I work in a quaint cafe in the vestige of old cannery village.  The building, a reclaimed craftsman-style cottage and boatyard, speaks to a romanticized era of bygone artistry and morality; like an honest day’s work.  Upon entering, one finds a wall filled with customer mugs, a communal library of earmarked tomes, and various other distractions and amusements to enjoy over scones and a cup o’ joe.

Newer patrons often exclaim “how cute” everything is.  The tables and chairs have been collected and worn over the decades, the cutlery and china are a hodgepodge of thrift store and swap meet finds, the lighting is warm and the atmosphere inviting.

It is cute.

In the years I’ve spent there, first as a daily frequenter and now as a barista, I’ve noticed a cultural shift in the manner in which customers, especially newer ones, approach, engage, and experience the public space of the cafe.

The most visible manifestation of this transition is the superfluous use of disposable cups, plasticware, and paper napkins.  Especially the cups.

Customers want double cups, cardboard sleeves, and disposable drink holders to carry their soy chais out to the gang in the car.  They want plastic forks and spoons and knives.  They want handfuls of napkins and they want their dessert served in a to-go box — just in case.

While i could easily rant about the environmental issues of so much unnecessary waste (especially as today is earth day), i’m actually more interested in why people privilege disposable as more desirable.

Is it that people just love to throw stuff away?

It has to be more complicated than that.

The Determinist in me wants to blame technology.  It’s Instagram’s fault — people see the way that others visually consume cultural experiences and then attempt to recreate and record those experiences for themselves.  An emulated pattern of mutually documented self-destruction, one plastic lid at a time.

The anti-corporatist in me wants to blame Starbucks.  That behemoth of corporate coffee shop culture sells an experience less than a product.  The principal symbol of that experience is a paper cup designed for a single use before being tossed in the bin (some would say a proper receptacle for the actual product).  Each transaction further deepens and complicates the connection between disposable culture and the experience of drinking coffee.

Coffee and tea are best served hot.  It is an exercise in slowing down and waiting for the drink to cool in order to truly revel in the taste and body.  These moments privilege lived reality.  In a cafe these moments foster observations, introductions, and casual conversations.

Paper cups don’t aid in the flavor or quality of beverage.  Paper cups privilege consumption and evacuation.  The desire for disposable products speaks to larger more structural patterns of consumption within Western Culture.  Fugazi wrote some pretty good songs about that.

Ultimately, it’s a process that has been occurring for centuries, now sped up, broadcast, and re-created.  Experiences are no longer lived, they are consumed and documented.

This process doesn’t occur in a vacuum.  These consumptive choices have real world consequences.  The amount of disposable cups, sleeves, plasticware, and to-go boxes that go into the garbage at the cafe is staggering and a little disheartening.  It is the evidence of conspicuous consumption of nature as commodity.

Does the unnecessary disposal of finite resources really make a better cup o’ joe?