Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey (TED Books)

by A.J. Jacobs

By the time I take a sip, the bean has been on a nine-month-long journey of 2,500 miles across the equator. It has traveled by motorcycles, trucks, boats, vans, pallets, shoulders, and forklifts. It’s been stored in buckets, bags, tubs, and metal containers the size of a small apartment. It’s come down a tree, descended a mountain, docked in ports, navigated customs, been loaded into a warehouse, rattled around on flatbeds. It’s like a tiny caffeinated Amazing Race contestant.

Pallets move everything. If you’re reading the paper-and-ink version of this book, it probably took a ride on a pallet. If you’re reading the book on a smartphone or a computer, those were also on pallets. The pants or skirt you’re wearing, they’ve been on pallets. The toothpaste and dish soap you used this morning, pallet passengers too.

[pallets] are everywhere: There are said to be billions circulating through the global supply chain. Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets. So widespread is their use that they account for, according to one estimate, more than 46 percent of total U.S. hardwood lumber production.”

Pallets save billions of hours of work every year. They’re designed to allow forklifts to pick them up and move the merchandise all at once without unloading. And pallets fit snugly next to each other in the truck or warehouse for maximum storage.

When I press send, I realize I have just written possibly the most passive-aggressive thank-you note in history. Thank you, now please change. I’m still waiting to hear back.

“I want to figure out if there’s a way to make my gratitude useful to the people on the chain,” I say to Julie. “If you really want to feel like you’re making a difference,” Julie says, “you could give up coffee for a year and donate the money you save to charity.” Abstaining from coffee for a year? It’s a solid idea. It also fills me with dread. Should I abandon my beloved daily beverage ritual? I

Your typical American probably isn’t going to uproot and move to the developing world and become a saint. Knowing that, how can you ensure you do the most good? One way is to splurge on stuff that is not too expensive but that gives you great pleasure. You don’t really spend much of your income on coffee. So you can splurge on that. But on bigger items, like cars and apartments, you should spend less and donate the balance to charity.”

Will’s rigorous ethics have inspired me to make another change. Instead of using a new paper coffee cup every day, I’ve started to bring my steel water flask to coffee shops.

Here’s why I’m a fan of thanking our lucky stars every day: it helps with forgiving yourself your failures; it cuts down on celebrity worship and boosts humility; and, perhaps most important, it makes us more compassionate.

The coffee faces many threats. There’s coffee rust, a fungus, which can spread in a flash. There are the birds that ignore the scarecrows on the mountain, but do fly away when the brothers shoot rifles in the air. The beans that survive are trucked off to a nearby mill, which has machines that separate the beans by color, size, and density.

I flash back to an article I read a few weeks ago. The idea was that, yes, three dollars for a cup of coffee is ridiculously high. Practically felonious. But if we paid American minimum wage to all the people on the chain, coffee would cost about $25 a cup.

You need coffee to make coffee. Coffee begets coffee.

It seems odd that birthday celebrations are all about the kid, when they should really be honoring the mom.

There is a beautiful scene from the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and I can’t help but recall it now. Calvino wrote a fable of a city where people’s apartments are connected by threads. The threads are strung from one apartment and across the street or down the block to another apartment. Each thread represents a different kind of relationship. If the people in the two apartments are blood relatives, the threads are black. If they are in business together, the threads are white. If one is the boss of the other, the threads are gray. Eventually, the threads grow so numerous and thick and multi-shaded, it’s impossible to walk through the city. If we connected the world with threads signifying gratitude, the result would be as thick as a blanket.

my thesis is that the world is woven together by connections. So I wanted to be expansive in my thanks, not restrictive. These folks may be tangential, but they are also, oddly enough, crucial.

Oxo kitchen tools,

Pioneers of the cupping procedure

Coffee pioneer Alfred Peet, who introduced high-end coffee to the United States in 1966.

Pope Clement VIII, who gave papal approval of coffee. “We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”

Boston Tea Party participants, who played a part in making coffee instead of te...

Type inventor Alex Haigh, designer of the Nanami font used in the logo.

Adobe software for designing the logo,

The developers of the plastic used to coat the inside of the cups: Jöns

KibbeChem makes colors for plastics that are found in Apple products, including

Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the World Wide Web.

Ernest Earl Lockhart, researcher who discovered people prefer coffee that’s been brewed between 194 and 205 ° F.

Builders of Tunnel No. 3, the tunnel that brings water to New York City,

Amanda Tripple, dog trainer for agriculture at U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The twenty-six workers (carpenters, stone layers, foremen) who died while building the Brooklyn Bridge, either by drowning, the bends, collapsing materials, etc.,

The bridge is used by trucks to deliver coffee.

Pioneers of paving and cement used in highways, including George Bartholomew and Joseph Aspdin.