Now that Labor Day is behind us, summer is unofficially over and school is back in session… and even the best of us might need some help in the morning, waking up.
Luckily, a little bit of internet research has brought me a brand new morning beverage: “Bulletproof Coffee.”
This concoction is the brainchild of someone named Dave Asprey, who has a business and a website to peddle his “Bulletproof” lifestyle.
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but his coffee caught my attention.
It apparently consists of coffee, plus butter, plus coconut oil. But each ingredient is as special as a snowflake: the coffee is his special blend; the butter must be unsalted (I could have told you that), from cows fed exclusively on grass; and the coconut oil is, well, coconut oil, although he calls it “Brain Octane.”
Mr. Asprey says he was inspired to come up with this potion by a cup of yak-butter tea which he encountered after climbing 18,000-foot mountains in Tibet, in negative-10-degree weather.
I have a few questions.
First of all: as would any mother, I am wondering what this man thought he was doing, climbing around in the Himalayas, let alone in sub-zero weather.
And of course, when you finally come inside from a stunt like that, I’m sure that anything they serve you will seem darned near ambrosial … (this is how I got my boys to eat split pea soup)… but that doesn’t mean that, in the calm, collected light of day, everything still is.
Alternatively, you might find yourself wandering the food stalls of Urumchi, China like James A. Millward, who wrote about the experience in his book “The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction.” “For a few pennies’ worth of ragged Chinese banknotes, two Kazakh women unscrewed the lid from a grimy, ten-liter plastic oil bottle, and decanted a frothy off-white liquid into a bowl.”
It was kumis — fermented mare’s milk. “It smelled salty and cheesy; tiny bubbles were rising to the grayish surface….I found it intensely refreshing after my push through the stifling bazaar.”
This is also how you might find yourself actually buying two sticks of beef jerky, after spending six hours in a terminal at La Guardia airport, waiting for a mysterious FAA outage to lift, all the while afraid to go any farther in search of food lest the flight get finally called while you are out of earshot.
But never was I tempted to make a lifestyle out of the stuff.
Mr. Bulletproof says he takes particular pains with his coffee, because from 50 percent to 91 percent of other beans he has sampled contain some kind of mold toxins.
I don’t see how coffee beans could sustain any kind of life at all — that’s why coffee works so well as a restorative, I always thought.
But just supposing he’s right, and if so many beans harbor this stuff — has it occurred to him that maybe mold is the key ingredient? Like the “blue” in “blue cheese” — maybe that’s the part with the flavor!
I suppose if you let anything sit around long enough, it’ll have mold on it, as I can prove to you if you’ll just come up and look at the packing crates in my attic.
As for the grass-fed yak-butter, I am left to wonder: where, among those 18,000-foot mountain tops, did the yaks find any grass?
And doesn’t anyone take the poor things in, for the 10-below-winter?
But the master stroke in this elixir is the coconut oil. Mr. Asprey makes many claims for the brain-building effects of what he calls “Brain Octane oil.”
By naming it that, he certainly validates his qualifications as far as I’m concerned. Not as a nutritionist, of course — but as one heckuva marketing genius.
But why should he have all the fun?
With mechanical names in Column 1, and random food words in Column 2, I think we could come up with some whiz-bang concoctions of our own.
How about Kevlar Cobbler? Lawn-mower Lemonade? Crank-case Cola? Machete-proof Milkshakes? (Those would include chunks of guacamole and some chocolate sauce).
The weirder the better, in a Bulletproof world.
But if all you want is some high-quality fat in your morning routine, I’ve got an idea: Just pour in some cream!
You can call it Diesel Coffee, if it makes you happy. Or whip that cream with a little bit of Java Dust — some call it sugar — and put that in your coffee and drink it.
I can’t think of a morning that that wouldn’t improve!
