Value Systems
Edward F. Fischer, Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value
University of California Press, 306pp, £24.00, ISBN 9780520386969
reviewed by Sean Russell
When I worked as a barista I found there were two types of customer. The ones that bemoaned the price of the coffee as too expensive, and those who were happy to pay extra, seeing it as benefitting those who farmed the beans in faraway and exotic places. Well, good coffee should be expensive, but the truth is that most of the profits — even of so-called third-wave artisan coffee — still remain in the place of consumption, not production. Meanwhile, the farmers, while undoubtedly doing financially better now than ever, still do not see the real benefit.
In the U.K. we drink 93 millions cups of coffee a day. There's your Starbucks and your Costa, if you like that sort of thing, and then there are the coffee shops which offer "unique" blends, from places such as Guatemala. This search for a provenance, a story, unique tastes is not dissimilar to wine. Some people are happy with a £5 bottle from Tesco, others want more. But this search for ‘authenticity’ which many will also associate with ‘fairness’ may not be all it seems — the connections are all far more complicated.
In 2019, in a taxi between Kabupaten Badung and Ubud in Bali, a taxi driver asked my friend and me if we liked coffee. Of course we did. Would we like to stop at a coffee producers Bali Luwak Coffee, then? Why not? When we arrived we were given a tour of the grounds, given plenty of coffee to try and shown the Asia palm civets that help produce famously one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Luwak coffee is, after all, made from partially digested coffee cherries which have been eaten and defecated by the civets.
Of course the coffee is expensive if you have to go through all this rigmarole, we thought to ourselves. And yes there was an old local lady there peeling the beans. Was it a tourist trap? Of course. And also I have no doubt the taxi driver probably made some sort of commission from delivering Westerners to this place where we'd inevitably spend a bunch of money. But the questions occurs to me, why is that such a sure thing? Why, if you deliver Westerners to a little coffee-making place, are we almost certain to spend money and lots of it? The answer is that it is a story, we are sold on a story, an idea of authenticity.
Coffee taste, like pretty much all taste, is subjective. No matter what the cupping competitions will say. One season they'll prefer fruitiness, another not. Yes the Luwak Coffee was good, perhaps even very good, but was it worth the price? Or were we simply paying for a story: a story including this little forested place in Bali, the civets, an old woman. A story of a tradition. That's the sort of stuff us Westerners bloody love.
But this understanding of my experience in Bali did not crystallise for me until I read the excellent Making Better Coffee by anthropologist Edward F. Fischer. Fischer studied the links of coffee production between Maya farmers on one hand and the coffee consumers of America on the other. He follows the process from Maya coffee farms ‘off the beaten path — even here, where off the beaten path is off the beaten path’, to cupping competitions in the United States where some beans can cost upwards of $212 a pound (commodity coffee costing about $1.04 a pound). And in so doing reveals that often what we are buying is as much a story as a product.
So why then does this potentially harm indigenous and Maya farmers with small-holdings in Guatemala? Surely, these are the people that stand to benefit most? Well apparently not always — and certainly not for sustained periods. This is due to two factors. Firstly lacking the social and cultural capital needed to control or create a story for people to buy into, while larger operations can. And secondly the unquenchable thirst for new and ‘unique’ tastes leads farmers into an impossible battle of trying to grow the next best thing. Perhaps their particular coffee is the trend of the year, but five years from now who knows what the Global North has decided is the flavour of the month.
Beyond this, what we are paying for, as Fischer explains is ‘a narrative connection to the grower, the novelty of discovering new flavours, and appreciation of the craft.’ But this so-called connection is not perhaps a connection at all. While Fischer writes that many growers are now perhaps aware of their position in the global trade, and have mobile phones and use things like WhatsApp, their real drive is one of tradition, to producing a seasonal crop and living off the land in the way generations have before them.
The extra money is great, but it fits their own value systems which are different to our own as consumers. Small-holding farmers, then, are sometimes totally removed from the cupping competitions their coffees may or may not be winning and the price-value that might afford that bean in the Global North.
Fischer takes us back though the history of coffee production and follows it all the way through the process asking questions of value which only breed more questions about our wider society. Coffee, then, is an example of a wider phenomenon which Fischer best explains using this anecdote:
The means of production is no longer the controller of value, but the means of creating an idea — an economy of information.
A book about creating value in the coffee industry could very easily be boring. But Fischer roots this so entirely in people, be it Mayan farmers or the 2020 U.S. coffee cupping champion, that it is never dry. If you want to know what you're really buying when you get that £5 coffee and tell all your friends about how ethical it is, read this book. It might not be as ethical as you think it is, and the hierarchies of colonialism are still in place in some form or another.
