Coffee: Grounds for Discussion (Part One)
A coffee grinder from the author’s childhood
I was born in British North Borneo, nowadays Sabah, a state of Malaysia. I would have been 10 years old in the mid-1960s. My mum roasted the family’s coffee beans each month over a wok. Then, us kids would take turns to grind the coffee with this grinder. My brothers – who hated the job – would adjust the notch at the back to the coarsest grind to hasten the process. Our family drank coffee in the morning and afternoon. Boiling water was poured over the coffee grounds and sugar, stirred, and left to brew for some minutes. With the grounds settled, no strainer was necessary.
When I arrived in Australia in 1992, coffee drinking outside the home was, shall we say, not that popular. The barista as an occupation had yet to exist. This is not to say there were no coffee shops or cafes. Greeks and Italians sold coffee in the early 20th century in milkbars, cafes and restaurants. But Australian coffee culture only began to take hold seriously from the beginning of the 21th century. In the 2001 census, barista was not listed as an occupation. The latest census of 2016 listed 37,200 baristas.
Urban Rituals
Coffee is among the many foods that have ritualistic behaviours associated with their preparation and serving, because social groups develop beliefs about right and wrong ways to do things.
Certain steps are necessary to make coffee, such as grinding the roasted beans and combining the grounds with hot water, to which people have added symbolic and meaningful dimensions.
Those of you who drink coffee will know that espresso coffee boasts the highest social prestige among the various ways of making coffee. It requires special machinery and training to create a perfect shot of espresso, ensuring it becomes a marker of socioeconomic class.
There are also those who drink coffee in the public space not only for the taste but to appear sophisticated, discerning or cool… and, of course, to critique it authoritatively. As I have written elsewhere, it is customary for Aussies travelling overseas to comment on other peoples’ coffee. Demographer Bernard Salt, a tea drinker, pokes fun at café culture in Australia. He writes:
“The coffee-making process starts with lots of thumping, as if to say, “look at me, look at me, for I am about to make coffee”. This is followed by a great mechanical hissing, then waiting, then by a precision act of pouring, all done in reverential silence …Queuers edge ever close to the barista, who from a distance I can see tracing a pagan symbol into each coffee’s froth.”
Early Origins
Coffee, similar to many other foods and commodities, is entwined in global networks that connect people who live in vastly different cultural, environmental and economic backgrounds.
Global networks create relationships across great distances, between producers and consumers, and among consumers, with shared concerns (or not!) and across divides of culture and perceptions. Your cup of macchiato or flat white is possible only because distant parts of the world are tied together in a global chain of people who grow, pick, transport, process, and distribute coffee beans.
So, how did coffee, a plant and drink indigenous to Arabia and the Horn of Africa become a global commodity? How is the process related to the growth of global trans-oceanic commerce, colonialism and the rise of capitalism?
There are many stories ascribed to how coffee became such an important beverage. One of these relates to the dancing goats. Apparently an Ethiopian goatherd noticed that his goats became very energetic and pranced around excitedly after chewing the berries of the coffee plant. Now, whatever it is, it also makes us think about the many ways that man has devised to create tasty, nutritious or not so nutritious dishes out of seemingly inedible plants or creatures. Who was it who decided that it was a good idea to cut off sheaves of the rice plant, remove the husk from the grain and cook it? The same goes with wheat flour and so on and so forth. So when people hold forth about how authentic a particular dish or meal is, I would ask: how far back do you want to go? But that’s an entirely different subject that I look forward to dissecting in this blog - the ways in which food and/or cultural appropriation takes place.
The coffee plant found its way from Ethiopia to Arabia before AD 850. There is some conjecture that raw coffee beans were chewed and eaten for their stimulating effect. The word coffee is modified from the Turkish kahveh which in turn is derived from the Arabic kahwa. As it became a drink it was initially consumed only as part of religious rituals or for medicinal purposes. The new beverage spread from Aden to the rest of the Arab world, and was drunk both at home and in public places. Coffee first began trading as a commodity in Yemen in the 15th century, soon becoming an export product. Until the mid-eighteenth century, Arabs, that is, Muslims, Jews and Christians dominated the coffee trade and had a virtual monopoly on coffee production, though the Indians and Chinese were also important coffee traders. The port of Mokha in Yemen was a key center of the trade, and Muslims in southwest Asia (Middle East) constituted coffee’s principal market until the eighteenth century (Watt 2012).
So although European travelers first encountered coffee in the Ottoman Empire during the fifteenth century, the beverage did not spread west for nearly 200 years. (Pilcher 2017, page 44). European interest in coffee as a social drink began in earnest after 1600 and generally spread from the south (Italy and France) to the northwest (the Netherlands and England). For most of the seventeenth century, however, Europeans obtained their coffee beans from Arab traders in Alexandria and other depots in the eastern Mediterranean. The Muslim stimulant suddenly became fashionable in Europe as the rising middle classes sought new centers of sociability outside exclusive aristocratic courts. A taste for coffee spread among Muslims in the Indian Ocean world too.
In his food history podcast Ken Albala talks of the Age of Mercantalism when colonial powers exercised control over trade in the colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. “Exotic” foods like coffee, tea, sugar and tobacco and spices were grown and introduced to consumers. He makes the point that none of these actually add any significant nutritional value to the diet. These crops were grown in the tropical or sub-tropical colonies. The general pattern was that slave or forced labour was deployed for the plantations. The mercantilist state fixed wages and prices of produce and products and these were exported. And so the native people who used to grow food on their own land, for themselves, were now forced to work in the plantations.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Stay tuned for Part 2 on discussion on “Space and Taste”, “Single Origin or Blends” and “Ethical Concerns”!
References
Albala, Ken. https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/the-history-of-coffee/ (accessed 27 August 2019).
Gupta, Akhil. “A different History of the Present: The Movement of Crops, Cuisines, and Globalization” (Krishnendu Rau and Tulasi Srinivas, eds) in Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 2017. Food in World History. New York: Routledge.
Watt, C.A. “A World of History in your Cup”. 2012.
White, Merry. 2012. Coffee Life in Japan. University of California Press.