Wolf and the Peacock
Friday, July 23, 2010 at 09:48AM The future of real coffee “leaders” in this country might well emerge as some strange herd of anti-rebels, oglers by birth-right, people who dare somehow to back away from ironic passivity and act brave enough to endorse and instantiate a single-entendre principle. These leaders will treat the plain old, untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. consumption life with reverence and conviction. For they have come to know these peacock feathers only too well.
They might be called, the willing, accomplishing great feats of being inclined towards a parting of self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These new icons might be seen as outdated, of course and rightly so, before they even start. They will be seen as dead on the plate, dead in the cup, dead upon arrival. Too sincere.
Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real thing. For as far as I can see, the risk of disapproval in today’s society is of greater net value than the current currency of approval.
Today’s risks aren’t so clear. The new coffee rebels might have to become artists willing to risk the rejection, the rolled eyes, the cool smile of teenage malaise, the broken ribs, the parody of the current avante garde of the establishment, the “Oh! How they are fools.”
I am calling for your going out to sea, at the risk of unbearable accusations of sentimentality, being a drama queen. Of overcredulity. Of suicidal life-styles of the unknown and unwanted. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of gawkers and celebrity profiles, who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Why?
Because coffee is an issue this country cannot afford to ignore anymore. But what is the "issue" of coffee exactly? What is in contention? What is the polemic? There are complexities regarding our relationship to coffee that the country has not really worked through.
There are distinct disparities that exist between a farmer and a consumer. There are concentrated pockets of coffee poverty, a direct product of the self-righteous understanding of our personal cup. There is the obvious degradation of our environment from the interdisciplinary taxation of conventional agriculture. There is the sickness of subsidies and the addiction it reaps.
The successful development of a coffee revolution here in my home town of Athens, is not disconnected from movements exploding within similar American towns across our countryside, is dependent on honesty. I have been thinking in depth over the past six months about the definition of honesty, and I have a new deity in my theoretical kingdom. Her name is sincerity, the New Sincerity. Honesty is our perspective on our own personal simple truths, but we are beholden to understand a reality far greater than that. The New Sincerity, she asks for collaborative efforts. She demands games of trust where we fall on each others' hands, risking the slip through arms in a dusty crash. The New Sincerity acknowledges context, and community. The courage to resist the lure of the status quo of self-reflexive honesty takes sincerity. We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together. And to solve them together we must regain acute awareness of not only our own needs and desires, but those of the greater system at work.
My belief in this new god comes from my unyielding faith in the collective power of the people of all backgrounds.
In these times - times of nutritional, agricultural, cultural, and environmental decline - we need a redefined army. We need farmers who are heroes, roasters who are samurais, importers who are wandering monks, producers who are sturdy, and the whole lot of them willing to sail into murky shark-winnowed waters of mediocre coffee production with all eyes bent on the gale in the mast rather than the unknown below. We need the new agriculturalists who reject the known safety of the 4H and Farm Bureau and stand under the twinkly lights of the future with neon postcards of the Downtown Farmers Market and coffee tattoos as their new scythes and trowels. We need educators that can move with delicacy through the sticky inter-tangling of the nation's first generation of direct trade heads, bringing progressive vigor to the coffee classroom and the rural backwater coffee houses. We need garden parties and church sermons and potlucks to color their choruses with a new credo of co-production rather than co-consumption. We need brazen, sincere warriors who give the consumer no choice but to follow their lead. The New Sincerity is hope - an oath taken under the cloud of gunfire and insurmountable odds between the men and women that are inspired to push a sense of humanity back into our kitchens. The battle is fought with weapons of the cuppings, the chemex, the espresso machine, and the revival of coffee slowness in the American dawn. In that bunker the soldiers tie a hand written note to their arrows and fire backwards in time while telling their children tales of the triumphs of such new-fangled arcane tools.... and the notes, of course, are compostable.
It has been said that the greatest selling album of all time is the blank CD. Numbers over Thriller, numbers over Rolling Stones, numbers over Purple Rain. What if anything can a food and culture learn from this? What is our metaphorical blank CD? What is the emergent quality that we have overlooked?
My submission: Sincerity. It is an unwritten hope. A blank CD awaiting a perfect play-list by imperfect and willing warriors.
Cultural movements have always come about with element of hostility, fragility, and often times seeing a leader go out into a place far from the shore of our expected humanity. The anger is real and it is powerful, but to dismiss it, is to miss a profound opportunity to engage the roots of that, which has created the food and cultural poverty structure we all currently participate in.
The cooperatives, the farmers markets, the community dinners, and coffee filled CSA’s are beholden to a greater decree of social allegiance now more than ever. It is the small-scale producers who must learn to collaborate around a single principle, just as the mighty McDonalds, Starbucks, and team have already done so. Over the past year I have been in contact with small-scale coffee producers on all levels of the supply chain, banging a drum in their ear as a battle cry for the fourth wave of coffee to begin through a concentrated collaborative effort centered around slowness. The go has been at times disheartening and overwhelming, but I push on for I believe it can begin here in Athens and spread like wild-fire across the globe.
The memories of humiliation, doubt, and fear finds voice in saying what is needed only for me, and not that which is good for the collective system. Let them laugh! Let them call the Police! We are programmed somewhere to cash in, before returning out into the unforgivable storming sea once more…but I say RESIST. Throw on your true self on and riot.
There is a wolf under the feathers of the peacock. That wolf has 1000 Faces.
END. BM
