Are You Going To Eat That?
If you’ve ever watched The Shawshank Redemption, you’ll probably remember that scene early in the movie when Andy, on his first morning as an inmate, comes to breakfast and finds a maggot in his oatmeal. Brooks, at the next table, asks “Are you going to eat that?” Andy replies “Hadn’t planned on it.” Brooks asks “Do you mind?” Andy hands the maggot over to him and we’re all wondering what he’s going to do with it until we see Jake the crow in his pocket, for whom the little tasty nugget was requested.
I guess that scene has been re-enacted in some version all through history in whatever era and in whatever tongue, whether by Homo sapiens or any hominid before us. Something is found, the question is asked “Are you going to eat that?” and then everyone watches to see what happens. The person either drops dead or falls to the ground foaming at the mouth or conveys “Oh my God this is awesome!” and then we eventually end up with pasta or avocados or salmon tacos or apples or coffee or croissants. The history of eating is littered with the bones of brave souls who ate something courageously on behalf of all of us. In the grocery industry I have asked that question a good many times. How did we first get the idea to eat “that?” Artichokes are an example, and there are so many more. Take your pick.
The history of coffee and coffee drinking has gone through all kinds of iterations. Years ago, we were sitting at the table with my sister-in-law talking about coffee and I asked “What was the name of that coffee in The Bucket List, remember that? The one where the monkeys eat the beans and then shit them out and then are processed from the poop, which gives them their distinct flavor?” Since none of us could recall, I googled “What was the name of the …” and by God the line was filled in on its own with “coffee in The Bucket List?” We knew that was because millions of people that asked exactly that question. Though we’re used to it now, it was the first time each of us had really thought about this gigantic online memory we’re building.
Right away I found out the answer is Kopi Luwak and is eaten by little Asian palm civets and can cost between one and five hundred bucks a pound. We are creative aren’t we?
In our house we make our coffee by pour over. In the morning before lights are turned on, the pot with the coffee funnel and the filter and coffee stands beside the kettle in which the water is heated and both are back lit by the light of the clock on the kitchen stove. The shadow cast on the opposite wall looks for all the world to me like one of those old-fashioned steam locomotives, with the funnel-shaped smoke stack we’ve all seen in The Little Engine That Could. I don’t know if anyone else would come up with a train, but that’s what I think of every time I see that shadow in the dark. Others might see something completely different, like with Rorschach tests.
Humanity is getting beaten up quite a lot right now, some of it no doubt deserved, with respect to taking care of the earth and climate change and creating our very own Anthropocene geological epoch. We’re doubtless culpable for a great many things wrong on the planet. We also are pretty damn funny and pretty damn creative, capable of applying meaning to whatever we see, whether coffee beans lying in poop or shadows on the wall or a cluster of stars in the sky which we decide looks like a bear or a hunter or a cloud formation that looks like the boot of Italy. I love that about us.
In the poem Ulysses there’s the line “Some work of noble note may yet be done.” I usually apply that to what can still happen now that I’m in my sixties, with a lot of my life behind me and I thank Tennyson for this context. I think it’s also true for humanity as a whole. We’ve left what we’ve left behind so far as legacy, and it’s decidedly mixed, but I have great hope that there is work of noble note yet to do.
