That Costly Java

Coffee. I can’t do without it.

I could quit drinking alcohol tomorrow, cold turkey. But not coffee.

And I’m not alone. Coffee consumption has declined very little, if at all, in the U.S. (including Florida) in spite of staggering price increases, shortages and, sadly, an overall decline in quality. The good stuff is not as good as it used to be.

Still, some 35% of Americans quaff down at least one cup of Joe a day and most of us drink more. Average consumption is two cups per person per day. The inferior stuff is better than nothing. It gets us out of bed in the morning and keeps the wheels of commerce turning.

Here’s some background.

Coffee, or what passed for it back then, dates to the 15th century when Ethiopian monks were said to have roasted some beans – how or why you can only imagine. The provenance is pretty shaky.

German chemists isolated caffeine in 1819, and scientists later pegged its effect as a stimulant to binding with the adenosine receptor, allowing feel-good dopamine to run free.

Today the most common beans – Coffea Arabica and Coffea Robusta – are cultivated in 70 mostly equatorial countries; Brazil with a third of the worldwide crop is by far the largest producer. The best place to see the growing, roasting and grinding is Hawaii, specifically Kauia Coffee on Kauia and Kona Joe’s on the big island.

Now as most aficionados know, there’s coffee and then there’s espresso. We devotees turn up our noses at regular coffee – too weak, lousy taste, not enough kick. You just can’t beat espresso. It dresses up every occasion.

What about the health effects of java, espresso or otherwise? Like most things in these ambivalent times, coffee is both good for you and bad for you. Good because the antioxidants in coffee help fend off certain kinds of cancer, or so says the American Cancer Society. Bad because, unless decaffeinated, too much can render you so jittery you are virtually unable to function. Recent evidence – I’m not sure I believe it – says it may even promote heart disease. For sure it’s addictive. I can attest to that.

There are other downsides. Growing the beans is an environmental disaster. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average Arabica tree produces one to two pounds of coffee via roasted beans. That means every two-cup-a-day coffee drinker requires continuous production from some 20 trees.

To achieve that takes relentless fertilization for trees that soak the nutrients out of the soil, resulting in land that will eventually become barren. Experts say in Brazil, the biggest producer, some 88% of the land will be lost by 2050.

Those frightening projections have spurred work on altogether different approaches. The best of these involves fermentation of genetically modified cells from coffee-bean plants. And that works, sort of. While you can roast the resulting beans, the coffee is lousy, virtually undrinkable.

So we’re left with the same-old beverage from the same-old source, slowly dwindling away, increasingly costly and not as good as it used to be. Folgers Classic Roast, already pricy, is expected to cost 20% more by mid-2026. A 12-ounce bag of Starbuck’s ground coffee already costs $10-15 at local supermarkets.

And proposed tariffs will jack the price even higher.

But you know what? I don’t care about any of that. I’ll take what I can get for as long as I can get it. I don’t care about soaring prices or environmental damage or watered-down taste. Some coffee is better than no coffee.

Like the song says, “I just can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff!”