#4-1 "Coffee"

Coffee vs. Beer

by 한젠쓰

When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?

-Ernest Hemingway

A morning without a cup of coffee is like sleep. An evening without a can of beer is like boredom. If you think about it, the normal time of the day to which each of these two popular drinks belong is not their only juxtaposing factor. Coffee with its caffeine content and beer with its alcohol content are two of the most popular means of ingesting what are essentially mood-altering drugs. Both are enjoyable at the time – with potential benefits in my opinion – but have negative long-term side effects on our health. Drinking coffee is a great way to stay alert, both physically and mentally. It helps us wake up in the morning and aids our productivity throughout the day, even playing a part in relieving stress. Drinking beer sort of has the opposite effect as a depressant, though it too plays a part in relieving stress – it slows the function of the central nervous system, altering our perception, emotion, movement – vision and hearing – so that in some sense, we are less alert and less anxious, in turn more relaxed and unconcerned about some of our problems at the moment. While coffee heightens our attentiveness, giving us an acute awareness and sense of our surroundings, the consumption of alcohol leads to feelings of confusion and disorientation – a dramatically slowed reaction time. Coffee and beer are contrasting in these ways, but I’d like to point out that both of these drinks could contribute positively to creativity.

Some may be highly opposed to the following statement, but a chemical in our body called adenosine – a type of neurotransmitter – controls creativity. It alerts our brain when we’re running out of energy by slowing down the connections made between our neurons via binding to adenosine receptors. These connections are essentially creativity – connections between pre-existing ideas in our brain to think of something original. Caffeine’s job is to block these adenosine receptors, thus preventing adenosine from binding to its receptors – tricking our brains into thinking that we have a lot of energy and helping us power our brains for creativity in such way. What beer does to us – making us less focused and getting us to care less about whatever there is to care about – can be even better for our creativity. It was concluded in a study done by researchers at the University of Chicago that a moderate blood alcohol level increases performance on creative problem-solving tasks. By reducing our abilities to pay attention to the world around us, alcohol frees our brain to think more creatively. College students often joke about writing a better essay while drunk, and it’s true. So beer maybe not be the right choice of drink before studying for a math midterm, but it could be so for writing those long-ass essays.

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/coffee-tea-taste-price-convenience_n_3112478.html>

the untold story

by Daniel M

Coffee is made of unseen, silent sweat and tears. We enjoy coffee every day as a refreshment, but we do not think of the people who work every day to produce it. On the other side of the globe, even right now, people under the sizzling sunlight go through repetitive physical torture. Their tanned bodies spot coffee beans, take them off and put them into the big heavy basket. Fields of coffee plantation farms that they have to cover today look massive and endless. All they receive is money- money that doesn’t reflect their sweat and tears. Their true reward is lost to the greedy stomach of capitalists. Every day the workers struggle to survive, to fulfill their needs, to support their families. This society of inequality endorses exploitation of labor. We do not want to care because we are too busy, because we don’t want to complicate things around us, because we want to keep enjoying cheap imported goods. The sweat and tears are again forgotten in the midst of the delicate and sweet coffee aroma that makes us numb.

<http://friendlycuponline.com/?attachment_id=21>