Of all the many lessons my father taught me, the most valuable one that I live by every day may be his lesson about “acquired taste.”
I’m sure you know that term — the process of learning over time to like something that you found distasteful when you first experienced it.
If you think about it, you can probably come up with several things that you have come to like but that causes some people around you to scrunch up their nose whenever you enjoy it in their presence. Caviar, maybe — although it’s hard to understand why anybody would spend any amount of time (or money) to gain the “acquired taste” of choking down some smelly slimy goo leaking out of the north end of a southbound fish.
But my dad was a simple man — a laborer who worked in a steel mill — so it wasn’t caviar or other bougie stuff he urged me to acquire a taste for.
It was simple everyday stuff — like black coffee.
Although I loved the smell of coffee in the kitchen when Dad drank it in the morning when I was a kid, I scrunched up my nose when I tried a sip of it.
“It’s an acquired taste,” he said.
But then later, when I was a teenager with a summer factory job, I headed to the break room to snag a Coke at lunchtime, and I was dismayed to see that all they had was a coffee machine.
“Well,” Dad said when I got home that day, “I guess you’ll have to learn how to drink coffee. But here’s a tip — you should drink it black.”
“But black coffee tastes lousy,” I whined.
“It’s an acquired taste,” Dad said. “But if you load it with cream and sugar, you’re not acquiring a taste for coffee. You’re just blocking the coffee taste and feeding your taste for sugar and cream. And if somebody offers you a cup of coffee but they don’t have sugar or cream, then you’re right back where you started.”
Good advice. By the end of that summer, I found black coffee not only tolerable, but palatable.
And it’s stayed that way all through my life. Thanks to Dad’s advice, these days I start each day with a bracing cup of black coffee.
And then another.
And another and another….
And as I take a moment this morning between my 4th and 5th cup to do the math and add up how much sugar I have not swallowed with my coffee, teaspoon by teaspoon, over the past sixty-some years — Yikes!
Mama Google tells me there are 108 teaspoons in a pound of sugar. So if I had plopped just two teaspoons of sugar into each of my five or six cups of coffee each morning — a reasonable amount for a coffee-with-sugar kind of guy — I would have downed a pound of sugar with my morning coffee in no more than ten days or so.
And in a year? That would add up to more than 36 pounds of sugar — about the weight of an average kindergarten child.
Now, if you want to see what that looks like, go to Jewel and get 36 pounds of sugar and stack them up like bricks to build your own sugary preschooler. And then consider that, while it takes a normal kid five years to grow to kindergarten size, it only took your sweet little spud a year to grow that big. Thanks to your sweetened coffee habit.
Yikes!
But why stop at just one year? Over my lifetime, how much sugar have I avoided swallowing since I choked down my first unsweetened cup of machine-spewed java in that factory break room some sixty years ago?
Well, my sugar-starved mental math clicker hints that it would be somewhere north of 2,160 pounds. Much more than a ton.
Now, go back to Jewel. Bring a trailer. Pile up a couple thousand of those Jewel sugar-bricks to see what that would look like. But do it in the garage, because you’ll be building a sugary lump as heavy as a 1966 VW Beetle.
A lump which I have avoided gulping, thanks to leaving the teaspoon alone at morning coffeetime over the past 60 years.
And I haven’t missed the extra sweetness one little bit.
In fact, once my “acquired taste” drink of preference was black coffee, I un-acquired any desire to guzzle other sweetened drinks like Coke or Pepsi, each of which contains ten full teaspoons of sugar per can! Had I downed a couple cans of pop a day for lunch or dinner over a lifetime, I’d have swallowed an additional schoolbus-sized pile of sugar by now.
But I didn’t. I haven’t touched a single Coke or Pepsi in more than 25 years, which is the last time I sampled one to see if I had been missing anything. And, having satisfied my curiosity, never touched another.
And all because Dad told me long ago that drinking black coffee was an “acquired taste.”
Thanks, Dad. It was sweet of you to teach me that lesson.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
