Coffee Pods and the Corrupt State of the Modern (Human) Mind

Did you see the incredible news this week?

Coffee Pod Carbon Footprint Better for Planet than Filtered Brew

Whew. What a relief.

It just goes to show how woefully misdirected our attentions and perceptions are that this story trended at all. As we hurtle towards the return of El Nino, a world with deeply broken weather patterns and a mass extinction that shows no signs of slowing is actually taking time to give ourselves a pass on an invention that made an already disposable habit a little lazier and more disposable, when this slight slowing in the waste stream is absolutely meaningless to our survival.

I always feel vaguely stupid when I brew my morning coffee. It is a little morning ritual with literally zero benefits. It doesn’t wake me up. My body long ago conditioned itself to shrug off quantities of caffeine that could give a rhino (assuming there are any left in the world) a fatal heart attack. It has no nutritive value. True, it does have some antioxidants, but even a single blueberry would deliver orders of magnitude more of them. Coffee also contains acrylamides, so I’m raising my risk of cancer (if only very, very slightly).

It doesn’t even taste that good, if I’m being perfectly honest.

What does it cost us all that I enjoy this habit every day? The quantity of rainforest mowed down for cultivation of coffee plants is almost certainly greater than zero. Sure, I buy shade grown organic fair trade coffee, but who am I kidding? In a finite world, space taken for monoculture agriculture has to steal from something else. Does the value of my pointless cup of coffee outweigh the cost of inconveniencing even one songbird for a single half second when he flits unexpectedly upon some (no doubt well compensated) worker who’s collecting coffee cherries in the underbrush?

Uh, no.

As if my habit weren’t offensive enough, someone decided it was just too much work to open a canister of ground coffee, measure out a few tablespoons into a filter, and pour water through it. No, you need a hulking chunk of plastic to heat water and automatically push the right amount of it through a plastic container of pre-measured coffee for you, relieving you of the immense mental effort you used to have to expend.

“But first, coffee.” Amirite? Of course, I am. Let’s celebrate once again our incessant demand for resources.

I suppose the carbon footprint of the plastic cup versus the tree fibers that go into my filter and the precise efficiency of the amount of coffee measured out versus my clumsy mound of grounds might all net out in favor of Keurig or Green Mountain or whoever makes those stupid machines, but that really misses the point.

WE NEED TO CUT WAY BACK ON OUR CONSUMPTION OF THINGS WE DON’T ACTUALLY NEED.

When the flukish string of storms that hit California subside and a long summer of heat domes brings withering heat and relentless drought back to the food production regions of the Central Valley, will any of us really wish we just had that one last cup of coffee?

No, just like when the west once again runs out of water (because we never bothered to rationalize our draining of the Colorado River soon enough to make a difference), the thing on our half-brains shouldn’t be: “Oh, the lawns I wish I could have watered!” It should be: “I wish I had one more glass of water to drink.”

Instead, just like the pointless kerfuffle over a ban (that isn’t happening) of gas stoves, the loudest voice will probably be shouting: “You can have my K-cup when you pry it out of my cold dead hand.”

Challenge accepted, and when aliens come to a desiccated, lifeless Earth (most likely scenario: as jaded tourists who ran out of things to see on Zargon-5), that’s one of the mysteries their unwitting archaeologists will be asked to unravel. What ceremonial purpose did the treasured artifact we found scattered around all these skeletons fulfill?

If I struggle to explain it now, so will they, so let’s admit: it doesn’t matter whether its carbon footprint is a little better, when our total footprint is so dramatically out of whack.