The Value of Coffee

The Value of Coffee

I didn’t always enjoy the stuff. I would eat coffee-flavored yogurt and coffee-flavored ice cream, but the actual beverage tasted bitter and crude, and it had incurred my discontent since my first encounter with it at the age of six. An aunt would offer the family coffee every time we went to visit, and she would ask me, “Do you drink coffee yet?” as if to press me forward, to instill a desire to proceed toward my inevitable destiny of favoring coffee. I ignored her. “It’s an acquired taste,” some people told me. I saw no reason to force myself to acquire it.

It was a July morning in 1999. I was at the University of Bucharest, Romania, for the International Mathematical Olympiad. I waited in line for breakfast, picking up the toast, the pastries, the beverage. What was the drink? There were few possibilities. The previous week, the US and Romanian teams had been training together in the town of Sinaia, and we got some evidence of what comprised the typical meal: cold cuts and cheeses, bread and patés, an entrée of meat, potatoes, perhaps a corn mush, and some boiled vegetables, and assorted desserts; breakfast would be lighter fare. The usual drink was mineral water, the quantity of which suffered a deficiency wholly inappropriate to the heat (my requests of “mai apa, va rog” were diplomatically ignored —the waiter in Sinaia perhaps thought I was only practicing my language skills); at breakfast, there might be juice, hot chocolate, or strawberry-flavored tea. Thus, when I picked up the glass of dark liquid in Bucharest, I imagined it was tea, or perhaps a thin chocolate.

After sitting down in the stifling cafeteria, I naturally approached the drink. It was a shock, a fee...

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...per-week quota always gets filled — not because I necessarily crave the drink, but because I periodically feel like I “should” be buying coffee now — a tradition that has become seamlessly enshrined in my identity. I have nearly mastered the art of drinking coffee precisely twice per week.

The value of coffee is mainly symbolic — it serves as a liaison to my vocational and cultural community. People claim to drink coffee because it keeps them awake. That never works for me. If I am drowsy, caffeine makes me drowsy with a headache, at best. It has less consciousness-raising effect for me than does a breath of fresh air. The effect of this substance is not neurochemical; it is psychological. With each long swallow of a steaming brew, I savor the pungent, rich first flavor, the appealingly bitter aftertaste, and the feeling of knowing who and where I am.