Sugar, Sugar

I drink a lot coffee, manly coffee: black, no sugar. All those fraternity sounding Starbucks drinks hold no appeal for me. Phi Kappa Frappacino. Sigma Alpha Machiatto. Alpha Dolce Latte. 


Vini, vidi, no vente.


Nor do those frilly coffee drinks seem to hold much appeal for Europeans, at least those that I've seen in Hungary. Okay, maybe Hungarians do order cappuccinos, and occasionally something that looks like a parfait. But generally, they order simple kávé -- espresso. For the jenki, Hungarian coffee shops offer what's called a hosszú  kávé (hoe-sue kah-vey) or "long coffee", apparently in an attempt to calm down Americans who get frantic wondering how you can savor a cup of coffee when you're essentially beginning with the end: when it arrives Hungarian kávé looks more like what you'd leave behind rather than what you should begin with. Dregs. A long coffee then is dregs with a dollop of hot water to dilute the dregginess and grow the cup American to expectations (sort of).

Anyway, as I drink a lot of coffee, in Hungary I go to a lot of coffee shops, and not surprisingly while there order a hosszú  kávé or two. As American coffee as Americans know it is nowhere to be found, I order long coffees as the next best option, albeit a very distant next best option. 


Now, in the U.S., it is customary for restaurants and coffee bars to offer milk and sugar as sides: milk in a little creamer and sugar in packets loaded into some kind of dispenser that gets refilled (or should) as needed.


By contrast, in those European countries I've visited so far -- Belgium, Poland, Germany, and my own Hungary -- each cup of coffee I've ordered, in whatever language, and no matter how puny, has coffee come loaded and cocked with two barrels of sugar; two carefully arrayed packets placed on the saucer. Or, to mix metaphors, Europeans are very serious about coffee presentation, and in Europe any cup would be embarrassingly naked without the cloth of two sugar packets to cover its coffee's beans. Cocked or covered, every cup of coffee served to me in Europe -- and I mean every cup -- has been garlanded with two packs of sugar. 


Okay. I have already declared myself a macho-no-mocha-java drinker. So, just because some European sugar cartel foists two packets of sugar on me I feel in no way obligated to consume them; I'm an American and no one tells Americans what to do. Go ahead Domino; make my day, punk. 


So me and the sugar packets stare each other down, every time. And I win. Every time. There hasn't been one single occasion where I haven't sent the sugars packing with their tails between their legs (more mixed metaphors). Which, because I am the son of a Depression-era father, would be fine with me if the coffee establishment passed along my shooed sugar to the next customer, and so on, until it reached a customer who actually wanted it. My father hated waste; he raised me to do the same. 


But, restaurants generally don't hate waste (at least not the ones I've worked in, and I've worked in a bunch). Given that in unseen ways the customer has already paid for the product, so no one really cares if they waste it. Especially with things so cheap as sugar. Meaning, once the sugar packets leave the counter, those packets, used or unused, become, in the eyes of restaurant employees, non-persons (or non-packets). They cease to exist in the eyes of service staff. If not consumed, they simply get dumped, unceremoniously, in the trash upon clearing. An ignoble end, to be sure.


And, because, in addition to hating waste, I have been attuned to the issue of global warming, I started to think about what is the carbon footprint of a pack of European sugar. 


You know carbon footprints: they attempt to measure in carbon calories how much energy is consumed during a product's or activity's complete "life cycle" to assess its impact on the climate. So, for instance, and bearing in mind that I am not a legitimate carbon-tracker, in order to calculate the carbon footprint for European sugar packets we'd look at the fertilizer used to grow the sugar where it's grown (and the carbon footprint of that petroleum-based fertilizer), the cost of getting that fertilizer there (gas, diesel); the cost to spread the fertilizer; the cost to reap the harvest (gas, diesel); the heat produced to refine the cane into sugar; the energy used to produce its package (from cutting down the trees to processing the wood into paper, etc., etc.) and then to package the sugar; then the cost in transports of the sugar packets to their distribution point; and ultimately the energy spent processing the waste of that sugar and its packet. 


And you thought ordering a Starbucks coffee was complicated. 


Probably, there are other variables I've overlooked, but you get the picture. Though you also may be saying at this point, Is this guy kidding? We're talking about two sugar packets.


Okay. But consider this. According to the wholly unreliable Coffee-Statistics.com, Italy alone purchases -- not just consumes, but purchases, as in cafes -- 14 billion cups of espresso each year. That means, if Italy follows proper European espresso protocol, 28 billion packets of sugar get shipped off with those 14 billion cups, each year. Further, as close to half of Italy's population is men, and manly men to be sure, you can also be sure those uomini macho are not sissifying their espressos with zucchero. They, like me, drink it just as God and El Exciente intended. 


And, that means that each year, some number approaching 14 billion packets of sugar are taking a direct route from the Italian barista to the Italian garbage, with a brief layover at the customer's table.


That's just Italy. Imagine other manly men around the world -- the Greeks, the Turks, all of the Mideast, and, of course, all of Central and South America, and you can see that a lot of ζάχαρη, şeker, قطعة سكر, סוכר, and azúcar is brought into this world for no purpose whatsoever. All that energy expended for no purpose. All that carbon, right down the drain. 


And that's just men. 


And that's just sugar, sugar.