Coffee Italian style

Coffee machine in a gas station on the way to Marco Polo airport

Although I'm not normally a coffee drinker, I've been longing for the caffe macchiato I had in Italy. I recently read an article about why we should start drinking coffee like Italians do. Instead of filling 16 or 20 ounce paper cups, carting them out to our cars or bus stops or shopping malls or desks and sucking on them mindlessly for half an hour, the article suggests North Americans try drinking coffee Italian-style: from a small white ceramic cup, standing up at a counter and downed in a few quick sips. While at first glance, it might seem like the ritual of this quick hit of coffee is a bit like swallowing a couple of aspirin, I've come to believe that it actually results in much more of a break than the North American style Starbucks march (or the Canadian Tim Hortons drive-through routine.)

When I was drinking coffee in Italy, I stood at a usually crowded counter with my tiny, perfectly brewed caffe macchiato (which I learned means "stained coffee," which is why in Italy I was told to make sure I said caffe first, not just "macchiato") and I drank coffee. I didn't check my email or negotiate traffic, walk down the street or teach a class, or anything else, really, except maybe to exchange a few words with the person I was standing with. Drinking the creamy, smooth, laced with slight bitterness coffee gave me this precious inward moment. Then I moved on. The day went on. But during my brief time in Italy, I looked forward to having that moment each afternoon.

When we were leaving Italy, our hosts stopped at a gas station on the way to the airport to get a coffee. Used to gas station coffee in North America, a watery brown and tasteless liquid warmed in a plastic carafe and dispensed into a styrofoam cup, then stirred with a plastic stick, I was surprised to see the gleaming espresso machine behind the counter, kept running by beleaguered baristas in uniforms who shoved the little ceramic cups across the counter to people in a hurry, like in gas stations everywhere. They did have disposal cups in this gas station. Because we were on the way to the airport, I took my caffe macchiato to go.

I realized my mistake immediately. First of all, I was embarrassed by how pointless and wasteful it was to take a paper cup to drink a coffee that would be gone in about three sips. But also, the moment I'd had standing and savouring my little coffee was missing.

From https://oliveonblonde.wordpress.com/tag/plastic/

Somehow the waste of the paper cup and the waste of the experience are linked in my mind. Why are we North Americans so good at taking a good thing and "improving" it to the point of ruining it? Why do we take a three or four ounce cup and turn it into twenty? And why do we always seem to lead the way in wastefulness? In Italy, I never saw the overflowing garbage bins outside of cafes that are such a common daily sight in communities across Canada and the US. An event like the Festivaletteratura that I was part of in Mantua didn't result, as it would in Canada, in streams of barely used, discarded paper and plastic food containers trailing down the sidewalks.

You might think that borrowing this Italian idea of coffee drinking, and at the same time eliminating mountains of waste, would be a no-brainer. Sadly, instead, there's a new ban on bans in Michigan, prohibiting local governments from banning or regulating the use of plastic containers.