My mornings usually begin with a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin as I scroll trough my phone for news and the forecast and to catch up on email.   Over my morning cup, I can plot out the day - should I go out for a walk, and if so, at what time?  Or will the day be better spent indoors, reading and writing and listening to music?  Is there something I want to watch on television, say, sports or a movie?  Later in the morning, I might top off my breakfast with a second cup of coffee.  That's my morning ritual, and it takes me longer than you might expect.  

"We reflect on the efforts that brought us this food," according to an old Zen meal chant.  "We reflect on our virtue and practice and whether we are worthy of this offering."  I don't recite the chant in the morning, never had, even at lunch or dinner.  I only recited it at group meals with other Zen practioners, but it's a good question - where does all this stuff come from? 

The coffee is usually marketed as French or Italian roast, but the beans were probably grown in Columbia or Costa Rica or maybe Guatemala.  The French roast isn't from France and the Italian roast isn't from Italy.  Maybe the beans are Arabian or Ethiopian.  Maybe they're Jamaican.  The packaging states that Starbucks French Roast is "100% Arabica coffee" (I got curious and just went and checked), but does that mean it was grown on the Arabian peninsula, or could it mean its an Arabic strain of beans grown elsewhere?

Somebody, somewhere in the world, grew the coffee beans.  Somebody, probably a team of somebodies, planted seeds, watered the soil, watched the plants grow, nurtured them, and in time harvested the beans. Somebody somewhere packaged the beans, I imagine into burlap bags, hefted them onto a truck, and took them to market.  While I like to imagine the "market" as an open-air bazaar, where merchants and buyers haggle over the price alongside vendors of fruits, vegetables and other goods, the "market" might have simply have been a metal warehouse run by some international corporation that paid the farmers a flat but substandard price for their produce.  

From the market or warehouse or whatever, the beans were then loaded onto ships.  Dock workers, forklift operators, accountants, and sailors all participated to some extent or another in getting the beans onto the boat.  Were those burlap bags full of coffee beans piled onto wooden pallets before they were brought on board, or were they packed into multi-modal shipping containers stacked up on a freighter?  And at the port of entry, did another forklift operator carry the pallets from the ship's hold into waiting trucks,.or did crane operators hoist shipping containers from the ship onto big, waiting 18-wheel rigs? 

Truck drivers transported the beans from port to a processing plant.  The truckers must have stopped somewhere for gas (and probably coffee), maybe spent the night somewhere at a Day's Inn,  and could have had breakfast at a Denny's, lunch at a Burger King, and dinner at a meat-and-three buffet at a truck stop.  Those establishments employed housekeepers and cooks and waiters and dishwashers and managers and more, all for the goal of helping the truck driver get the beans from port to processing.

And the beans finally did get to processing, where the  burlap bags were emptied and the beans were washed, roasted, ground, and repackaged.  More workers, more managers, and more labor.  I won't even get into the whole chain of activities from forestry through off-set printing that resulted in the packaging arriving at the processing plant.  The little one-pound packages of roasted and ground beans were then placed into cardboard boxes (forestry, paper mills, and printing) and sent to distribution centers, which then sent the boxes to local supermarkets.  More truck drivers, more gas stations, more Denny's waitresses.  Someone at the supermarket helped unload the truck, unpacked the cartons (careful with the box openers - watch your fingers), and stocked the shelves. 

It's only at this point that I got involved.  Pushing a cart down the supermarket aisle, I selected the flavor and roast of coffee that I prefer, tossed one of those one-pound bags into my cart, and took it to a cashier to ring up.  I then drove my purchase home in my personal automobile with the rest of my groceries (the last leg of the coffee's long odyssey)  and once home removed the coffee from the reusable shopping bag to a cupboard where it waited until morning.

I drip-brew my coffee using a Krups-brand machine made of plastic, metal and glass and circuitry. It's even got its own digital clock for some reason, although it's been flashing "12:00" since at least 2008.  I have no idea where the machine was manufactured or the history of all of its component parts and materials, but I can't imagine that it's not a far more complicated story than the history of my pound of coffee.   

But, yes, finally, at long last, I place the coffee on a No 4 brown paper filter and the Krups-brand machine introduces the beans to hot water. There's a whole story about how water comes to be at my faucet when needed and that story involves municipal utilities, civic planning, and the entire hydrologic cycle of the planet Earth (we'll set electric power generation and distribution aside for now).   The coffee brews and I take a sip, oblivious to the innumerable efforts that brought the drink to my lips.

Sometimes I don't even drink the second cup of the day and wind up pouring the excess coffee down the drain the next morning.  All those efforts of all those people - farmers, truckers, ship captains, short-order cooks, and shelf-stockers, .layers and layers of management, highway maintenance, geopolitical trade  agreements, and so on - and half that bounty never even gets consumed.   

Now that I think about it, each person in the chain of activities, each cog in that vast machinery, doesn't just exist in that one moment for that one purpose of getting my morning coffee to me, but each has their own unique history and back story.  Innumerable, virtually infinite, efforts govern the complex clockwork of activities that govern each of their lives, that take them from the instant of conception to their moment of involvement with my morning cup of coffee.  Depending on how far we're willing to extend the sphere of influence, it's probably not an exaggeration to say that the entire effort of the entire world is distilled to some degree or another into that cup of coffee.

And it's no different for the blueberry muffin, either.