Diane Lenney. 2020. Coffee. Object Lessons Series. New York: Bloomsbury. ISBN # 9781501344367. Xiv + 167 pp.
David Sutton (Southern Illinois University)
"Coffee is about so much more than coffee." So says Dinah Lenney, thirty pages into her book on the subject. Coffee is part of the series by Bloomsbury called "Object Lessons" in which authors explore the meaning and ubiquity of all kinds of things in our lives, from "Veil" to "Baseball" to "Shipping Container." A number of these books focus on foods/drinks, such as "Burger" "Potato," "Egg" and "Bread," which suggests that when it comes to food, the more mundane, the better. Each book, however, is written by authors in different disciplines, and can go in very different directions. Burger, for example, is written by feminist philosopher Carol Adams and is pointedly political, revealing the euphemisms hidden behind our terms for this edible, as part of Adams' dissection of the Western "technologies of violence" that lie at the heart of the meat industry.[1] Diane Lenney is a faculty member in writing at Bennington college, an essayist and author of five non-fiction books. Her approach in Coffee is very much not about revealing what hides behind our mundane daily rituals, but rather what lies to the side, what coffee evokes, more metonym than metaphor
I have found the subject of coffee very useful in teaching, not only in classes on food (is coffee food?), but also in my class on material culture, "The Social Life of Things," where I ask students to trace the commodity chain of coffee, and in my course on Greek society and culture. In addition, as conversation starters in a class on the anthropology of food at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, I have students read Lawrence Taylor's classic "Coffee: The Bottomless Cup," which portrays the role of coffee in creating "neighborship" in 1970s suburban America, and an early exemplar of anthropology "at home," and the idea that anthropology can and should study anything. Next, we read Julie Reitz's "Espresso: A Shot of Masculinity," a depiction of the gendered history and politics of coffee, written in the mid-aughts. Alongside of this, I show some of the classic Folgers and Maxwell House commercials from the 1960s which depict numbingly repeated narratives expressing the idea that a wife needs to learn to make good coffee for her husband (through using this brand, a suggestion conveyed by an older woman who is not the young wife's mother or mother-in-law). The students from this class are from all over the world, but they almost all have opinions about the gendering of coffee, as well as its rules,[2] symbolism, and the different practices and preparation methods surrounding it. Coffee is a conversation starter, for sure, one that provokes plenty of associations not directly about the substance itself.[3]
The introduction to another one of Lenney's books of essays on the role of different things in making up our lives The Object Parade captures the mood of Coffee when she writes ""Things, all kinds—ordinary, extraordinary—tether us, don't they, to places and people and the past, to feeling and thought, to each other and ourselves, to some admittedly elusive understanding of the passage of time" (2014: xiv). But while The Object Parade stitches together a number of different objects in a series of essays, Coffee follows one substance through a series of short reflection—often no more than 2-3 pages or less—on the brew as part of the author's life, and where it leads her into the world. Lenney introduces a questionnaire early on (13-15), asking people about their coffee memories and habits, but the answers to her questionnaire only appear occasionally in the subsequent pages. Indeed, one could say that her method in writing Coffee is digression, one that she justifies by noting coffee's own digressive nature: "Coffee is the dock in the bay, the point of departure and return—the moment before, anticipated, extended, improvised, framed, causal or formal, serious or serendipitous…(Sorry, I digress all over again. But this, too, is part of the story, how coffee encourages not only focus and industry, but also reverie, reflection, rambling, parentheticals…)" (26). You get the idea.
