"The Coffee War"

Published 15 May 2003

(word count: 750)

While everyone’s attention has been focused on the impending, shooting, and aftermath of Imperial America’s war in Iraq, a War Against Coffee is brewing right here in the very heartland of the nation.

According to the Iowa City Press-Citizen, two juniors at the University of Iowa have woken up and smelled the coffee, and they think it stinks.  Now they want to protect their fellow townsfolk from consuming politically incorrect java, noting that “some” coffee beans are grown using synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

At first sip, even libertarians might find the concern and care of students Oliver Belcher and David Burnett to be laudatory.  But, alas, their compassion just naturally takes the form of coercion.  The pair wants a city ordinance stating “that all brewed coffee sold in town must be brewed from coffee beans that are organic, fair-trade, shade-grown or a combination.”  Grounds for punishment are as strong as the coffee.  If the owner of the Koffee Kup Kafe fails to pour you a mug of biodiversity-friendly Colombian he could be fined up to $1,000.  Wilma the Waitress could get a three-day coffee break in the Iowa City hoosegow.

No mention is made in the Press-Citizen article concerning enforcement.  Will the local police force be required to form a special Keystone Koffee Kops unit?  Will eateries be subject to no-knock raids in search of contraband Arabicas?  And what about those unintended consequences that inevitably percolate whenever coercion is the first choice of social engineers?  Could this create a black market in Folgers, run by vicious mocha mobsters?

Makes you wonder just what those professor types have been teaching their young wards up there in Hawkeye land.  Their education is woefully incomplete.  True, they are only juniors, so perhaps they’ll still learn about Advanced Domestic Coffee Warfare in their senior year.  As many of us older, world-weary donut dunkers are well aware, countless coffee consumers prefer their mud with cream and/or sugar.  And that means an expansion of the Coffee War.

As this war inexorably spreads to engulf coffee’s two closest allies, we can expect a steady stream of dispatches from the Iowa City front lines:

Cream used in coffee must be all-natural, unprocessed, non-pasteurized and non-homogenized, produced only on people’s cooperative dairy communes.  All Jerseys, Holsteins and other members of the udder sisterhood must be free-range grazers.  While their milk may taste nasty from eating stinkweed and thornapples, everyone knows that natural is better.  And of course the bovines may be milked only by virgins with soft, tender fingers while crooning soothing lullabies into the ears of the noble beasts.  The Animal Liberation Front shall have the authority to firebomb any corporate dairying operation that uses inhumane mechanical milking devices.

Sugar is another matter.  All sources of the white sweet stuff must be one hundred percent organic, fair-trade, grown without the use of synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and hand harvested by highly paid union “human resources” during a thirty-two hour workweek who meet all minority and gender diversity requirements.  Ideally, Iowa City restaurateurs offering coffee to their customers will replace their sugar shakers with raw chunks of sugar cane and zero tolerance non-threatening serrated plastic knives for shaving off the desired amount.  Patrons can decide if they want one scrape or two in their cup of joe.  Aberrant sugar substitutes such as Equal or Sweet’N Low will, of course, be banned.  Any coffee shop discovered offering sugar grown from genetically modified beets or cane shall be subject to firebombing by Earth Liberation Front.

And let’s not forget the containers.  Most coffee is sold in cans, made of low-carbon steel coated with a thin layer of tin.  This requires open pit mines and manufacturing operations destructive to the environment.  Milk cartons and sugar bags are the spawn of chemical processes.  While the Iowa U students may be utterly ignorant as to how these products are created, just the word “chemical” smacks of icky stuff injurious to our biosphere.  So they all should be outlawed.

The best containers, of course, are earthenware.  Coffee, cream and sugar should never be sold in town unless they’ve been shipped in individually handcrafted natural clay pottery produced by authenticated Native Americans.  Any Starbucks wannabe in Iowa City caught smuggling coffee or its common condiments in non-crockery containers will be open to firebombing by the American Indian Movement.

That may be a lot of crock, but we have to start somewhere if we want to save the Earth from civilization.

- by Garry Reed