I cannot possibly stress how on-the-mark this comment is about the lure of Starbucks…

In his book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putman reveals that there’s been a 33 percent decrease in families eating together over the last three decades. And more than half of those families are watching television as they eat together. Over the same period there’s been a 45 percent decline in entertaining friends. Growing up I would ask each Sunday, “Who’s coming for dinner today?” Not whether but who, because I knew my parents always would have invited someone. “In the typical American household, the average number of dinners eaten together is three per week, with the average length of dinner being 20 minutes.” Many homes no longer even have a dining room. We protect ourselves from outsiders, but our security systems and garden gates are our prisons, cutting us off from community. Instead we get our community vicariously through soap operas. Friends is a television program or a Facebook number, not people with whom we eat and laugh and cry. Instead we’ve commercialized hospitality. In his history of Starbucks, Taylor Clark argues that the secret of Starbucks’s success is not in its coffee, but “the pull of the coffeehouse as a place.” When sociologist Roy Oldenburg coined the term “third place” to describe a neutral gathering spot that’s neither home or work, “the company,” Clark writes, “now had its philanthropic rallying cry: it wasn’t a coffee company, but a third place bringing people together through the social glue of coffee.” Starbucks’s research showed that people wanted “a cozy social atmosphere above all else. . . . For those seeking a refuge from the world, the cup of coffee they bought was really just the price of admission to partake of the coffeehouse scene.” Starbucks is selling us hospitality.

This is the thing people miss whenever they start to talk about Starbucks and the cost of their coffee: many people who come here aren’t coming just for the coffee, they are coming for the atmosphere, for the community spirit and for the homeyness of this “third place.” I can’t even begin to explain it any clearer that the quote above, but that is exactly where i come. I don’t live in a neighborhood where neighbor’s are close and relationships are easy to cultivate over shared life situations. I live in a home that is too small to avoid clutter and often feels like just more work to do than a place to relax. Starbucks for me is a warm atmosphere, familiar people, good coffee, reliable ambiance and the feeling I’m right at home. For many just like me, it’s worth the $4.00 price tag to purchase something quite valuable.

The quote above is from an excellent book called A Meal With Jesus by Tim Chester. He has some great thoughts on food and our view of it as fuel that I’m still grappling with. He covers a wide variety of topics and he has some very thought-provoking things to say. The book convicted me in some ways and in other ways worked to validate some of my thoughts about our out-of-control diet industry in America and even more specifically the attitudes toward food in God’s own people. I’ve decided not to blog about these quote specifically because I’m still struggling to understand how these ideas fit into my life and choices and also because I’m pretty sure where he goes with this is a place not many would agree with. Well, they might in principle but not grasp how far-reaching the consequences would be. Anyway, if you want to read a great book on the idea of food as the number one way to establish community then give this book a try. I recommend it with the reservation that it will most likely challenge what you think about  some personal things.