If I were to list my island foods — you know, the only foods I would bring on a deserted island with me — it would be easy: avocado, mac and cheese, and coffee.
As absolutely cliché as it is, being a teen from the Seattle area, I love coffee. I love everything about it: the taste, the caffeine rush that I am now mostly immune to, sitting for hours at coffee shops, holding a cup close to warm up my hands, the smell. I just love coffee. My dad is an avid coffee drinker — a tall cup of black every morning for breakfast. I don’t even remember when I had my first sip. It was something that was always around, but never something I had. I have a very distinct memory about my first Starbucks coffee. I was in seventh grade and I had been working on a large research project with my friend. Her mom took us to the Starbucks near their house. She ordered a white chocolate latte, and not knowing anything else I got the same. I hated it. The next time I went out with her she ordered a java chip frappe, and so did I, too. That drink turned my life around. I felt like I was seeing the sun for the first time after living in cave. I felt enlightened, grown up. I was a coffee drinker.
Flash forward a few years. While my little sister was ordering java chip frappes and white chocolate mochas, I had graduated to soy lattes. I thought I was superior to her because I drank my coffee black instead of with cream and sugar. I like when my coffee actually tastes like coffee, the bitter liquid of the gods — not like milk, sugar, and chocolate. I had developed a horrible habit of what I call “coffee superiority” where I thought that I was a better person for liking darker drinks. I thought that because I made my own coffee or went to local shops instead of Starbucks I was a better person — a better teen or northwesterner or something. I laughed and stuck my nose up at “white girls” who spent hundreds on Starbucks, while I did the same at a local place. I was determined not to drink “white girl” drinks.
I find myself suppressing my coffee superiority whenever I am at a coffee shop. It was not until recently that I realized that I was not cool for drinking coffee — because we all do it. I was also not edgy for taking it black; I just had a different preference. There has been research that people who drink darker coffee have darker personalities and are more likely to have psychopathic tendencies. Perhaps that is where my coffee superiority stems from. Either way, I, like many of the “white girls” who drink more cream and flavoring than coffee, really love it. We see it as a life source. I thought maybe these people were just drinking it to look cool, not for taste. It is possible that I do the same subconsciously. I do feel that as a Seattleite and college student, it is my duty to love coffee and spend all the money that I don’t have on soy lattes and dirty chai lattes, so I do it in what I hope is now a more inclusive way.
