Having just read Memoir from Antproof Case I must bring this up. The main character has, among other things, dedicated his life to destroying the human consumption of coffee. Reasoning why coffee is bad:
The Renaisance began, more or less, at the beginning of the 16th century. Its cultural accomplishments have never since been matched. It ended around the time coffee was introduced into Europe. Why do you think these feats were never repeated?
Humans digest food and move at certain rates. These rates determine our work and sleep schedules. If you introduce coffee, these rates change dramatically. Internal bodilly rythms are screwed up, and suddenly your life changes.
Coffee can have terrible effects on one’s body- development of ulcers, premature aging, etc. Who really wants that?
In order to reach one’s inner self, one must find an inner peace and calm. Coffee will prevent one from finding that calm. So what? Good question.
I will not defend coffee, though I know it does have its uses. Most people don’t really care of the side effects, though. So, I will ask: Do you dopers think coffee should be drunk? Why? Just because you don’t think it * should* be drunk doesn’t mean you don’t or won’t drink it though.
(What are you, nuts? No coffee? Stop drinking coffee? Get thee behind me, thou dark satanic advocate of food that is “good for you”!)
The Renaissance was not that great, me bucko. “It’s cultural accomplishments have never been matched,” and maybe that’s just as well. The Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, doctors practicing medicine by bloodletting with leeches, the whole Protestant Reformation, the complete destruction of American Indian cultures by freebooting imperialists from Spain, England, Holland, France, etc. So even if coffee did bring the whole Renaissance thing to a grinding (heh) halt, what’s the big deal? No great loss. We moved on, as a race, to bigger and better things: Jeffersonian democracy, Model T Fords, polyester, the Internet, and Madonna.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is the fallacy here. Just because something happened before something else, a causation chain is not implied. If you reasoned that way, women getting the vote caused the Cold War. Obviously false.
During the same period of time tea, sugar, and tobacco were also introduced. Brewed tea has as much caffine as coffee, the evils of tobacco are well documented, and there is some very interesting data regarding the effects that succrose has on the body and mind (especially in the form of chocolate ).
I work in a coffee shop, and I drink my fair share, so maybe I’m biased. I don’t like the idea of weird chemicals in my system, but caffiene isn’t so bad. I did a paper on caffiene for my chemistry class a few months ago, and I found that there are no strong associations between caffiene and any diseases. So there
A jealous god. It giveth and taketh away. It has the power to energize and refresh, but if you abuse its power, it takes revenge. Like Eos’ mortal lover Tithonus in Greek myth, who was given eternal life but not eternal youth and grew older until he became a grasshopper, coffee gives its abusers sleeplessness without energy.
The engine of the world economy. In terms of economic importance, it rivals oil on world commodity markets and is almost as strategic. The globalized economy is apparently built on ignoring humans’ natural sleep cycles in favour of jittery wakefulness. See SIESTA.
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