Twitching at Panera

    How much caffeine in a cold room is really legal? My friend and I have studied at Panera for 8 hours on many occasions, and we were shaking. But the real question is if it was from the cold, the scary workload, or from the caffeine in the refillable drinks with 200mg caffeine in each charged lemonade we were guzzling down at the moment? And how long would we go on pretending we weren't going crazy from it, the workload, cold, and caffeine as one?

    Whether it be Panera, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, coffee shops, or the library, it’s no coincidence that the most popular study spots for students sell caffeine. It is seen as a necessity, since drinking coffee is like proving socially that “you do so much hard work that you need coffee to keep doing it.” But is it really necessary to ruin yourself and your environment just to prove you are as sophisticated as others your age? It’s always been a metaphor that your body is a temple, so respect it. But why stop the comparison there? Our bodies mimic so much of nature, which shouldn’t be as shocking as it feels considering we are nature. So why do we only respect temples? Why do we not respect our bodies and nature more and stop drinking caffeine?

    You may be wondering how caffeine damages the earth. After all, it comes from a plant, and composting is a very popular method of handling food waste. But caffeine can be considered a “pollutant” as Mongabay News details how 258 rivers in over 104 countries were water-sampled and over 50% of the 1052 sampling sites had caffeine as one of the highest ingredient concentrations in river surface water. It doesn’t stay there benignly either, as this eutrophication leads caffeine residues to affect animals by “inducing oxidative stress and lipid peroxidation, neurotoxicity, changing energy reserves and metabolic activity, affecting reproduction and development and, in some cases, causing mortality… exacerbate the stress effects of ocean acidification and higher temperatures on coral algae, potentially contributing to global bleaching events” (Mongabay News). Even how it’s made has caused adverse effects, with more sun-grown caffeine plants leading to more trees being cut down. The pollutant doesn’t just stop in nature— it pollutes our bodies too. Caffeine is considered a drug after all, and its addictive effects have led to high numbers of coffee drinkers in our society today, with every day “about 90 percent of Americans consume caffeine in some form… making it America’s most popular drug” (Kuakini Health System).

    There are ways to combat how caffeine damages the environment with better machinery and disposing options, but the best option would be to stop it at the source: us. Caffeine isn’t good for people or the environment, so instead of blaming outdated machinery let’s blame ourselves so we can break our addictions and move past the substance that has controlled our lives for far too long. One way to start would be back to its prime consumers, which are the gullible students studying out of the house. Get rid of those addictive charged lemonades before they kill us… or continue to: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/panera-lawsuit-charged-lemonade-sarah-katz-death-rcna120785 .

Coffee Carbon Footprint