Displays of Authenticity (6)—"Real" Coffee

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series Displays of Authenticity. 

[a] Real?  RF

As you can tell from yesterday's and today's post titles, I have been thinking a lot about coffee lately. And authenticity. I am back in Wisconsin for the beginning of the autumn academic term, and my mind is on cultural difference. Driving through Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana will do that to me, and you might think of this as a kind of caffeinated ethnography. I learned as much from the stops at diners as I did from the scenery.

As I sipped a bracing cup of old (time) coffee in Zanesville, my mind drifted back...and eastward. There I was on Monday morning, standing behind a bunch of easterners in the coffee line at my local brewery. I waited while they tore, poured, and stirred. Their combinations of packaged granules, thick white liquid, and spoons (or sticks) is something you just don't see back in the homeland. I had a lot of time to think, since their meandering and tweaking took minutes. "What a production," I thought to myself. "All I want to do is grab the 'dark roast' nozzle and fill my cup." No fancy stuff.

I said nothing and smiled vacantly as I gazed into the parking lot and waited...and waited.

As a born North Dakotan, I don't understand cream and sugar. In fact, I was already in my mid-twenties when one day, in Boston at an academic conference, I ordered a "large coffee" at a well-known place that sells doughnuts and coffee (the Chinese call it 當肯多娜).* I happily grabbed my big styrofoam container, walked out into the New England morning, and started down the street as I prepared to take my first sip of the day.

[b] Breakfast?  RF

Ugh. Retch.

It was my first sip on eastern soil of what I thought would be "coffee." It tasted like eastern soil and Karo syrup. I could not believe the sugary awfulness of it all, and made a face not unlike the one on the cover of a David Foster Wallace book of essays. I went back into the store and explained that perhaps I do not get out enough and maybe "one large coffee" doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. I politely asked for plain, black coffee—with NO cream or sugar (at all). I was told (equally politely, I should add) that one must make such "exotic" preferences clear when ordering "coffee" in Boston.

[c] Cuffy  RF

That was the beginning of my cultural coffee education, and it has taken me in many directions in and beyond the United States. I have had coffee prepared in ostentatious ways that startled a simple Midwestern boy who thought coffee only came in white ceramic cups. But no, the dark bean juice has appeared in strange blends and with various accoutrements in Hakodate, Chengdu...and Toledo (the one in Ohio) that I would never have guessed from my culinary protectorate in Finley, North Dakota. In short, I have learned almost as much from studying the Way of Coffee (コーヒーの道) as I have from reading East Asian history.

We should ask ourselves right now about the relationship between authenticity (as we see it) and our favorite beverages. Since I will be looking at some other popular beverages ("I'll have a Coke, please!") in the coming weeks, let's stick to coffee for now.

What does it mean to order "a (cup of) coffee?" Why do we sometimes become "outraged" at the humiliations to which our treasured liquid has been subjected (cream, sugar, and worse)? Why do some of us get our backs up over "real," "genuine," or "authentic"...coffee?

[d] East  RF

Of course, I have been playing up the "outrage" angle only to make a point here. I have come to love all sorts of coffees, and even went through a brief period in my late-twenties when I took a little cream with it. That didn't last, but I have learned to like curry and coffee just as much as I enjoy a cinnamon roll and fresh cup. In short, I have come to love the cultural diversity of it all.

It's multiculinary education, pure and simple.

That doesn't change the fact that a "rhetoric of authenticity" swirls around and through the brown liquid and its commercial outlets all over the world, like so many expanding ripples of cream. For us, it is another episode in our ongoing discussion of authenticity on Round and Square, and it is just the beginning of many more foods and drinks that will follow.

Just wait until we discuss Pinot Noir, Sprite, and ice cubes in China.

*Dangken duona