Marke Greene on tea and coffee

Spotted an article by Mark Greene, in which he ponders on the phenomenal growth in coffee shops (which are now more numerous than estate agents on our high streets) and asks whether this trend is a friend or an enemy to community. He also muses on the relative values of tea and coffee, and challenges us as to whether these trends lead to less hospitality.

Here are a few quotes but do read the full article:

"Employers wanted higher productivity, more people spending more time at their desks and more flexibility for workers to time their caffeine hit to their own bio-rhythms and ‘fatigue curve’. And in this they were aided by what one might call ‘the cultural values of tea’. Tea was about stopping work whereas coffee never was. Coffee was a stimulus to work and had somehow retained its connection with the intellectual fertility of the early coffee houses. Tea, though perhaps more significant in the early centuries than coffee, lost its connection with productivity. Coffee means activity, tea means leisure. Coffee makes work better. Tea is a pause from it. Coffee is an aid to workaholism, tea an antidote. Similarly, if you have had a terrible day at work, just discovered dry rot in your roof, subsidence in your kitchen, been abandoned by your spouse and knocked off your bike, your neighbour won’t offer you, “A nice hot latte” but rather “A nice hot cup of tea.”
...
“If coffee is about activity and adventure and tea is about rumination and comfort, no wonder church is associated with tea. At the same time, more and more churches are serving ground coffee, partly because more and more people have experienced ground coffee and are less content with instant. And partly because it’s simply nicer."
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"Perhaps the growing number of places to have a cup of coffee with friends or acquaintances is not so much a sign of the regeneration of relationships in our culture but actually their decline. It’s convenient, it’s true, to pop in to a coffee shop. And it’s often refreshing to get out of the house and delightful not to have to tidy the place up to make it presentable enough to say, “Oh, sorry, it’s such a mess.” But still I wonder whether choosing to treat ourselves in the neutral arena of Starbucks is also a way to avoid inviting people into the revealing realities of our homes and the more intimate connections that can be forged by serving them tea or coffee or frog and nettle infusion, or whatever it is you happen to have in the cupboard that might change the colour of boiled water and serve to nurture a relationship."