Stirrers: A Polemic
Who the hell decided that it was a good idea to stir coffee with a midget straw? And why do people put up with it?
When you prepare a can of tomato soup at home, do you stir it with a straw? When you make coffee at home and add sugar, do you reach for a chopstick? When you go canoeing, do you bring a mop handle for propulsion?
The purpose of stirring is to get everything in the coffee all mixed up, so that sugar molecules have a good chance of running into water molecules and bind to them in an orgy of hot brownian motion. And the best way to do that is to use a broad instrument that a) can shove a lot of molecules at once, and b) can set up secondary whorls and whatnot. About the worst thing you could choose would be a small, hydrodynamic object that won’t disturb the molecules much. And that’s exactly what the coffee “stirrers” provided at many coffee shops and convenience stores do.
So I’m going to issue a call to revolution. A minor one, but hopefully an effective one, fully in line with both Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolent civil disobedience, and free market capitalist forces. The next time you get coffee at a coffee shop, bookstore, a 7-Eleven, or even, God forbid, Starbucks, use a spoon. If they don’t have any, ask for one. If they won’t give you one, ask them to rectify this lapse in customer service. I call upon our tea-, cocoa-, and other hot beverage-drinking brethren and sistren to join us in this glorious fight against the forces of corporate repression.
And once the running dogs of stirrerism have been sent packing, we can undertake the next item on our manifesto: real ceramic mugs for “eat in” orders.