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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 The Barista and the Taster

  Thanks for Serving Me My Coffee

  CHAPTER 2 The Cup Makers

  Thanks for Stopping the Coffee from Spilling on My Lap

  CHAPTER 3 The Roasters

  Thanks for Taking the Heat

  CHAPTER 4 The Water

  Thanks for Filling My Cup

  CHAPTER 5 The Safety Patrol

  Thanks for Keeping Me from Dying

  CHAPTER 6 The Movers

  Thanks for Lugging My Coffee Around the World

  CHAPTER 7 The Extractors

  Thanks for Getting All the Raw Materials

  CHAPTER 8 The Farmers

  Thanks for Growing My Coffee

  CONCLUSION

  A THOUSAND THANKS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WATCH A.J. JACOBS’S TED TALK

  RELATED TALKS

  MORE FROM TED BOOKS

  ABOUT TED BOOKS

  ABOUT TED

  To my family. And everyone else.

  INTRODUCTION

  It’s a Tuesday morning, and I’m in the presence of one of the most mind-boggling accomplishments in human history. This thing is so astounding in its complexity and scope, it makes the Panama Canal look like a third grader’s craft project.

  This marvel I see before me is the result of thousands of human beings collaborating across dozens of countries.

  It took the combined labor of artists, chemists, politicians, mechanics, biologists, miners, packagers, smugglers, and goatherds.

  It required airplanes, boats, trucks, motorcycles, vans, pallets, and shoulders.

  It needed hundreds of materials—steel, wood, nitrogen, rubber, silicon, ultraviolet light, explosives, and bat guano.

  It has caused great joy but also great poverty and oppression.

  It relied upon ancient wisdom and space-age technology, freezing temperatures and scorching heat, high mountains and deep water.

  It is my morning cup of coffee.

  And I’m grateful for it. Really, really grateful.

  It wasn’t always so. I tend to take things for granted. For most of my life, I rarely thought about my coffee unless it spilled on my jacket or scalded the roof of my mouth. But the last few months have forced me to change that. Earlier this year, in an attempt to battle my default mental state (generalized annoyance and impatience), I undertook a deceptively simple quest. I pledged to thank every single person who made my cup of coffee possible. I resolved to thank the barista, the farmer who grew the beans, and all those in between.

  That turned out to be a hell of a lot of thank-yous. My gratitude quest has taken me across time zones, and up and down the social ladder. It’s made me rethink everything from globalism to beavers, from hugs to fonts, from light bulbs to ancient Rome. It’s affected my politics, my worldview, and my palate. It’s made me feel delight, wonder, guilt, depression, and, of course, a whole bunch of caffeine jitters.

  • • •

  How did this quest get started? Well, I’ve been an admirer of gratitude for several years. It’s not an emotion that comes naturally to me. My innate disposition is moderately grumpy, more Larry David than Tom Hanks. But I’ve read enough about gratitude to know that it’s one of the keys to a life well lived. Perhaps even, as Cicero says, it is the chief of virtues.

  According to the research, gratitude’s psychological benefits are legion: It can lift depression, help you sleep, improve your diet, and make you more likely to exercise. Heart patients recover more quickly when they keep a gratitude journal. A recent study showed gratitude causes people to be more generous and kinder to strangers.

  Another study summarized in Scientific American finds that gratitude is the single best predictor of well-being and good relationships, beating out twenty-four other impressive traits such as hope, love, and creativity. As the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast says, “Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.”

  So intellectually, I’ve long known gratitude was invaluable. And for a while now I’ve made modest efforts to kick-start my gratitude whenever I could—and to instill the value in my kids.

  My three boys are required to write old-fashioned handwritten thank-you notes when they get birthday gifts, much to their disbelief.

  When I’m running errands with my sons, I nudge them to thank the bus driver.

  I even tell them they should thank our household robot Alexa when she informs us about the weather.

  “Alexa doesn’t have feelings,” my son Jasper will say.

  “Yeah, but it’s good practice,” I respond.

  And sometimes, before a meal, I’ll say a prayer of thanksgiving. Sort of. We’re not a particularly religious family. I’m agnostic, verging on atheist, so instead of thanking God, I’ll occasionally start a meal by thanking a handful of people who helped get our food to the plate. I’ll say, “Thank you to the farmer who grew the carrots, to the truck driver who hauled them, to the cashier at Gristedes grocery store who rang me up.”

  “You know these people can’t hear you, right?” my son Zane asked me one night.

  I told him I knew, but that it’s still good to remind ourselves of others’ contributions.

  Yet Zane’s comment stayed with me. He’s right. Those people can’t hear me. My pre-meal thanks are kind of perfunctory.

  As I pondered this over the next few days, I wondered if I should commit more fully. What would it be like to personally thank those who helped make my food? Each one of them?

  I knew the idea was absurd on one level. It’d be a major headache. It’d be time-consuming and travel-heavy.

  But it could also have huge benefits. It might be a nice thing for the people who make my meals possible.

  It would show my sons I’m serious about gratitude, and that they should be too.

