Cafe culture.

"The cafe experience is delicious!" Having a delicious experience is more fun, less fattening, and more suited to active lifestyles than just having delicious food and drink. More and more consumers are doing their consuming and imbibing in the fresh (or polluted) outdoor air. They are drinking waters, beers, wines, cocktails, coffees, teas, and concoctions in a creatively unlimited assortment of colors and shapes, as well as flavors. Slender square glasses feel like a tease to me, but like Starbucks, they encourage sipping slowly rather than drinking quickly. The global diversity and creativity of the imbibing is part of the experience. I giggled even before tasting the bottle of "Messiah Bold" by Hebrew, The Chosen Beer, "a rich and robust dark brown ale" brewed by the Shmaltz Brewing Company, cooled off with a skinny can of non-alcoholic Kopparberg Premium Pear Cider imported from Sweden, while eating shrimps wrapped in amazingly long and thin slithers of grilled zucchini, and realized that the thousands of calories I was consuming in ultra-thin bottles, cans, glasses, and slices were helping me to think thin as I got fatter! At least that's something.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]