I want Starbucks!!!

After living in the world comprised of Starbucks stores, it is easy to get tempted by their gourmet coffee. Gourmet Coffee? What is that? According Arabica.com, gourmet coffee is high quality coffee. Hmmm...High quality coffee I guess has a stronger coffee taste, flavor and aroma. I am also guessing that gourmet coffee is made from the best of coffee beans, roasted to perfection, and processed precisely and tastes the best.

I, personally, can taste good coffee and bad coffee. I can also tell the difference between various types of coffee. Does that make me a coffee connoisseur? Who knows?! All I know is that we as a society are marketed to get the best of everthing including the best coffee. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy my usual Starbucks Coffee, which is a grande White Chocolate Mocha with soy milk and whipped cream; but while I sit at a Starbucks store staring at pedestrians and drinking "gourmet" coffee, I wonder if I am contributing to a bigger problem...creating a society that "wants" the best and healthiest at any price.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kashmiri memories

Image
In the mid-80s,  my parents, my brother and I visited Srinagar in Kashmir, India. We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast houseboat on the Dal Lake.  I remember beauty, meeting merchants who sold saffron and wild honey .  The other remarkable thing is that the local police had beards, which were not seen in the rest of India.  I also saw locals carry their Kangers.  Kangers are woven baskets that have hot embers that are carried by folks under a Kashmiri robe called a Pheran . My trip to Kashmir was a unique experience because it was my first trip to a Muslim-dominant India where the customs were different from the majority of secure India.  It reminded me of Old Delhi, which is predominantly of Muslim Indians. While I was in Srinagar, there was a sense of uneasiness due to the political turmoil.  I am not sure if my family and I had a bias that Kashmir is trouble and we need to be extra cautious.  The local Kashmiri folks were great.  As a cricket fan, I was surprised to see a lot of cricke
Read more

The Impact of Mr. Jones' class

Image
Reflecting on my high school education, I recognize certain classes have had a significant impact on me from a personal and professional standpoint.  One of the classes I didn't enjoy much while taking it has made a considerable impact on me as a leader.  Nope.  It wasn't biology, physics, English, geography, or any other standard high school.  It was a course called History of Oklahoma. Yup!  In the early 1990s, the state of Oklahoma required students to take and pass a class about Oklahoma history to earn their high school diplomas.  I spent my ninth and tenth grades in Oklahoma and then completed my eleventh and twelfth grades in Kansas.   In the Spring of 1991, I took History of Oklahoma, which was taught by Mr. Jones.  Mr. Jones was a US Air Force pilot who flew sorties during the Vietnam War.  A couple of times, he had slide shows with pics of him and his buddies in the military.  Mr. Jones' classroom was also quite memorable since he didn't hang any posters, fram
Read more

I have to say...

Image
I have to say that the position of the US President has been a huge fascination of mine from the last six and half years. I am a history buff and am a fan of social history. I don't care much for how a war was executed or which policies helped a country or two. I am a fan of social history and have been for most of my life. What I care about is how people through the rivers of time thought and perceived life around them. When you study this, you realize that the people may dress different, think different or even speak different but the common things that tie altogether through the splitting forces of time is how people individually react to stresses, joys and tragedies in life. US Presidents go through a heightened state of reactions since their decisions impact millions of people around them. My fascination started when I read the biography of John Adams by David McCullough. The book showed a human who was trying to do his best to lead a country but no one was happy with h
Read more