My Dark Love Affair

I have a headache. I moan to Carl about this, but he is not impressed.”I don’t believe such a thing exists.” he says. This is because I have a caffeine headache, or rather, a lack of caffeine headache. I didn’t sleep particularly well last night, and this morning I had to get up unhealthily early for me, rush round trying to pack everything up for the weekend, and then leg it to the station to catch a (late) train at 8.14. I did not get time to make coffee. Further more, as a conscientious, perma-broke student and ex-Nero employee, I flatly refuse to spend £2.25 for coffee from Costa at the station. My body cannot cope with this.

My addiction may well be psychological, but the effects are very physical. My head hurts, there is some serious pressure on the top of my skull. I have little energy, I am pale (in fact, I am reliably informed that I look dead) and I am very irritable.
This never used to be the case. My parents drank tea by the bucketful and when I was a baby, they used to give me a luke warm bottle of milky tea every day. Possibly as a result of this, I have never touched the stuff since. But I never drank much coffee either. I spent most of my teenage years being healthy and guzzling herbal teas and water. I probably should have stuck to that! However, at age 17, I got the second most boring job in the universe -data entry. An entirely sedentary life style, parked in front of a black screen with green text, typing endless addresses in over and over again, eight hours a day. The most interesting thing to do all day was to get up and wander over to the monstrosity in he corner, press a series of buttons and receive a plastic cup full of brown powder with metallic tasting hot water poured on top.
Sometimes the powder still floated, or clumped at the bottom until poked by an enthusiastic plastic stick. And woe betide anyone who dared request ‘milk’ – more powder, onl sort of off-white in colour, and seemingly even less soluble than the brown stuff. This was, apparently, coffee. Nescafe instant vendor machine coffee to be precise. It was foul. But it was hot, it had caffeine in it, it required moving from my desk occasionally, and as such, it was the only thing that stopped me turning in to a brain dead corporate zombie, gradually losing form and melting into the chair, just becoming a giant pair of fingers welded to the keyboard….

I left that job after six months, having put on a lot of weight, got repetitive strain injury from the keyboard, and the beginnings of a caffeine addiction. However, I also had enough money to go to Peru for the rest of the year. Peru produces a small amount of truly excellent, high altitude arabica coffee, but such are the ironies of global capitalism, they export all of it, and getting hold of coffee in Peru is difficult and expensive. Nestle produce something called Ecco, which is ground, roasted wheat and chicory. When brewed, it is brown and looks like coffee. It has no actual coffee in it, no caffeine content, but if you ask for ‘cafe’ in Peru, this is generally what you get.In short, I went cold turkey.

On my return from Peru, I started university. I did a lot of different activities outside classes including various theatrical endeavours. ‘Show weeks’ were notoriously hectic and doing 16 hour days playing with lighting meant a lot of coffee was consumed. Meeting friends in coffee shops became almost ritualistic, and anyone who has ever endured lectures on cranio-facial morphology of early hominids and phylogeny of various primates, or even quantitative methods for social scientists will know that at some points, major caffeine boosts are a medical necessity.

After graduating with no other ideas about what to do with myself, I started working in cafes and coffee shops. It was from these that I started to really learn about coffee. I initially thought that working with the stuff, day in, day out would put me off, but this has never been the case! All the different strains and varieties, all the subtleties of flavour that can be produced, all the different methods of brewing, filtering or extracting, all is fascinating to me. I am by no means a world class barista, but I am at least relatively skilled in the art, and I intend to continue learning.

So I am now doing my Phd about coffee, about the links between quality and wastage about the political effects of such a globalised industry. I’ve learned so much about its ‘dark history’ that I am s self-confessed coffee geek.

Coffee increases blood pressure, can lead to hypertension and anxiety attacks, has been linked to colon cancer and now apparently doubles the chance of miscarriage. However, it also protects against cirrhosis and other liver diseases, is a good source of fibre,keeps you alert and stimulated and kick starts your metabolism. It is the second largest legally traded in the commodity in the world, and the industry as a whole, from farmers to baristas, employs a hundred million people all over the world. For me, its a welcome addiction, an obsession, a career and a wonderfully dark love affair.

What the hell I think I’m doing

Even the words terrify me now. “Upgrade Proposal”. I have to write exactly what I want to do with this project, 4000 words, and then a panel interview to defend The Plan. I’ve still got a couple of months, but it is now becoming obvious that before I can convince other people that this is a good, plausible idea, I need to figure out once and for all what that idea actually is.

I’ve been faffing. Farting around with vaguely academic concepts and seeing how they could possibly be applied to my main obsession of the moment: coffee. I am employed to work on the Waste of the World project, which incorporates a lot of different themes, but focuses on reexamining what we think of as ‘waste’ in social terms. Our “team” – that is, Joby, Anna and I, are charged with research the concept of Food Waste. To me, this meant Coffee Waste.

