Hypothetically speaking...

If I were to be systematically tempted to break the Word of Wisdom, I would be most likely to give in at the coffee stage.

Most prohibited substances hold no attraction to me in the first place. Any form of alcohol, be it beer or wine or champagne, smells rather repulsive to me, and on top of that I don’t like the idea of losing any degree of control over my thoughts or other faculties. This rules out drugs as well, which don’t even have the alleged (and dubious) taste appeal of alcohol. In fact, I don’t own cold or allergy medicine, either—I never take it because I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I find that if there’s a choice between feeling funny and feeling miserable I will generally choose feeling miserable, illogical as it seems.

Tobacco is even less tempting. Although I would never make the choice myself, I suppose I can understand why a person might drink a glass of wine with dinner, or have a few beers with friends, or even inject themselves with a foreign substance simply because it made them feel really, really good. It makes at least some degree of sense that there’s enough pleasure involved to draw a person in despite the risks or unpleasant side effects. But the appeals of cigarettes and cigars and chewing tobacco completely elude me. I can’t fathom what would make someone choose to inhale cigarette smoke for the first time, and then repeat the experience enough to form an addiction. And the image of being a cigarette-smoker has lost its social attractiveness over the course of the last few decades.

Even the much-debated caffeine issue has never been a question for me, if only because I don’t have any desire to partake of the “legal” caffeinated substances in the first place. I don’t like soda, and even back when I did like soda I only liked the fruity kind, like Sprite or Squirt or Cactus Cooler or Hansen’s Natural Fruit Soda, the kinds that aren’t usually caffeinated in the first place. I will only drink root beer in a root beer float (and tend to like my floats with a liberal dose of ice cream), and I quite dislike the taste of cola (any brand—they all taste the same to me) or any of those other drinks that one tends to encounter in caffeinated form.

But coffee might be a temptation. Even when I was very young I loved walking down the coffee aisle at the grocery store. It sort of gave me this sense of illicit pleasure. I love coffee-flavored Jelly Bellies. I love the delightful (and guiltlessly caffeine-free) chocolate espresso bar from Target that I picked up at the recommendation of Ambrosia this past summer, and it took great restraint to refrain from buying more on each subsequent trip to the store. And I am dying to bake chocolate cookies with the cappuccino chips I discovered (also at Target and also caffeine-free) shortly before leaving Provo, except that I haven’t found any around here yet and any excuse to bake cookies generally involves some sort of ward function, at which cappuccino cookies might be received with a bit of suspicion.

Today I had my very first ever chocolate-covered coffee bean. I just had one, I swear, and I never intended to have more than one. But one of the other grad students bought a few at a recent candy store run and I was dying of curiosity because I always thought coffee beans were an odd thing to cover with chocolate. My curiosity is satisfied now. It turns out that coffee beans are a wonderful thing to cover with chocolate, which means I now know that I ought never to eat another one.

Honestly, though, I have no worry of succumbing to the coffee temptation. Throughout summer temp jobs and a year of public school teaching and a month in a non-BYU grad program I have had plenty of free access to coffee percolators and the thought of swigging even a mouthful has never once crossed my mind. My commitment to the Word of Wisdom via my commitment to the gospel runs deep enough that it would never be a serious consideration—it’s just the source of entertaining thought experiments.

Besides, if I were to go all the way and actually pour myself that mouthful of coffee, I think I would be mildly disappointed. It’s like the herbal tea that my roommates last year consumed with such obvious and unfathomable pleasure. It smells delicious on a cold, dark winter evening, but when you actually drink the stuff it taste disappointingly like what it is—water that’s had dried leaves soaked in it—and it takes a good-sized dollop of honey, and probably a little milk as well, to make it tolerable (although I’ll admit that because I was so determined to learn to like it is has grown on me and I don’t need nearly as much milk and honey anymore).

The point is, I think coffee would probably be the same. I’m sure it would smell great steaming in a mug in my hands, but in order to down the whole thing I’d probably need lots of cream and sugar, and at that point there would be little difference between a cup of coffee and, say, a cup of hot cocoa.

In which case, for the sake of my eternal soul, I’d probably better stick with the hot cocoa.