Who's Behind the Bean?

Everything has a story. No one of us, no moment of anyone’s life, fits a template or follows a formula.  We are all the amalgamation of nuance.  We are inseparable from our stories, and so is everything we consume.

I’ll be traveling to South and Central America in September to collect a healthy crop of stories from coffee farmers (cafeteros) in an effort to humanize a commodity we all interact with daily (even if you’re not a drinker, you see, smell, and experience coffee in some way every day). This project is an open investigation to gather the human stories behind something that seems so familiar. Coffee is an integral part of our lives, but we as North American residents have no point of reference for how our morning pick me up arrives in the paper cups of our favorite cafes or filters into the carafe on our countertop; we have no framework for thinking about what happens behind the scenes of our k-cup or latte.

Coffee is an inherently remote commodity because our North American climate simply does not support its cultivation. Currently, people in this country are expressing a renewed desire to flock to farmers’ markets to shake the weathered hands that harvested their lettuce and meet the butcher who personally parsed their recently slaughtered, pesticide-free grass fed cut of filet mignon. But with coffee, however, it is simply impossible to localize, to humanly connect with the source due to the equatorial climatic requirements of the plant.

Coffee maybe close at hand in our daily lives, yet it is colonial and distant in its origins.  Along with chocolate and fruits like bananas, mangos, pineapples, and kiwis, coffee is a lifetime member of a family of imperial commodities sourced from tropical colonies, commodities which we’ve adopted (perhaps kidnapped?) and cherished as our own.

Because coffee is sourced from formally imperially controlled locations, the histories of coffee farmers are largely histories of oppression and injustice. In the face of a legacy of such exploitation, the grossest injustice we, as consumers and residents of an imperial power, can commit is to speak for people who can speak for themselves. Even with negligible incomes, without access to clean water, education and healthcare, the one- and arguably the most invaluable- commodity which every human still has access to is his or her own story. By removing the white lens that distorts all summaries written by (however theoretically unbiased) imperial visitors/observers/consumers, we exercise more equitable storytelling through listening to what people have to say for themselves, rather than putting the stories of others into our own continually privileged and historically controlling words.

Every commodity we consume is itself an amalgamation of nuance and particulars. This collection will offer a few stories to humanize one of the United States’ most pervasive commodities, coffee.

Also available on Wordpress

The Humanity of Connection, Perspective and Commodity

(or The Search for Coffee Stories in Central and Latin America)

The case for local food is large and complex. Supporters of the locavore diet often cite one of the main benefits of eating local as an increased connection to one’s food; locavores shop at farmers markets where they can see the farmers who grew their lettuce and talk to men with grimy hands who personally planted, harvested, and transported the contents of their salad. It is only recently that our lettuce and tomatoes have begun to come almost entirely from places like Mexico, and it makes sense that they should again come from much closer in lieu of making a transcontinental journey to our plates. Locavores know that there are many products we can grow and make closer to home than we currently do, with resulting benefits to the environment, quality of the final product, and community.

It seems that the closer we are to our food source, the better it gets. Local farms have profound transformative qualities on their environment; they offer new jobs, afford opportunities for education, provide healthy food, minimize emissions from shipping, and, perhaps most importantly, foster connections within communities. In literature about restoring suburban farms or creating urban ones, the idea again and again surfaces that farms and gardens grow more than food; they grow relationships, often ones that bridge wide gaps of age, economic status, and other ideological distances. Eating more local food sounds like the best idea ever. I'd argue that it is.

But local sourcing simply doesn't cover everything. To go strictly locavore in New York City would mean to give up favorites like avocados, bananas, chocolate, and perhaps most frighteningly, coffee. Small, local farms are an outstanding way to provide a bounty of healthy, tasty food for a community while establishing genuine connections among members, but they can't bring us everything. If we, as Americans, want to continue drinking coffee, we have to import it from tropical regions as we have done for over 200 hundred years. What does this mean for our locavore goals? Can be high minded about or organic local microgreens and still suck down Venti lattes from mysterious tropical regions we’ve never seen or even thought about?

We've become disconnected from our food as a nation (and a generation- has anyone in their 20s or 30s killed an animal before eating it? Pulled a carrot from the ground?), and people are now beginning to restore the connections between themselves and what they eat. Books and movies (think Omnivore’s Dilemma, Salt: A History of the World, Fast Food Nation, Twinkie, Deconstructed, Eating Animals, Food, Inc. ) have recently forced us to recognize then inspired us to remedy the disconnect between ourselves and what we consume. People have developed ingenious classroom gardens, rooftop farms, farm to table restaurants, and butcher shops where you can choose your cut of meat from the whole animal. These efforts have sparked a new and essential dialogue among Americans about just what it is we’re eating, and the conversation is only getting louder.