  And it might make me more grateful, which would, in turn, make me less petty and annoyed. Because I needed to be less annoyed. Even though I know that I’m ridiculously lucky—I don’t lack for meals and I have a job that I mostly enjoy—I still let all the daily irritations hijack my brain. I’ll step on our dog’s dinosaur-shaped chew toy, or I’ll open an email that begins, “Dearest A.J., I regret to inform you . . . ,” and I’ll forget the hundreds of things that go right every day and focus on the three or four that go wrong. I’d estimate that in my default mode, I’m mildly to severely aggravated more than 50 percent of my waking hours. That’s a ridiculous way to go through life. I don’t want to get to heaven (if such a thing exists) and spend my time complaining about the volume of the harp music.

  I’m not too far from the norm. If you believe evolutionary psychologists, all humans are genetically programmed to pay attention to what goes wrong. In Paleolithic times, it had survival value. Your one-thousandth great-grandparents needed to be damn sure they remembered which mushroom was poisonous.

  But the result of this negative bias is that we are awash in modern-day anxiety. We often see our lives as problem after problem, crisis after crisis. Many of us live in what some psychologists call the “deficit” mind-set, not the “surplus” mind-set. We spend far too much time fretting about what we’re missing instead of focusing on what we have.

  I needed a mental makeover, and a gratitude project could be my key to success. My goal for this project was to flip my ratio: By the end, I wanted to spend more than half of my average day experiencing gratitude and mild happiness. Or at least not outright irritation.

  My first task: I had to choose what food item to be thankful for. I considered apples, white wine, and Monterey Jack cheese. (My sons lobbied for s’mores, since they figured it would increase general s’more consumption around the house.)

  I thought about nonfood items as well: my pen, my socks, my toothpaste. Almost every object I encounter in my day requires thousands of humans and tons of effort—effort I take totally for granted.

  Finally I settled on something I can’t live without. My coffee. It seemed right for a couple of reasons. First, I do love my morning cup from my local café. I take it to go, no milk. I’m not a fanatic and my palate is unrefined, but I relish coffee’s bitter taste and the pleasant buzz it gives me—it’s my favorite narcotic, hands down.

  Second, coffee has a huge impact on our world. More than two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day around the globe. The coffee industry employs 125 million people internationally. Coffee is intertwined with politics, economics, and history. The Enlightenment was born in Europe’s coffeehouses. Over the centuries, coffee has helped create international trade and shape our modern economy.

  So I set out on the Great Coffee Gratitude Trail, intent on following all its twists and turns. What follows is the tale of my attempt. Oh, and lest I forget: Thank you for reading this intro.

  1

  The Barista and the Taster

  Thanks for Serving Me My Coffee

  I’ve decided to do this project in reverse, starting with my local café and working my way
backward to the birth of the coffee. My coffee shop is a block’s walk from my apartment. It’s called Joe Coffee and has survived for twelve years, despite two Starbucks within a three-block radius.

  On a Thursday morning, I get in line, prepping myself to say the very first “thank you” of Project Gratitude. While waiting, I force myself to stash my smartphone in my pocket and actually notice my surroundings. The act of noticing, after all, is a crucial part of gratitude; you can’t be grateful if your attention is scattered.

  On the wall, there’s a photo of a pink Cadillac that, for some reason, is perched on top of a tower. There are moms pushing strollers, dogs tied up outside, the frequent hiss of the espresso machine. Glowing indigo lamps the shape of doughnuts hang from the ceiling. That indigo light is lovely, I think to myself. You don’t see enough indigo lamps.

  I get to the counter and am greeted by my barista, a twentysomething woman with hair gathered in a ponytail atop her head. She hands me my order—a small black coffee, the daily blend.

  “Thank you for my coffee,” I say.

  “You’re welcome!” she says, smiling.

  And there it is. My first thank you. It’s fine, but no lightning bolts yet.

  I slide my credit card to pay the three-dollar fee. (Three dollars is, of course, ridiculously expensive. But in a weird sense, as I’ll learn, it’s also wildly underpriced.)

  I hold my cup of coffee and stand there, trying to figure out what, if anything, to tell the barista about my quest. I pause five seconds too long, somewhere on the border between awkward and creepy. I glance at the line of customers behind me and slink out.

  A couple of days later, I’ve worked up the nerve to tell the barista about Project Gratitude. I asked her if she’d be willing to share with me a bit about what goes into making my coffee. She said she’d be happy to talk after her shift.

  “Thanks again for the coffee,” I say, as we sit down at one of Joe’s small tables.

  “Thanks for thanking me,” she says.

  I consider thanking her for thanking me for thanking her, but decide to cut it off lest we get caught in an infinite loop.

  She tells me her name is Chung. Her parents are Korean immigrants, and she grew up in Southern California before moving to New York for college.

  “So . . . ,” I say. “Um . . . What’s it’s like being a barista?”

  “It’s not always easy,” she says. This is because you’re dealing with people in a very dangerous condition: Pre-caffeination.

  “You get some grouchy people?” I asked.

  “Oh, they can be grumpy.”

  Chung tells me tales of customers who refuse to even make eye contact. They just snarl their order and thrust out their credit card, never looking up from their smartphone.

