Whats Fa Dinna?

(more…)

Per a reader’s request, here is a transcript of the thing I wrote and then read at aforementioned Church last weekend. Feel free to imaginitively apply emphasis and dramatic mannerisms.

It is 7:55 AM, at my opening shift at the MetroWorks Cafe in NoLiTa.

My first morning customer has demanded her “usual” in her usual way, by staring at me and waving money.

This regular’s “usual” is the thing that waits under the stairs for every starry-eyed co-ed lured by the understated glamour of the barista gig. The ones who still believe that serving coffee is somehow cool, who believe in the mystique of the tattooed, birkenstock-wearing barista, you know, the one outside sullenly smoking a cigarette

But nobody really wants to do this. You wake up one day with a $200,000 degree in 1968 studies and the geopolitics of punk music, and find yourself delivering resumes to any and every local dealer of brown swill within the reaches of your bicycle.

Back to the Drink.

I should know by now, The Decaf Skim Latte will appear to torment me every day. The bastard redheaded stepchild of Swiss Water Process Decaffeinating technology, agribusiness milk processing, a diet/fashion/media/medical complex hell bent on selling people “guilt free treats” they dont need. For three dollars or more, you may have a tall foamy glass of nothing. No fat, no sugar, no caffeine, no guilt. For this daily tall glass of notihng you will shell out the cost of a month’s worth of food for a starving third world child to get the fix for your “latte habit” You know, the one you joke about with the girls from the office.

Sometimes you recall with horror how you once got accidentally served whole milk. of course you asked her to throw it out and make a new one for you. It’s gotta be decaf. skim. This latte is purely symbolic.

The crusty rim of the milk jug makes a sick scraping sound as i pull off the pale blue plastic cap. A dribble runs down my hand in the space between thumb and forefinger where I hold the steaming pitcher. As I steam the watery skim milk for this symbolic latte, I contemplate that every coffeshop in every part of the country is using millions of gallons of milk every day to feed their customers these nothings.

Milk created in the bodies of huge animals to feed their stolen young, creatures enslaved somewhere at a dairy carefully concealed miles off the highway in a wasteland near you. Creatures whose excrement fills methane-enshrouded bogs that span acres, whose grain and energy consumption rivals that of many third world nations. The lives of the young heifers are sustained until they are old enough to be impregnated themselves, bear a calf, and spend a few years of hormone-fueled milk production before, at the worn-out old age of 5, the creature from which this latte sprung forth will be sent to the hamburger factory, where, after a traumatic, hard trek through sludge and blood and the defecation of the other inmates, she to be shot with a bolt through her skull.

I wonder if the drinker of this latte has ever seen a living cow.

When was the last time you saw a cow?

Has a cow ever tasted coffee?

I scoop the powdery espresso grounds into the filter.

The bag the coffee comes from has a cute, brightly colored illustration of a Central American woman on it, holding a woven basket of what i assume are coffee beans over her head. The background is lush, tropical foliage, her floral wraparound skirt and braids accent the exotic scene.

Did you know? This happy cartoon woman picked all of these beans JUST FOR YOU. We aren’t exploiting her, we’re giving her a good old fashioned opportunity to earn a living and better her life.

The IWW reports:

“A coffee worker’s wage is extremely low. In Kenya, coffee workers earn about US$12 per month. In Mexico, if lucky, coffee workers are paid a minimum wage of US$2.50 per day. Women are often paid less than men.”

“Child labour is a prevalent problem in the coffee industry. In Kenya’s central province, 60% of the workforce on coffee plantations are children. They may start working when they are tall enough to reach the lower branches and old enough to identify which berries to pick. Children are involved in all aspects of coffee farming and manual processing activities: picking, sorting, pruning, weeding, spraying, fertilizing and transporting. During the planting season and harvesting season in Honduras, children make up 20% and 40% of the labour force.”

As the syrupy brown espresso flows forth, I imagine all the children in Park Slope lined up in a scorching hot coffee plantation, mom and dad cruising by with pesticide sprayers strapped to their hunched backs as the children hurry to pick coffee berries from whatever branches they can reach, hoping to earn in 10 hours of hard labor the amount of money one decaf skim latte will cost one person in New York City.

