Dear Mr. Mate
Dear Mr. Mate,
It is the year 2025, and we are constantly being bombarded by man-made horrors that should be beyond our comprehension. I can barely open the internet in the morning without fear of what new dipshit move our President has pulled overnight, you leave your house and BAM suddenly a Cybertruck is menacing your every move, you get ten or fifteen scam phone calls for every person you actually want to talk to, and then you go to the grocery store and you have to brace to answer the twin questions of a) are there any eggs, and b) if so, what percentage of my mortgage are they going to cost this week?
I was actually walking to the cooler to answer those egg questions when you ambushed me, sir, with a product so confounding and unexpected yet so horrifying that I pretty much expected an angelic voice to burst out of the store’s speakers, intoning in a stentorian baritone ATTENTION SHOPPERS IN AISLE FOUR: BE NOT AFRAID. What was this misguided product that stopped me solid in my tracks, almost causing an accident with the person behind me, this product that so arrested my eyes that I could only stare at it, repeating the words “oh, no” over and over, starting from a whisper and slowly increasing to an almost-screamed distraught plea? Why, it was a deceptively cheerful bottle of your Coffee Mate White Lotus Pina Colada Creamer, that’s what it was.
Sir, this creamer is a horror on so many levels I’m not even sure where to start. But, I’ll start here - I don’t believe that a single person in the history of the world has ever, ever put pineapple in coffee and thought it was a good idea. The very idea of coffee and pineapple together is revolting. This has the feel of a slapdash marketing gimmick that you didn’t even bother paying someone to create. This feels like you typed “coffee white lotus marketing go” into ChatGPT and hooked the output up directly to your factory, slammed an entire fifth of dark rum in one go, and sat in your dimly lit office hammering on checks your minions brought you with a signature stamp while you contemplated why you were even making creamer.
When I brought the bottle of creamer home, I stuck it in my fridge, where it proceeded to stare at me every time I opened the door. I had intended to try it immediately upon getting home, but then life got complicated, and instead I just kept seeing it. It began stalking my days, and soon enough, it began haunting my dreams. In an attempt to banish it from my thoughts, I decided to search the internet to see if anyone else had ever done such a thing before.
You know what’s interesting, Mr. Mate? There are more copycat recipes on the internet for your colleague Mr. Starbucks’ Coffee Pina Colada drink that I would have expected… because that drink doesn’t actually exist. How are people publishing copycat recipes for things that don’t exist? snaps fingers, points, and winks – that’s AI, baby! Or hell, maybe it’s just normal grifters – you can search for pineapple coffee too, and once you filter out the results for the Pink Pineapple Coffee Company, there are actually a couple hits. One vegan recipe site talking about how good it is (one rating, five stars, probably a marketing bot, can be ignored), a couple reddit threads (2 replies, I assume telling OP to DIAF), and one result for the “pineapple process” of roasting coffee that is not a real thing and does not actually exist and is probably an April Fools’ joke that someone deep in the coffee industry thinks is hilarious but went right over my head as a coffee civilian.
The point of all this is, sir, that you made a product – pina colada coffee creamer – that literally no one wants. That no one has ever wanted. That no one will ever want. You can’t have moved any of this product, can you? Did you make this product on a dare? Did you have a contract with HBO and were you forced to make a White Lotus creamer tie-in in exchange for making a Harry Potter-branded butterbeer creamer later? There is no actual logic to the creation of this product that makes sense from any sort of food or good taste standpoint, or any sort of customer-focused viewpoint either. This product is so far beyond the pale of any non-financialized logic that in comparison it makes Disney’s live action Snow White look like a sane business decision.
Eventually, of course, in order to make this creamer stop haunting my dreams, I had to make a choice: either put it directly in the garbage where it obviously belonged, or to try it in a cup of coffee first, before dumping the remainder down the sink and making this abomination the Portland Water Bureau’s Sewer Department’s (sorry, guys) problem to solve. And so, with great trepidation, I removed the foil tamper seal, screwed the stupid red lid back on, and poured some creamer into my cup of coffee…
Mr. Mate, there are a lot of things one might say as one pours creamer into coffee, but I can tell you for true that “what the fuck?!?!?” should not be one of them. And yet, as I poured the creamer into my coffee and it just disappeared, sinking to the bottom, with no bloom whatsoever, “what the fuck” is indeed what I yelled. It was such an unexpected, divorced-from-all-previously-known-reality experience that I just stared into the cup, willing the creamer to bloom. It did not. Then I pulled out my cellphone and took a video of me pouring more creamer into the coffee with no bloom, because I knew when I told people what had just happened, they wouldn’t believe me, and I needed proof. Wildly, when I did it the second time, it still didn’t bloom.
I’ll be honest, Mr. Mate, I really don’t use much creamer in my coffee – I prefer half-and-half like a good corn fed apple pie American boy or whatever the fuck people say these days – but it just so happens that about two weeks ago I had the opportunity to use your normal creamer for a couple cups of coffee, and if it had sunk like mercury into whiskey in the world’s worst Manhattan I’d have definitely noticed. I cannot tell you how disturbed and unnerved I was by this creamer’s plunge into the unthinking depths of my coffee cup.
