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.