Some of the more focused sections of the book explore questions of whether there are rules for good coffee, and how, more generally, we should think about the taste of coffee. She notes some rules that all coffee drinkers should know, like not storing ground coffee in the refrigerator (53 ff). But as much as she sometimes seems to feel that she should follow rules and, as a serious coffee person, should take the taste terms for coffee (leathery, blueberry, jammy) very seriously, I find it particularly enjoyable when she debunks rules and the preciousness in which people talk about taste. Early on, she puzzles, "Is there any pride to be had in appreciating a challenging cup of coffee? As with experimental theater for instance? Is there a virtue in working at liking it? Shouldn't it just taste wonderful? And isn't wonderful a matter of taste" (32-33). A visit to a roastery complete with a pretentious young tasting guide who asks them to taste lemon zest and golden raisin in their coffee leads Lenney again to reflect on the hall of similes that tasting seems to provoke: "shouldn't coffee taste like coffee? If coffee tastes like all these other things, what does taste like coffee? Why isn't anyone else confused?" (67). But this reflection ends with the young tasting guide admitting "Between you and me? I'm more of a tea person?" (67). And Lenney questions all the expensive equipment we buy for producing perfect flavors, wondering whether this is necessary or simply fetishistic: "Haven't people been making coffee for almost a thousand years? Wouldn't the Ethiopians laugh at this stuff? They roast the beans in a pan on the stove, grind them with a mortar and pestle, brew them in a special ceramic pot…and, if the coffee's not ready…they pour it right back and keep boiling till it is. How do they know? From the smell, from the color, from the speed of the trickle of steam" (79). This is Lenney at her best, using simple common sense to debunk our culinary perfectionisms and platitudes. Noting that the pleasures of coffee cannot be pinned down and specified, even for a coffee lover like herself, she asks for coffee that retains some mystery, that surprises, that involves "instincts." The best coffee "is the coffee you know how to make" (80).
As Roland Barthes pointed out long ago, food and drink are not just substances, they are occasions. Lenney captures this in various reflections, and in particular in a nice section on why tea can be a meal, but coffee is "with a meal, or after a meal, or instead of a meal" (99; emphasis in original). Coffee is not just an occasion, it is a mood, as Lenney points out in her discussion of Robert Rauschenberg's claim that he's never had a sad cup of coffee, and some charming musings on the immortal Carly Simon line "clouds in my coffee." As part of exploring the mood of digression, Lenney takes some byways that are more digressionary than others. This seems to be the price of admission, not as much as an $8 latte, anyway. While a section titled "Coffee and Catastrophe," on Christine Blasey Ford's testimony at the Kavanaugh confirmations, nicely captures the condescension of Senator Grassley in a few remarks about providing coffee, another section, "Coffee and the Jews," is barely tethered by the fact that at some point Maxwell House was offering a free Haggadah with the purchase of their coffee.
Close to the end, Lenney's editor is quoted as follows: "Good thing…that coffee is an evergreen subject," to which she replies, "Is it ever…ever-green. Ever growing. It's a maze, a matrix, a vortex—if I fall down one more of these coffee holes" (146). Some coffee holes, as I've suggested, are greener, or more tethered, than others (green coffee, by the way, is another worthwhile subject). Sometimes I was caught up in the vortex as well, and can imagine using sections as conversation starters for my students. Over a cup of Greek coffee, perhaps.
ENDNOTES
[1] See review by James Verinis: https://foodanthro.com/2018/11/07/review-burger/
[2] When I teach this class in Italy, someone always points out that you can't drink cappucino after 12 noon, a good lead in to discussing Mary Douglas's idea of meal structures.
[3] A few of the other articles I have found useful for teaching include Jane Cowan "Going Out for Coffee," Charlene Elliot "Sipping Starbucks," William Roseberry "The Rise of Yuppie Coffee and the Reimagination of Class in the United States," Brad Weiss "Coffee Breaks and Coffee Connections," and Margaret Wilson "Indulgence"
REFERENCES CITED
Cowan, Jane. 1990. "Going Out for Coffee: Contesting the Grounds of Gendered Pleasure in Everyday Sociability." In Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece. P. Loizos & E. Papataxiarchis eds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Elliot, Charlene. 2002. "Sipping Starbucks: (Re)considering Communicative Media. In Mediascapes: New Patterns in Canadian Communication. P. Attala & L. Sharp eds. Camden, NJ: Thomson Nelson.
Lenney, Diane. 2014. The Object Parade Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press.
Reitz, Julie. 2007. "Espresso: A Shot of Masculinity." Food, Culture and Society 10(1): 7-21.
Roseberry, William. 1996. The Rise of Yuppie Coffee and the Reimagination of Class in the United States," American Anthropologist 98(4):762-775.
Taylor, Lawrence. 1981. "Coffee: The Bottomless Cup." In The American Dimension W. Arens & S. Montague eds. Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Publishing.
Weiss, Brad. 1996. "Coffee Breaks and Coffee Connections."In Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities. D. Howes ed. London: Routledge.
Wilson, Margaret. 2005. "Indulgence." In Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession. D. Kulick & A. Meneley eds. New York: Penguin.
No comments:
Post a Comment