The Coffee Conspiracy

Lucy Cunningham

I used to hate coffee. I spat it out, I hated the smell. My boyfriend, Tom, used to hate coffee. When I came around to ‘liking coffee’ Tom got annoyed and claimed I ‘didn’t really like it, you forced yourself to like it’. He thought I was putting it all on, I went to university and suddenly transformed into this caramel latte drinking snob, an unrecognisable version of myself. But the thing was, it wasn’t some act to fit in with my surroundings, it wasn’t for the aesthetic of walking to class with a cardboard cup with a sleeve. I just happened to one day wake up and think to myself ‘Oh wow, I need some coffee’. 

This is how is happened. Everyone wanted to be caught up in that autumnal pumpkin-spice latte fad, get their pictures on instagram and caption it something like ‘#leaves #feelingfestive’. The truth is, I never tried it. When I started uni it was pumpkin-spice season and I tried again. At this point it wasn’t 2012 and the hype was mostly gone, but I walked into Starbucks and ordered a small. It was bearable, a little unpleasant, but I drank it, all of it. It was something about the bitterness and the strangeness that pulled me and made me finish it up. And the next morning? My body awoke, begging for caffeine. 

When I got it that day, I can’t even say I enjoyed it but it made me full of energy and full of liquids that I had to hold in desperately until the end of most lectures. As time passed, I discovered the soya caramel latte. Slightly more sweet and even better than before. The caffeine craving had developed into a genuine love for the taste of coffee, my tastebuds every so gradually asking for a stronger taste. 

Tom would often have sips of my coffee, screwing up his face and asking ‘how can you drink that?’. What he didn’t know was that he was undergoing the same process as I went through when trying that cup of pumpkin-spiced heaven back in September. It wasn’t long until his requests for a sip turned into him ordering his very own. Soon he had been sucked in like the rest of us. 

There is a consistency with items like this. They don’t make us feel particularly good but we keep coming back for more. It’s kind of like the ingredients in a McDonalds meal that makes you hungrier, bringing you back for more. Like the ingredient in dispenser drinks that dry you mouth and make you thirstier, resorting you to buying more. I sense a hint of dishonesty in the air when I think of these mass- industries. The ones that seem to have constant demand. The reason for that I believe is because they hook us on it, in a way, drugging us right under our noses.

I’m too late to realise, now latched on to the addiction, my body pulling me into every second cafe I see, there is no turning back. But for those who still turn their noses up at the offer of coffee, who curl up at the smell when passing a cafe, keep it that way or you’ll end up like us.

And to all the coffee drinkers who make the argument of ‘think of how much money you could save a year if you weren’t buying cigarettes’?

Think again.