Just spotted an article on CNN.com about a college professor in Kentucky who has created a class all about coffee and its effect on society.
Here's how it got started:
For years, sociology professor Beau Weston has held informal office hours off campus in a local coffee shop, sipping his mocha latte while advising students.
As he did, he formed relationships with other coffee shop regulars who might otherwise have remained strangers. That caused a sort of academic epiphany, and now he's one of a handful of teachers across the nation who have developed courses that study coffee and its effect on society.
Other professors are doing the same thing:
"It really combines so many disciplines," said Mark Pendergrast, of Colchester, Vermont, the author of "Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World," which was used as a textbook in Weston's class at Centre.
"Everywhere you look in our culture, coffee has a fairly profound effect," Pendergrast said. "I think it's a wonderful way to teach history and culture and economics."
Cal-Irvine history professor Steven Topik began teaching his "History of Coffee" writing seminar course in 1996.
Coffee "is just not something we think about," Topik said. "History is usually taught as the history of great men and wars and great events. We don't think about the history of everyday things. But historians have been increasingly thinking about these things."
Studying coffee "is a palpable, liquid way of understanding globalization," Topik said.
It's nice to see Coffee being taken so seriously!
