Every cup of coffee is a spectacle of logistics

Hi, everybody! Tim Carmody here, guest-hosting for Jason this week.

Robinson Meyer drank a cup of coffee shipped hot overnight from a roaster in Minneapolis to The Atlantic’s office in DC as part of a Thermos promotion. He traces the beans, cultivated in Kenya and grown in El Salvador, all the way to his mug:

[T]here’s something that enables all of this, from my supping of the coffee to your reading this now: the global supply chain. The ability to fling ingredients and products from coast-to-coast and continent-to-continent makes not only Thermos’s contest but Spyhouse’s very business possible. It’s the supply chain that moves coffee beans from El Salvador to Minneapolis, where they can be roasted and sipped in days. It’s the supply chain—in the form of FedEx, which, remember, has the world’s fourth largest collection of aircraft—that performs the final stunt of getting coffee around the lower 48 in half a day.

Behind every ingredients list stand the movers and shippers of our world: each, like FedEx, possessing a private army of execution. I accepted Thermos’s coffee contest because it seemed a spectacle of logistics. But every single day of our lives is already that.

Meyer’s essay is part of what seems like a still-developing genre—Paul Ford’s essay on “the American room” is another example—of stories that excavate the hidden infrastructure that make everyday experiences possible. These systems are utterly prosaic exactly because they’re the product of huge amounts of manpower and material working according to painstakingly developed protocols. The author’s motivation for exposing them seems to be to both demystify and reenchant the world, and the attitude expressed is a mixture of admiration, awe, and dread.

Neal Stephenson’s classic Wired essay “Mother Earth, Mother Board” might be the model for the genre, like Tolkien is for epic fantasy. Let’s call it the “systemic sublime.”

• coffee
• logistics
• Robinson Meyer
• supply chain
• systemic sublime