  She’s had customers berate her till she cried for mixing up orders (which she swears she didn’t). She’s been snapped at by a bratty nine-year-old girl who didn’t like the milk-foam design that Chung created on top of her hot chocolate. Chung made a teddy bear. The girl wanted a heart. “I wanted to tell her that she did need a heart—a real one.”

  And yet, Chung says the cranky customers are the minority. Most folks are friendly, especially when Chung sets the mood by being friendly first. And man, Chung is friendly.

  She is a smiler and a hugger. She’s like a morning-show host, but not forced or fake. To give you a sense: During our half-hour chat, Chung got up no fewer than five times to hug longtime customers and former coworkers.

  “I first realized I might be good at customer service when I was working as an usher at my church,” she says. “I saw that it takes a certain personality.”

  And like at church, when she’s at Joe Coffee, she sometimes watches as people are transformed, their faces lighting up when they get their cups. “I see my job as getting them coffee, but also making them happy.”

  I ask her if she’s planning on being a barista for the long haul.

  She shakes her head. “Actually, this is my last week.”

  She’s moving back to California to take care of her parents. Plus, nowadays, she’s having trouble staying up on her feet her entire shift.

  “Let me give you a visual of why,” Chung says.

  She takes out her smartphone and swipes to a photo. It’s a startling image of her left foot, bloody, bruised, and with more than a dozen metal pins sticking out of it.

  “A year and a half ago, I got hit by a bus,” she says. “I broke every toe, the heel, the ankle. The skin was gone.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t pretty.”

  Chung says it’ll be sad to leave the regulars. She talks about Nancy and John, who arrive every morning as soon as the glass door is unlocked. “I always say, ‘How’s your day going?’ And John will say, ‘Now it’s going well.’ ”

  She’ll miss her coworkers, whom she says always have her back.

  She won’t miss the occasional feeling that she doesn’t exist at all. “What’s upsetting is when people treat us like machines, not humans,” Chung says. “When they look at us as just a means to an end—or don’t even look at us at all.”

  I thank Chung, and she gives me a hug (her eleventh of the day, by my estimate).

  On my way home, I make a pledge. Though I probably won’t hug any other baristas, I promise to look them in the eyes—because I know I’ve been that asshole who thrusts out the credit card without glancing up. I’m not sure if I ever did it to Chung, but I know I’ve treated many others—waiters, delivery people, bodega cashiers—as if they were vending machines. I sometimes wear these noise-cancelling headphones when running errands, so that just makes me look more aloof and unfriendly.

  And this is an enemy of gratitude. UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons—who is considered the father of gratitude research—puts it this way: “Grateful living is possible only when we realize that other people and agents do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves. Gratitude emerges from two stages of information processing—affirmation and recognition. We affirm the good and credit others with bringing it about. In gratitude, we recognize that the source of goodness is outside of ourselves.”

  From now on, when I have an interaction with anyone else, I’ll try to affirm and recognize them. I’ll try to remember to treat them as humans—at least until robots take over all service jobs. I’ll try to keep in mind that they have families and favorite movies and embarrassing teenage memories and possibly aching feet.

  • • •

  Chung served me my coffee—but who chose what type of coffee I drank? Who selected my daily blend from the tens of thousands of varieties across the globe? The answer to that takes me one step back on the chain to a man named Ed Kaufmann, head of buying at Joe Coffee Company, which now has nineteen stores in New York and Philadelphia.

  Ed agrees to meet me at the Joe Coffee Company headquarters in Chelsea. He ushers me into a back room with a round table.

  “Thanks for my coffee this morning,” I say, making sure to look Ed in the eyes. I tell him I’d picked up a cup earlier at the Joe Coffee near my apartment and drank it on the way down.

  “Did you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you like about it?”

  “Well, it woke me up. And it tasted good. Bitter, I guess? I don’t have a very sophisticated palate.”

  “We’ll work on that,” he says.

  Ed looks a bit like a young Elvis Costello, spectacles and all. He grew up in Montana, where his parents owned a restaurant at a ski resort. It’s there that Ed first fell for coffee. “As a teenager, my friends and I would get caffeinated up and go snowboarding.”

  He can’t snowboard here in New York, but Ed tells me he still likes the bracing cold.

  He’s a fan of ice baths, which he says give him energy. And every morning, even on seventeen-degree January days, he jolts himself awake by biking to work without a shirt. “Actually, now I wear a T-shirt,” Ed says. “I was getting too many stares when I went shirtless.”

  But Ed’s true love is coffee. He’s smitten with it, head over heels. Some proof? He spent his honeymoon taking a five-day coffee-tasting course in Massachusetts. On his days off, he goes café hopping and “gets wasted on espresso.” He talks about particular cups of coffee the way some people talk about long-lost girlfriends. “That was a meaningful cup of coffee,” he’ll say, about a cup he drank in Ecuador. He describes coffee with elaborate metaphors, sort of like an antic sommelier. “There was this one coffee—I call it the Wonka Coffee because it was like an Everlasting Gobstopper, flavor after flavor, just exploding.”