- Green Lifestyle
What is a good coffee worth?
One of these mornings: The alarm clock rings at 6 a.m. The night was short, as it is so often the case. The schedule is jam-packed. Dog, cat, mouse, children must be looked after. Now a good cup of coffee is worth a fortune to me. Because it saves everything, the day, the mood, the children, the clients. But …
Barbara Beiertz
…my colleague, the controller says: A coffee is worth about 15 cents. Because that’s what a cup of Arabica Crema costs if you calculate 0.2-0.25 oz of coffee powder per cup at a price of $10.5 per pound (leaving out water and energy consumption for the sake of simplicity). In the coffee shop around the corner, the admittedly very tasty espresso costs $3.30, on the ferry from Denmark to northern Germany a pretty lousy brew costs $4.80. And if we were to ask Cesar Marin from the Demeter coffee farm in Peru, we would get a completely different value.
Change of values?
Let’s start from the beginning: What does the dictionary say?
- Value in philosophy and psychology: Meaning, importance. Designation for a certain level of quality.
- Value in logic: The result of a measurement or investigation expressed by a sign or number.
- Value as a synonym for the price that something would have if it were sold.
And of course, the latter – the price – is closely linked to the subjective importance (e.g. of a coffee). So far. So good.
Values are therefore what is important to an individual. They are the basis for decisions, opinions, and feelings. Of course, there are also “universally valid” values, which are then incorporated into social norms and laws. Justice, for example, is reflected in the American Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
However, our value systems and the priorities within them are constantly changing – depending on what is going on around us. So, value is what is important to me at the moment (that cup of coffee at 6 a.m.). And that’s not as bad as you might think at first.
And we are herd animals after all.
If, for example, society becomes increasingly aware of the value of an intact environment, as has happened most recently with the Fridays for Future demonstrations in Europe, it will ultimately become a social norm that is then also reflected in law: For example, in the European ESG guidelines.
The principle behind this is called social contagion. We humans simply want to “belong”.
“Social norms provide a script, a template for how individuals should behave in certain situations,” says social psychologist Immo Fritsche from the University of Leipzig. “This gives them an uncanny power over us, even if we don’t realize it.” (…) In order to bring about a change in behavior among the general population, it is not necessary to convince everyone right from the start. As Damon Centola from the University of Pennsylvania and other researchers were able to show in a 2018 study, the tipping point at which social norms change is reached earlier, namely as soon as a critical mass of around a quarter of the population is convinced that new social conventions are necessary.
(www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aas8827)
Which is great on the one hand but can also be terrible on the other – think fascism, Islamism, nationalism, anti-Semitism.
So, the question remains: What matters most to us? What is important? What is valuable? For us, it is (of course) coffee. Because its organic cultivation, fair payment, friendly relationships with farmers and cooperatives, and its wonderful aromas make it worth much, much more than 15 cents a cup.
