Posts Tagged ‘Caffeine’

No One Cards

Thursday, February 23rd, 2006

I was at the Daily Grind just a few minutes ago for my afternoon fix, and there was a small sign on the side of the quick-cup-of-coffee register:


NO ONE
CARDS AT THIS
REGISTER

Of course they were referring to the One Card, but in my uncaffeinated state I seriously thought for a moment that they were saying that they don’t check IDs. As if they were sticking it to The Man, or something, and allowing the under-21 set to buy cups of coffee. Rebels, those baristas.

This is your anterior cingulate cortex on coffee

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

Good news for all us coffee addicts:

Coffee Boosts Short Term Memory, from MedPage Today

…functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) detected significant activity in the brain’s memory centers 20 minutes after the men consumed 100 mg of caffeine…

…the fMRI scan detected activity in the anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, which is responsible for some short-term memory functions.

Now I’m going to go grab myself a cup. If I can remember where the coffee machine is.

Java Man

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

Screaming Man on Caffeine

Recently I’ve been reading some of Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker essays. One of them that I particularly enjoyed is this one, Java Man, a review of the book The World of Caffeine, by Weinberg & Bealer. I’m totally going to read this now.

“It is not extravagant to claim that it was in these gathering spots [coffeehouses] that the art of conversation became the basis of a new literary style and that a new ideal of general education in letters was born,” Weinberg and Bealer write…

…nicotine… moderates mood and extends attention, and, more important, it doubles the rate of caffeine metabolism: it allows you to drink twice as much coffee as you could otherwise. In other words, the original coffeehouse was a place where men of all types could sit all day; the tobacco they smoked made it possible to drink coffee all day; and the coffee they drank inspired them to talk all day. Out of this came the Enlightenment. (The next time we so perfectly married pharmacology and place, we got Joan Baez.)

And not only did caffeine apparently cause the Enlightenment and the development of liberal arts education, it also caused the industrial revolution:

One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.

On that note, Gladwell includes this rather revolting recipe for beer soup:

Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a separate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. Stir in some cool beer to cool it, then pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, and finally mix all the ingredients together, whisking it well to keep it from curdling.

Gladwell’s conclusion:

The modern personality is, in this sense, a synthetic creation: skillfully regulated and medicated and dosed with caffeine…

Guilty as charged.

Food as social statement

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

I was at the Daily Grind earlier today and they’ve started carrying Aceh Relief Blend. (”For every pound of Relief Blend we sell, we will donate $1.00 to the fund.”) I of course had to have it, and I’m happy to report that it’s very tasty. More important, though, it got me thinking, could you eat and drink nothing but food where a portion of the cost goes to some worthy social cause?

I suppose Fred would say that the cost of fresh, local produce goes to a worthy social cause: local farmers. And I’d have to agree with him on that. I (we) shop the Carrboro Farmers’ Market nearly every Saturday when it’s on, both because the food is better and because I just believe in supporting local businesses. But I mean for the rest of the stuff we eat: all the prepared foods, like coffee.

Of course there’s Newman’s Own and Newman’s Own Organics, which give all profits to charity. But salad dressing and Fig Newmans will only get you so far.

(As an aside, the Fig Newton was apparently named after my hometown of Newton, MA. Back in 1986 or so, on the 100th birthday of the Fig Newton, Nabisco hosted a big celebration in Newton and donated a bunch of fig trees to the city, which were planted on the city hall lawn. Which, when you think about it, is kind of silly, since no way will a fig tree produce fruit in Massachusetts. Anyway… Once upon a time there was a large cookie-making industry in MA. The Nestle Toll House? In Whitman, MA. But whatever other cookies once existed are now extinct. Their fire has gone out of the universe.)

Anyway, I can’t think of any food companies other than Newman’s that donate to social causes. Anyone who can, please post a comment! I may change my shopping habits.

Decaf Librarians

Wednesday, January 12th, 2005

Decaf Librarian’s Blend

A flavorful blend of Indonesian, African, and Central American beans, the Librarian’s Blend is named for that person who always told you to keep quiet when you were studying. This blend is representative of the soul of the librarian: steady, reassuring, and always there with that slight edge of eccentricity. It has a bold base with a bit of sparkle. Here’s to good reading.

Personally, this librarian would be steadier with a bit more caffeine, but I love this idea. From IntelligentsiA Coffee, Inc. I’m told that Guglhupf carries this.