Robusta

Are you what you eat most often or most happily?

For most of us, some kind of warm beverage or (even more broadly) flavoured beverage is a way to start the day. It’s also a way we end the day, mark an occasion or toast to friends and family. It is something we look forward to and get to do often, one of life’s simple pleasures of civilisation and essential in a culture that until recently had some taboos against consumption of any kind in solitude. 

Many people by extension like to define themselves by their preferences or aversions. Whole cultures have been created around consuming caffeinated, alcoholic or notably dry beverages and each carries contextual baggage which is quite extensive when one stops to consider it. Coffee, especially black, is masculine, tea is feminine, beer is social, wine is a healthy indulgence, etc. 

As an aside, ever since enjoying tobacco from time to time during my stay in Paris and various other limited occasions elsewhere, I’ve found it confusing that our culture divides people into smokers and non-smokers as if there were nothing in between. Definitely there are ends of the spectrum, one can be a habitual user just as one can be a virgin. However just as with the sexual use of virginity the whole idea of having had or not had an experience carries its own unnecessary baggage and identity. I have smoked tobacco and will likely continue to do so from time to time. So have many people I know who would almost certainly identify as non-smokers if pressed by a parent or doctor. Surely a single experience doesn’t cause one to cross a bridge and forever be considered something as ugly as ‘a smoker’? But that’s just how we think of virginity or illicit drug use for that matter. But other, more benign (even addictive) behaviour like gum-chewing or social media browsing? We can safely consider that a spectrum and not binary. I’ve never heard of someone being called a gum-chewer or saving their facebook use for the right special someone to share. My point of course is that, like the breakfast club, culture seeks to classify what in reality is never black and white.

It’s really people who choose to define themselves, publicly or privately, in these terms and all the associated baggage.

So it is with coffee. I love coffee. I am a coffee-person. But so does nearly the rest of the world, especially if one includes the other (slightly more popular) caffeinated beverage of choice, tea. So especially if I say I am a caffeine person, I’m in the majority. But that doesn’t tell you much about what specifically I like or don’t like. And I try not to dis-like but of course it is difficult to just like what you do and ignore what others do.

Let me explain a little about coffee, for context. Coffee is a beverage made by dissolving in water the ground seeds of a plant whose genus is called Coffea. Coffee plant seeds are called beans of course but in order to de-mystify the process and clarify what’s happening I think it’s important not to fall back purely on convention. 

Two of the most propagated varieties of this plant are the species Arabica (Latin for Arabian) and Robusta (Latin for Strong). They’re of course very similar plants with similar looking seeds but with a few key (mostly culturally defined and therefore subjective) differences. The most prominent difference is that coffee connoisseurs have decided that the flavour produced by arabica seeds in water is superior to that of robusta seeds. So this allows people who have read a little about coffee to show off what they know about the drinks by prizing arabica and denigrating robusta. This has led to (or is perhaps the cause of) Robusta seeds being chiefly used to make the polar opposite of ‘speciality’ coffee; instant coffee granules.

Here is what I’m proposing about cultural preferences, definitions and food: most people don’t really know what they’re talking about. The vast majority of people, myself included, have never had the chance to blindly taste test several different coffee varieties side-by-side, which is adorably called ‘cupping’. We actually have no idea if maybe we’d prefer artisanal crafted robusta or, as I’d argue is more likely the case, if we couldn’t really tell the difference and would like to base our decision on another factor; price for instance. Experts, with their own palates almost by definition different to our own, have told us they prefer arabica and so should we. We, as Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, buy our beliefs off the rack and put ourselves in one camp or another as a fashion statement. 

It recalls some of what I learned during my brief foray into fine dining. Food critics and chefs, whose palates are again very different to the majority, have developed a taste for artistically and philosophically gratifying food which in many cases succeeds to satisfy culturally just as it fails biologically. I’m referring to the often true cliché that after one eats at a multi-Michelin starred restaurant, one often needs to fill the stomach with something much more affordable as much to soak up the ten plus courses of alcohol pairings as to feel genuinely full. What we aspire to and what we actually do day-to-day or identify with might be just as mismatched in other ways.

The vast majority of coffee consumed globally is robusta, in the form of instant coffee, which (like comic sans and carbohydrates) coffee snobs will most likely assert is a crime against good taste and should probably not even be considered coffee. If you come across this opinion it’s interesting to counter with the fact that India is producing some really nice artisanal robusta varietals prized for their flavour and not (as robusta bound for instant coffee is concerned) for high yield. It will show that you know at least a bit about coffee and even more about snobs.

Robusta typically is associated with woody, earthy flavours and higher body, making a richer cup of coffee. For these reasons it has traditionally been a part of Italian coffee culture where people prefer it for taste as well as cost. As with instant coffee, people can come to prefer certain aspects of their food and drink for reasons which may not include flavour but also which can include flavours some other people dislike. These people aren’t wrong. 

I’m reminded of finding other people’s flavour descriptors puzzling, especially as a kid. Flavours are of course imprecise and subjective but can help as some information is better than none. But it can be particularly confusing when someone is so used to one experience and someone else a virgin or novice. As a child, I’d take it for granted when actors in movies and tv would describe a good hard alcohol as ‘smooth’. As you can imagine my first hands-on experience with the flavour of hard alcohols was many things, of course interesting and bold as flavours go but nothing I would ever describe as smooth. 

It is one argument to say robusta or instant isn’t coffee because the post-war industrial food complex is poorly suited to our biological and ecological health, which it is. It is quite another to equate this way of drinking coffee, or any cultural activity, with a form of uneducated baseness and ignore the context in which people do what they do. 

It’s common when meeting new people to ask what they ‘do’. By this we mean ‘how do you make your money?’ We phrase it this way because it’s impolite to ask directly, likely because that would be adjacent to asking ‘so how much money do you earn at work?’ But this phrasing suggests a whole series of more interesting questions. Assuming we roughly sleep one third of our lives and do paid work another third, wouldn’t it be much more interesting to ask ‘what’s your favourite hobby?’ Or more directly ‘what do you wish you were doing most often?’ Do you define yourself by how you earn money or would you like to talk about something else? And is how you define yourself a thing you do often or the thing which you most look forward to doing?

This question would be just as informative and probably allow for a richer description of the person, as it would for a society. People have all sorts of reasons for a potential mismatch in what they do for money and what they are excited by and wish they were doing most often. I can only assume that it’s the same for food and culture. 

As with so many human endeavours, cost is a chief concern. Many people’s reason for being a coffee person who drinks instant coffee is surely cost or utility. There are certainly other people who drink coffee but mostly in social settings and so have never been bothered by variety etc etc. There are so many contexts in which someone can both like coffee and like instant coffee, for so many reasons.

Even flavour, the food connoisseur’s last bastion. Surely, they’d argue, there are many reason’s to enjoy instant coffee, cheap beer, wonder bread and fast food but quality is of course not one of them. But of course even that is subjective. Just because you have spent your life comparing food and drinks of all sorts, identify as an expert and want to tell other people about your preferences does not make you right. In fact the most democratic approach would be to see what most people do most of the time, and that’s to drink the robusta.

So have your preferences, of course. I don’t want to offend anyone who isn’t trying to offend anyone else. Maybe people talking about what they like is in no way trying to imply a dislike for anything else. Even a description of disliking something else is possibly just meant to be a strong opinion, not a value judgement. Ultimately what I’d love to see is more people taking an interest, but again that’s a preference and some people just don’t care. Just don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that your tongue is right and someone else’s is wrong. Or even that they care.