The Coffee Was Still There at Four
A fictional afternoon at a cluttered freelance desk turns into a closer look at how often a sweetened drink reaches your teeth.
One cup, somehow all day
At four o'clock I found the coffee I had made at eleven. It was beside my laptop, half full and wearing a pale ring around the inside. I microwaved it. Again. The milk had stopped being enthusiastic several hours earlier.
I told my partner I only had one sweet coffee a day. She looked at the cup, then at the clock. "That is a very long coffee." I had been taking tiny sips between captions, invoices and an email I kept reopening.
The part I had not counted
The Ontario Dental Association explains that frequent sugary snacks and drinks give mouth bacteria repeated opportunities to produce acids that contribute to decay. I had counted the mugs. I had not thought about how often I was sipping from one.[1]
I did not make a dramatic farewell speech to coffee. I decided to have it with lunch, enjoy it while it was warm and leave water at the desk afterwards. That was a small enough change to try without reorganizing my entire personality.
I also wrote a question for my next dental visit: did my usual drinks matter for my own cavity risk? There were things about my mouth that a mug inventory could not answer.
An empty cup
The next afternoon, the coffee cup made it to the sink before the school buses went past. I still reopened the difficult email six times, then got distracted by a delivery downstairs. The water stayed beside it, and for once I did not have to scrape dried milk off a teaspoon before dinner.
Dev