However, there are many commodities fundamentally excluded from the locavore discussion based purely on logistics. If eating local connects us to our food, how can we be connected to consumables we've imported for centuries? Maybe we've never seen a pig at slaughter or plucked a tomato from a vine, but surely we've talked to someone who has. If not that, at least we've seen images of food in its original form, whether in idealized story books or sensationalized news reels. We at least have a point of reference from which to depart in our reconnection to meats, grains and produce. But there are some commodities for which we have no point of reference, and those happen to be some of the most prevalent in our lives.

What does raw coffee look like? Most of us know that brewed coffee comes from roasted beans, but where do those beans come from? What does "wild" coffee look like if we were to leave it alone?  How does it get from that form to us? Not only are we disconnected from one of the commodities we consume most, we are complacent with our disconnection.  Have you ever asked yourself where your coffee comes from? If so, you probably answered with "Colombia" or "Brazil." Perhaps, but where in Colombia; what does that even mean? Our general lack of desire to consider the origins of one of the most ubiquitous commodities in the nation speaks to a national tendency to not question what's directly beyond earshot or just out of sight.

In this way we've allowed ourselves to buy clothes made in sweatshops, purchase electronics made on assembly lines, and eat chocolate harvested by near slave labor. There are so many realities geographically removed from our own realities which we affect immensely simply by living our lives, and we hardly consider them. But worse than not considering them, we let people like ourselves, people born and raised in a world comprised of such products,  peek into these realities and report back. We've swallowed observations and accounts of the fabrication of our food and stuff seen through the largely white lens of privilege, and colonial/imperial lineage, without ever asking the people who's lives are these realities what they have to say for themselves.

This project aims to build a connection between consumers and the producers of the commodity they so voraciously consume. 

But why coffee?

Coffee is a product we forget to consider because it’s always there, always has been, and seems like it always will be.

Why not write it yourself ?
I am merely the curator and compiler; my voice and platform will be evident only in the inclusion, ordering and omission. Perhaps I’ll intersperse some stories of my own experiences into the final piece, but they will differentiated from the stories I collect.  What I have to say as a white traveler is not nearly as significant as what people have to say for themselves. Salman Rushdie says “the human being is a storytelling animal, or, rather, the storytelling animal; it is the only creature on earth that tells itself stories to understand just what kind of creature it is.” By hearing the stories of the people who coax coffee from the loins of the earth and without whom we would not be able to consume it, we share in the humanity that connects us. The project is framed by simple questions, like “what’s the best thing that happened to your family this past year? The worst?” that people across cultures, languages and locations can all respond to with the same ease and wealth of stories to share.

Coffee is often credited with fueling the productivity of the nation, and it certainly fuels the economies of many countries of the world. The greatest respect we can pay to the people who devote their livelihoods, and often unwillingly give their lives, to bring us the commodities we no longer consider miraculous, is to pause in our consumption to listen to coffee sounds like from a different point of view.

This capacity to put ourselves the shoes of someone else- to tell stories but even more to hear them- is what makes us human. Let’s spend some time exercising our humanity. 

Project Rationale [Working Draft]

Why are you quitting your job and abandoning your querida New York to go to the wilds of Costa Rica in August?

In his cautionary novel 1984 Orwell warns against the “mutability of the past,” but coffee’s history is anything but quiet. Most (maybe all) coffee literature discusses coffee’s rebellious past as a fuel for revolutions and social upheaval. What is evident today, however, is the mutability of the present. We’ve been able- we are able- to keep the present quiet by removing it from sight or by giving it a foreign tongue.

This project aims to afford the people who know what we consume, those who interact with it in its raw form daily, those who coax it from the loins of the planet (or from the loins of chemically drenched and programmed plots of experimentation) the opportunity speak for themselves. No summary, no matter how padded with academic logic and historical supplements, can do for the present what firsthand stories can. I’m looking for individual stories of daily occurrences- both the normal flow of a Tuesday and the harrowing tale of “that bizarre time when…” that everyone still regales…over their morning cup of coffee perhaps?

The resilient, idiosyncratic personalities and voices of actual people will do more for connecting us comfortable residents of the global north to the source of our favorite beverage than any fiction I could invent. The present is quite articulate if you can pause long enough to listen.

But why coffee?

It is only recently that our lettuce and tomatoes come to us from Mexico instead of farms down the road, but for as long as coffee has been consumed in this nation (think the day after the Boston Tea Party), coffee has been imported from the world’s tropics. Whole families and communities have developed livelihoods, lineages, and lifestyles centered around coffee. Many fincas are in the hands of fifth generation cafeteros. With so many years of a family business come stories; heirloom folk tales, grandparents reminiscing about when they were young, and endless threads of  people sharing what they’ve heard, seen, done and thought as they labor and live together.

Salman Rushdie makes a case for fiction when he says, “The human being is a storytelling animal, or rather, the storytelling animal; it is the only creature on earth that tells itself stories to understand what kind of creature it is,” but his rationale also works for non fiction. By telling each other the stories of who we are, we become a little more ourselves.