Coffee Merely Good

“Whatever happened to good?” asks the white man with graying hair, dad khakis and an alarmingly large face as he fills his mug with coffee brewed from beans which were picked by poor farmers who make less than a few dollars a day for working the vast plantations that produce the beans, which are shipped to large industrial facilities to be toasted, pulverized into a dry, soil-like mass and eventually dumped into large blue tubs bearing the logo of Maxwell House, a billion-dollar brand of Kraft Foods, mega-purveyor of chemically ingenious foodstuffs, which is keen to regain its status as the biggest coffee seller in the United States, not by producing the best commodity coffee product, but by promoting the virtues of the merely good with a twenty to twenty-five million dollar advertising campaign. Indeed, what did happen to good?