Coffee and me

I have a love-hate relationship with coffee. I guess that's probably not unusual -- many people tend to come down on one side or the other when it comes to the strongly flavoured beverage, though with more recent developments in flavoured and iced coffees, even coffee haters have made exceptions.

I probably would have been a militant coffee hater if it weren't for the fact that I ended up with Type 1 (Juvenile) Diabetes at age 17. Suddenly, juices and soft drinks were taboo, and even milk had to be factored into my caloric intake. No- and low-cal alternatives in the fluid realm were required. Water? Too boring for a teen aged palate. Diet soft drinks? A person can take only so much aspartame, ugh. Tea? Too old-ladyish. Coffee? Too predictable, too bitter... or so I thought.

I started university seven months after my diabetes diagnosis, and discovered the world of flavoured coffees at Second Cup and Java Jive. Rare was the day that my best friend and I didn't end up at one counter or the other for a morning coffee... and the flavours were enough to tempt my taste buds. Butter Pecan, Hazelnut Creme, Columbian Supremo, Dark Roasts, Light Roasts, and Roasts in-between. It wasn't long and I was hooked.

After four years of coffee addiction at the U of A, I was fortunate to spend a year with a travelling performing troupe. The coffee was pretty dismal in the US, but our cast spent a lot of time in Eastern Canada that fall, and I introduced my cast mates to the joys of Second Cup, where, the Europeans said, cappuccinos were almost as good as the ones they had at home. They weren't much into flavoured coffees, but espresso passed muster in Canada. When our cast got to Europe, there wasn't any flavoured coffee to be found, so I delved into the espressos and cappuccinos that my European friends enjoyed... and loved them! What's not to love when you're sitting on the piazza overlooking Firenze with a frothy cappuccino in hand after a day of checking out Michelangelo's David and wandering the winding ways of the old city? Cappuccino is still my favourite caffeinated beverage.

But my love affair with coffee of any variety is coming to an end. I feel it with every cup. Caffeine affects me now in ways that I can't control. My hands have a perpetual shake due to a hereditary condition known as Essential Tremor, and the shake is even worse with coffee. I could take medication to eliminate it, but that means taking a relaxant that might make for driving drowsiness. (I could give up driving entirely, but that's another moodling for another day.) Besides, I'm not much for taking any more medication than I already do (six shots a day).

What's worse than my shakes or the meds to control them is that it's hard to justify the drinking of coffee when there's so much wrong with the coffee industry. True, Fair Trade sorted out some of the inequities in some places -- and made me feel better about my morning habit when I changed from Maxwell House to Kicking Horse -- but now that Fair Trade coffee has become an industry unto itself (with even Starbucks and McDonald's serving "ethical" coffee, and Walmart jumping on the Fair Trade bandwagon because it's a profitable enterprise), if a large retailer chooses to support a particular Fair Trade cooperative, it can freeze smaller, morally driven coops out of the market altogether. I'm scratching my head and wondering. How fair is my Fair Trade beverage?

As strong as these issues have become in pressing me to find another beverage of choice, there is one more that holds more weight than personal health or ethics. It's that the earth's atmosphere can only take so much pollution before things get extremely messy for all its inhabitants. I'm already contributing to that pollution enough by heating my house. I can't get through our Canadian winters without creating some fossil fuel emissions, but guess what? I can get by without coffee that has to be transported halfway around the world by fossil fuel-inefficient cargo ships.

I don't have to drink coffee. I grew and dried a lot of wonderful French mint this summer, and my best friend introduced me to homemade lemon balm tea (and gave me a plant) so there are alternatives from my backyard. Old ladyish teas, maybe, but I'm getting there. Backyard tea mixes are healthier for the planet, and for me. I know this is true. I know I should want this if I'm living simply. Honestly, though, I don't really want to give up coffee. I love its aroma. I plain old like it. Maybe I need to wean myself off it by halves, cutting back from my 14 oz mug first thing in the morning, to seven oz. Then from seven to three? Three to 1.5? The first sip is always the best, so maybe I could get by with 0.75 oz? And heck, if I cut it back that far, I can probably live without it, right? But not without a healthy planet.