It’s said that there’s two types of coffee enjoyers in this world, sir. On the one hand, you have people who enjoy the slow ritual of a pourover, who take the time to savor the first brush of the aroma against their nose, who have that first sip and sigh like someone’s paying them to be in a Folgers commercial; on the other hand you have people who just need the hit and if it were socially acceptable they’d just pour from the carafe straight down their gullet. I’m definitely more the second than the first, and this cup of coffee absolutely challenged my normal coffee approach, because everything about it was just so off-putting. But eventually I did unwrap some disposable chopsticks – its bad enough this shit is hitting one of my favorite cups, I don’t want it to infect one of my spoons – and I gave the coffee a stir, thinking that I’d gotten over my visceral dismay of the creamer’s presentation and maybe I’d finally get to take a sip. Oh, how wrong I was.
I don’t know what in this recipe of yours broke as I stirred the cup, but all of a sudden the creamer Deepwater Horizon’d all over my cup, spewing a thick and viscous sheen of oil across the top of the coffee with the bloom of milk. There was suddenly enough oil on the coffee’s surface that a Victorian-era fortune teller could have read the future in the oil patterns as easily as she’d read the future in tea leaves. There was so much oil on the surface of my cup that if George Dubya Bush had seen it he’d be trying to figure out where it was hiding weapons of mass destruction to use as a pretext for invasion. It was so slick Mr. Dawn would have considered coating a cormorant in my coffee so he could make a commercial about how his dish soap helped save wildlife. A Roman general looked into my coffee cup and scrapped his plans for the invasion of Carthage because it told him that if he went in on the east flank his men would be slaughtered. He lost the battle anyway and as a punishment he was sent to the Colosseum as a gladiator, and ironically the eunuchs used this coffee to oil up his muscles for the crowd.
I haven’t even yet tasted or smelled your creamer, sir, and it has already entirely put me off my feed. The primary senses you should use to sample your creamer should be your mouth and nose, and without engaging either, this creamer has not only disgusted me, but made me question why I even put creamer in my coffee. It is almost an impressive achievement!
But, as they say, all bad things must reach their nadir, and eventually, I was forced to smell the coffee. It was evocative! It took me to a place I hadn’t been in years… to a foreign, exotic land, known to its inhabitants as “downtown Denver,” where I once shared an elevator with a woman who had doused herself in temu-ass floral perfume to cover the scent of the Four Loko bender she’d been on the night before. Ah, the memories! The fond memories of the clean air I sucked into my lungs after fleeing from that elevator! They say that no atoms are actually created or destroyed, they are just reformed into new compounds as the earth evolves; this is one instance in which I wish any atom involved in this absolutely awful creamer could be flung into a black hole and removed from this universe forever; although a man cannot know what an atom thinks, one imagines they wish for the same.
And finally, what does it taste like? Well, Mr. Mate, sir, let me tell you a bit about myself. Growing up, my father was an engineer, and my parents owned their own business. I spent many a weekend at the business, and my father had an entire library of specialty solvents that he would have to use on specific machine parts. As an adult, I am the rare individual who will smell, say, xylene, and instead of being disgusted (which is the obviously correct response) I’ll be taken back to a soft-focused time swimming with parental love. So when I tell you, sir, that this burning-plastic-ass, engine degreaser laden, would probably actually dissolve bones better than straight lye does, creamer is disgusting, you can believe me. I can pick out three distinct flavors you’re trying to evoke in this horrorshow: cherries, coconut, and pineapple. I’ll grudgingly give you the coconut; it’s not good, but I get it, and it at least meshes properly with coffee. The maraschino cherry doesn’t work, but it’s not awful; it throws some bright notes into the beverage and doesn’t improve anything, but it at least isn’t objectionable on the surface.
The pineapple, sir, is just awful. Just, the worst. Solventy, rancidly acidic, absolutely foul; this is the worst and most offensive artificial pineapple flavor I’ve ever experienced. It is so bad it almost makes actual pineapple taste bad through association with it. It is just awful. Thanks to this creamer I think this might actually be the worst cup of coffee I’ve ever had in my life, and I once had a 12-hour old midnight cuppa from a gas station on the South Carolina/Georgia border called “Fuel Club.” I drank less than a third of this cup of coffee, which is a new record for me. I tried to think of the worst thing I’d rather drink than this: I think a cup of hot hot cyanoacrylate superglue might actually taste better. It would, at least, taste more like natural pineapple.
There was one thing that I was actually worried about when I picked up this hate crime disguised as a product, specifically, that I had no idea what The White Lotus was. I still don’t know what it is, but I was worried that I’d be writing you this letter while taking a big ol’ crap over something created by a culture I had no right to speak of. You can imagine my relief, sir, when I learned that Parker Posey was one of the leads in the show; that launched the show firmly into the category of exploitation, with probable colonial overtones, and I no longer worried that I’d overstep my bounds while writing this letter.
It is, in fact, the opposite! This horrible, terrible, no good, very bad creamer, disguising itself behind a show that I’m guessing involves rich white people behaving poorly in “exotic” (barf) locales, while in actual point of fact, doing the exact same thing as the show? It is rare that the map and the territory should overlap with such precision, stepping so far outside of metaphor to merge into a reality that would make Marshall McLuhan weep in awe.
For those of us who aren’t Canadian philosophers, however, we can only fervently pray that you learn from this experiment, and never fucking do this again. Because my gods, this was awful, and I hope never to experience it’s like again.
Sincerely,
Alex Parise
