"In the distant future, archaeologists will dig us up, looking for clues they can decipher in their studied hindsight as indications of the decline of western civilization. In the same way that we reflect on the Romans and wonder why they couldn’t see that feeding people to lions was not a sign of good things to come, historians will one day look back at us and think, 'All you can eat? Double Big Gulp? Super-size it? A 24-ounce coffee?' The writing, they’ll say, was on the menu."

 

-From The Supersizing of Specialty Coffee: Is Bigger Really Better?  

 

by Mike Ferguson

 

Published in the June 2003 issue of Fresh Cup magazine 

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"Perhaps no other word in the coffee industry carries with it so complex a mixture of passion and promise than 'origin.' There is the history and romance of the coffee farm, the tangible sense of very cup of coffee being descendant from the soil. There is the connection, so critical to the success of the specialty coffee sector, to places far away and exotic, endlessly unique and unknowable except through the cup: the earth of Yemen, the mean seas off Sumatra, the rainforests of Guatemala. Then there is the dependency inherent in the word itself. The livelihood of every single person in the coffee industry originates in coffee lands, is born of the plants and those who tend them and harvest their fruit."

-From Impact at Origin
by Mike Ferguson

Published in the November/December 2000 Specialty Coffee Chronicle