If you’re like me, and let’s face it, not many are, then you too love the newest coffee craze taking California by storm. Californians love their coffee. But not a piping hot mug o’ joe at Denny’s or your local diner, served with those little thimbles of creamer. Folgers? Maxwell House? Yuban? No, I’m talking a pretentious, responsibly sourced cup of java.
A cup of java certified to meet labor and sustainability standards that ensure more equitable trade relationships, protect the environment, and support farmers in developing nations.
And a mug? Puhleeez! That is so anti-woke. This isn’t Arizona. Next you’ll say we should get rid of our paper straws… oh wait, that’s a good idea, I hate those.
Although, what’s up with those three “sizes” from Starbucks? I took Spanish in high school. Four years of it. I can’t speak Spanish, but I remember enough of it to tell the woman from housekeeping to wipe down the counter under my microwave. And I remember that “grande” means big, like really big. Then Starbucks comes along and turns my world upside down. A “tall” is really a small even though the name implies something else; a “grande” is bigger than a tall, as you might expect, but it’s actually just a medium. If you want a really big cup of coffee, one you think is going to last you through that meeting on the Anderson account but ends up backfiring such that halfway through you have to pee so bad your eyeballs are turning yellow and no amount of crossing your legs or shifting nervously in your seat helps, you want a ”venti” (20 ounces) or maybe even a “trenta” (30 ounces).
Now I’m with you Starbucks on the venti and the trenta, because those words are Italian for 20 and 30 respectively. But grande means “large” in Italian (like it does in Spanish), and we’ve already established it’s a medium. Furthermore, it’s 16 ounces – so why isn’t it called a sedici (Italian for “sixteen”)?
I used to get so nervous ordering I would just ask for whatever the person in front of me ordered! But my anxiety is over. If there’s one thing Californian’s love more than some fair trade coffee, it’s avocadoes. And now, we’ve combined them. It’s a match made in heaven, right up there with peanut butter and jelly, or The Captain & Tennille. And as an added bonus, there are no more worries about sizes, or pre-caffeinated cognitive dissonance about a tall being smaller than a grande.
Starbucks, a Seattle-based company, may have single handedly “invented” the place to take your laptop and work on your screenplay (Los Angeles) or novel (the rest of the world), but it takes a singular kind of person to look at guacamole and arabica beans and say, “those go together.”
It takes a Californian.
Only Californians have the foresight to, say, look at the fifth largest economy in the world, behind the US, China, Germany, and Japan, and conclude that the best person to run it came to prominence by lifting heavy things, putting them back down, then running around in his underpants to show off his body. And marrying a Kennedy.
So leave it to us to take a perfectly good avocado, scoop out all its insides till only the skin remains, and fill that with a freshly pulled shot of espresso on top of which to make latte art with steamed milk. Click on the image below.
There’s only one problem. I’m lying. I made the whole thing up. Well, except for the confusing cup names at Starbucks, the size of the California economy, and our former governor running around in his underpants. And marrying a Kennedy.
The Instagram post above comes from Australia, Melbourne to be precise. There, a barista posted his avocado latte creation as a joke to protest a local politician who had made the assertion that millennials can’t afford to buy houses as they spend too much money on avocado toast. The story was picked up by “reputable” news sources all over the world in 2017. It’s a modern-day equivalent of H. L. Mencken writing his fake “history” of the bathtub, bits of which are still quoted today as fact by newspapers of record like The Washington Post.
And I feel no remorse for misleading you. If the President of the United States and his Muskrat can just make up stuff like the US sending $50 million dollars worth of condoms to Gaza and if that same president, as a convicted felon er, sorry, I mean candidate, can claim residents of Springfield, Ohio were eating pets on national tv, what’s to deter me, or anyone else, from making wild, unsubstantiated, or just plain silly claims?
At least I came clean in the end.