In the U.K. we drink 93 millions cups of coffee a day. There's your Starbucks and your Costa, if you like that sort of thing, and then there are the coffee shops which offer "unique" blends, from places such as Guatemala. This search for a provenance, a story, unique tastes is not dissimilar to wine. Some people are happy with a £5 bottle from Tesco, others want more. But this search for ‘authenticity’ which many will also associate with ‘fairness’ may not be all it seems — the connections are all far more complicated.
In 2019, in a taxi between Kabupaten Badung and Ubud in Bali, a taxi driver asked my friend and me if we liked coffee. Of course we did. Would we like to stop at a coffee producers Bali Luwak Coffee, then? Why not? When we arrived we were given a tour of the grounds, given plenty of coffee to try and shown the Asia palm civets that help produce famously one of the most expensive coffees in the world. Luwak coffee is, after all, made from partially digested coffee cherries which have been eaten and defecated by the civets.
Of course the coffee is expensive if you have to go through all this rigmarole, we thought to ourselves. And yes there was an old local lady there peeling the beans. Was it a tourist trap? Of course. And also I have no doubt the taxi driver probably made some sort of commission from delivering Westerners to this place where we'd inevitably spend a bunch of money. But the questions occurs to me, why is that such a sure thing? Why, if you deliver Westerners to a little coffee-making place, are we almost certain to spend money and lots of it? The answer is that it is a story, we are sold on a story, an idea of authenticity.
Coffee taste, like pretty much all taste, is subjective. No matter what the cupping competitions will say. One season they'll prefer fruitiness, another not. Yes the Luwak Coffee was good, perhaps even very good, but was it worth the price? Or were we simply paying for a story: a story including this little forested place in Bali, the civets, an old woman. A story of a tradition. That's the sort of stuff us Westerners bloody love.
But this understanding of my experience in Bali did not crystallise for me until I read the excellent Making Better Coffee by anthropologist Edward F. Fischer. Fischer studied the links of coffee production between Maya farmers on one hand and the coffee consumers of America on the other. He follows the process from Maya coffee farms ‘off the beaten path — even here, where off the beaten path is off the beaten path’, to cupping competitions in the United States where some beans can cost upwards of $212 a pound (commodity coffee costing about $1.04 a pound). And in so doing reveals that often what we are buying is as much a story as a product.
So why then does this potentially harm indigenous and Maya farmers with small-holdings in Guatemala? Surely, these are the people that stand to benefit most? Well apparently not always — and certainly not for sustained periods. This is due to two factors. Firstly lacking the social and cultural capital needed to control or create a story for people to buy into, while larger operations can. And secondly the unquenchable thirst for new and ‘unique’ tastes leads farmers into an impossible battle of trying to grow the next best thing. Perhaps their particular coffee is the trend of the year, but five years from now who knows what the Global North has decided is the flavour of the month.
At the coffee shop, we are asked to pay more for quality, but who decides what constitutes 'quality'?" Very rarely is it the farmers, and very rarely does it stay the same over time. What commands a price premium one season, could very well change the next.
Beyond this, what we are paying for, as Fischer explains is ‘a narrative connection to the grower, the novelty of discovering new flavours, and appreciation of the craft.’ But this so-called connection is not perhaps a connection at all. While Fischer writes that many growers are now perhaps aware of their position in the global trade, and have mobile phones and use things like WhatsApp, their real drive is one of tradition, to producing a seasonal crop and living off the land in the way generations have before them.
The extra money is great, but it fits their own value systems which are different to our own as consumers. Small-holding farmers, then, are sometimes totally removed from the cupping competitions their coffees may or may not be winning and the price-value that might afford that bean in the Global North.
Fischer takes us back though the history of coffee production and follows it all the way through the process asking questions of value which only breed more questions about our wider society. Coffee, then, is an example of a wider phenomenon which Fischer best explains using this anecdote:
Taiwan-based Foxconn has done very well in assembling iPhones and other products in Shenzhen, China, but the device's 'designed in California' label nods to the intellectual property and branding that extracts the most surplus value.
The means of production is no longer the controller of value, but the means of creating an idea — an economy of information.
A book about creating value in the coffee industry could very easily be boring. But Fischer roots this so entirely in people, be it Mayan farmers or the 2020 U.S. coffee cupping champion, that it is never dry. If you want to know what you're really buying when you get that £5 coffee and tell all your friends about how ethical it is, read this book. It might not be as ethical as you think it is, and the hierarchies of colonialism are still in place in some form or another.