There are a lot of different forms of ‘waste’ in the coffee industry. Physical waste on the plantations – what happens to coffee that doesn’t sell? What happens if the crops are diseased? What happens if the roaster screws up somehow? And then at the retailers – what about all the crap espressos trainee baristas make that cannot be served? Then there is all the branded packaging – most of it can be recycled, but generally isn’t.And even if you throw away your branded cup, is it somehow worth it if you have become slightly more aware of that brand? Storage packaging: if you don’t store it right, the coffee goes stale and you have to throw it. If you do store it well, you can’t recycle the foil bags…

And then there is the idea of waste of knowledge. An infinite and complex array of skills go in to this industry, everything from grading green beans, roasting to perfection, to baristas drawing rosettas as latte art on the top of our drink.. Does all the effort that’s gone in to making the coffee get wasted if the bored barista screws it up in the shop? And even if she gets it perfect, is all that expertise wasted on customers who come in for their venti, 1-shot decaf syruped-to-hell soy crappyfrappemockacino and then go home and drink instant?

Most significantly though, is trying to find whether or not all this waste, physical and conceptual, is actually necessary. If there is a demonstrable demand for high quality, speciality coffees in the UK, and if these specialty coffees inevitably create more waste to produce, then the waste is justified. However, if in the UK we are still clinging to our teapots and drinking Nescafe instant, or perhaps, going to Caffe Nero or Starbucks for the ‘lifestyle’ – buying in to the brand, for instance rather than the coffee itself, then the waste involved in this industry becomes meaningless.

How do I go about answering all these questions? The anthropologist in me is bouncing up and down going “Participant Observation!” “Multi-site ethnography!” I don’t know if human-geographers have other methods, but good ol’ PO sounds appealing to me. With emphasis on the PARTICPANT bit. I WANT to see what it’s like to pick coffee: I am going to a tiny co-op farm in Nicaragua, and a big commercial farm in Costa Rica. I would love to learn how to roast coffee professionally, so I am going to try and find an independent roaster and the one that supplies a big chain like Caffe Nero. Finally, I want to see if my own barista experience is ‘typical’ of the industry, and so I intend to compare the goings on in an independent cafe (hopefully, Gusto Italiano in Sheffield) and at a branch of Caffe Nero. Constantly comparing big and small, independent and commercial will, I hope, give a better all-round view of the industry…

So, I’ve got a lot of Ideas, and when I get really into this, I buzz… it’s exciting, I want to get on with it!! But, first, I’ve just got to translate all of the above into formal academic speak, then add in references and inteliigent sounding theory, and then timescales and costings and … aaaaaaaargh. Bureaucracy and academic prostitution!! aaaargh indeed! Sometimes, the fact that I have a certain responsibility to the uni to produce intensive, innovative, accessible and practical research is enough to crush any creativity and enthusiasm. I am Lost in Caffienation, again.

All hail Kaldi, discoverer of the black drink of happiness.

Once upon a time, in ancient Ethiopia, Kaldi the goat herder sat, no doubt picking his nose or dreaming of that really beautiful ewe he saw in the market last week, or whatever 16th century goat herders usually did while sitting in a field full of goats.

This was no ordinary day, however. Today, the noise of frantic bleating drove Kaldi to get up from his comfy rock and check on his subjects. The goats were acting strangely; their already-mad yellow eyes were stretched wide and darting about uncomfortably. Some were dancing manically, to music no sober mortal could hear.. others were eating the ancient african equivalent of hot water bottles. The head Ram had just completed a phenomenally complex and ground breaking PhD thesis in a little over three hours, which sadly Kaldi didn’t even notice in all the comotion.

The centre of the bedlam seemed to be coming from a small shrub, with dark waxy leaves and bright red berries. Some of the kids were skipping round it excitedly, then taking large bites, chewing the tasty-looking red cherries.

Instead of rounding up the goats and sending them home for the night, possibly with mugs of horlicks and security blankets, as all good goat herders should, Kaldi decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Grabbing a handful of cherries, he chewed them slowly, wincing at the intensely bitter flavour. The cherries had small green seeds in the centre. These were good. You couldn’t chew on them, they were far too hard. Kaldi didn’t want to swallow them either; even he knew that goats could digest things far better than humans could. But sucking on the hard little green things was very pleasant. Not too bitter, just, nice. Exciting even. Yes, he could take to these. In fact, he was goingtogoandtelleveryoneallaboutitrightnow! Yes! He’druntothevillagerightnow and hemightevendoalittledancejusttocelebrate! Woohoo! Ow. now his head hurt. Butitsstillgood! yusyusyus!

Kaldi abandoned his goats, with no thought to their welfare, and bounced energetically off to the village, where he confidently ran up to the local Imam.
“Hey!” he panted, “Igotthese aaaaaaamazing beans! They’re brilliant! you can chewtheredbits and suckonthegreen bits and they make you wannadanceandsingandstuff!”

The Imam gave the manic fool a whithering look. Having mentally slowed down that sentence, he eventually patted Kaldi patronisingly on the head, and calmly told him he must be possessed by an evil spirit. The red cherries were obviously designed by the devil to tempt gullible souls, and therefore must be disposed of accordingly.

Kaldi ran home, fuming, humiliated and nursing the world’s first caffeine come-down. The goats could not sympathise. The small, seldolm used walnut thing that rattled about behing their yellow eyes seemed to be aching. This was far too much for your average cloven lawnmower to comprehend.

The Imam, however, in an act of incredibly fortunate but righteous stupidity, threw the cherries on to the fire. They cracked and popped, and turned a deep, shiny brown colour. The resulting aroma was intoxicating, almost like luxurious incense. This couldn’t possibly be the work of the devil. The beans must be divine, and the resulting drink a gift from God himself…

Ok, so this is an example of artistic license rather than historical integrety, but you get the general idea! And I much prefer this version of events.