I wonder if this customer has any children.

Why aren’t children allowed to drink coffee?

“I’m sorry, what?”

I have spaced out. It is, after all, 7:55 AM.

“Oh, Of course I’d be happy to mix in two packets of Splenda for you.” And so I do, making sure to call to mind the people who will develop cancer working in the aspartame factory. In this, the age of obesity, we must cut calories whenever possible, at any cost.

And of course I have double-cupped. People really hate to feel that their hand is too hot from holding a single paper cup full of their drink. Even when you use those little “java jacket” sleeves, some folks will ask you to double cup, just in case.

I hear the groan of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. I hear the creak and crack of the Amazon rainforest that we’re all so tired of hearing about. I hear the whirring of the paper mills and I smell dead fish floating in the river downstream from the company that makes the bleaches, waxes, dyes for the paper that will become these two nesting cups. The sound of the milk and espresso pouring into these cups is the sound of rainforest clearcuts and pogroms of indiginous tribes to make room for the new industrial cattle ranch, which will farm cheap beef and milk for us, the calorie-counting Americans, in countries where most people starve for want of grain. Of course the cattle will be heartily fed imported grain by the ton, until they are fatter than all of the coffee-picking children of Honduras put together.

I wonder how this customer would react if I served her a pint of blood. Maybe a gallon of petroleum. A gallon of the unprocessed, sickly, blood-streaked milk of an overworked cow with advanced mastitis. Maybe a bag of sawdust from old growth trees, with a child’s brown bony fingers sticking out of it clutching a ripe coffee berry.

I do not do this. I press a plastic lid onto her double-cupped, two-spenda’d decafe skim latte. She hands me a twenty dollar bill, I return 16.75, she drops a quarter into the tip jar. I say thank you.

I have nothing to thank her for. I am very busy thanking the children, and the trees, and the coffee bushes, and the cows and the genetically modified grain, the ozone-hole’s bright sunshine and the acid rain, the methane bogs and the depleted Amazonian topsoil, and all of the people in the world who are driven to work themselves to death so that we can have things like decaf skim lattes, so I can have a job to work away my youth paying for my cigarettes and my student loan.

I tell her to have a nice day.

At this point there is a small line of morning regulars forming behind her.

Lately I’ve taken a liking to this fancy bakery/cafe near work, in Hell’s Kitchen, called Amy’s Bread.
The place serves the exact fare, at the exact ( outrageous) prices as my old place of employment, Metropolitan Bakery in Philadelphia. This is perhaps why I go there. Last week I ventured inside, came away with a tiny (but delicious) mozzerella sandwich on olive ficelle, a very delicious oatmeal raisin cookie, and a coffee, but lost about $9 in the deal. Today I resolved to go back to Amy’s Bread and find something delicious that wouldn’t run me more than $5. Success: the soup and roll cost $4.88 with tax. I opted for the delicous-sounding Creamy Tomato, eagerly awaiting the moment when I could sit in the playground on 47th st. (where I eat my lunch, weather permitting) when to my dismay I noticed a little sign behind the register with the soup’s ingredients.

Foolishly, I had forgotten to ask/observe whether or not the soup was vegetarian. It wasn’t. And as I walked away from the register with my warm little bag of lunch, I decided that a little chicken stock won’t kill me and I already bought the stuff anyway. Plus it also had orzo in it, my favorite kind of pasta for putting in soup. If the chef had the insight to add orzo, s/he must have enough sense to know when chicken stock is really necessary.

And so, head hung with bad-vegetarian shame, I sat down at the little park and consumed the delicious creamy tomato soup with orzo and a whole wheat French roll, while an insubordinate child ran around throwing those little paper poppers all over the place despite the half-hearted protests of his pillhead rich mother. She mostly tuned him out and chatted with a few of her equally negligent friends on a neighboring bench. I would have accompanied the meal with a few pages ofbut did not want to drip the red, chickeny soup on Dan’s nice new book that he lent me.

Now I’m back at my desk, wondering whether or not I’ll develop a stomachache, diarrhea, or worse, that two-day appendix/spleen soreness that I got last time I “accidentally” ate a BLT.