Today’s The Korea Herald published a thought-provoking (if not debatable) piece about one-time Korea Barista Champion, Jeon Yong: Barista bringing coffee back to basics. Internal divisions within the national barista association prevented him from representing South Korea at the 2007 WBC in Tokyo, and he dismisses the notion that a training course can make one a qualified barista.

But one of the more curious topics he brought up concerned coffee standards — and how what the Italians may have started long ago has since been hijacked and adulterated by American franchise coffee shops. From the article:

“Coffee is being globalized by the American standard. Coffee is a culture that the Italians have cultivated over hundreds of years. It’s a pride they have, but the American franchise coffee shops have completely distorted the originality ― let’s say Korean kimchi is being spread to the world with the Japanese word ‘ki-mu-chi’ ― that is not what we can call cultural diversity, but a distortion of a tradition. That is what is happening to coffee these days ― becoming like ‘ki-mu-chi.’”
– Former Korea Barista Champion, Jeon Yong

Earlier this year, Giorgio Milos, Master Barista for illycaffè, ignited a bit of a coffee culture smackdown — taking shots at the American brightness bombs and heavily-packed shots that pass for quality espresso here. You might say Mr. Yong seems to be in a similar camp, suggesting that American coffee shops have perverted a standard that is now being spread throughout the world with America’s economic and cultural weight. (We liked his kimchi analogy.)

As we like to jokingly say with a zombie-like mantra, “Third Wave is Best Wave“.

Yet right after making that point, Mr. Yong completely loses the plot — linking the same forces distorting espresso’s cultural standard to those exploiting coffee growers to the fullest extent possible. (A bizarre accusation for some of the biggest wavers of the Fair Trade flag.) Commenting after he watched the deeply flawed documentary Black Gold, we don’t expect him to fully comprehend the cost-of-living disparity between coffee producing and consuming nations, which the documentary miserably failed to do. But any wannabe champion barista should be aware of the many links in coffee’s supply chain — not just farmers and baristas.

Worse, he claims both that coffee is “completely overpriced” and that we are not paying enough to coffee farmers in the very same article — practically a form of cognitive dissonance. All of which unfortunately devalues his opinions in the end.

Today’s London Times published something of a book review of a new four-volume series, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture (Markman Ellis, editor): Smell the coffee – Times Online. It’s a long-winded article. But compared to the British tolerance for long-winded, academic tomes (it clocks in at a whopping 1,840 pages), the article is a walk in the park — and represents a great savings over the £350 list price (over $720).

Unfortunately, the article’s author spends too much uncritical time on the curious-but-flawed documentary, Black Gold, and its unburdened, one-dimensional representation of Fair Trade as a cure-all. After several paragraphs of this, he suddenly remembers that he’s reviewing a book and not a movie. The question he oddly seems to keep asking — of both the 1600s coffeehouse and the modern Starbucks — is whether coffeehouses are inherent goods or social evils.

More interesting are the roots of the early European coffeehouses of the 17th century as places of literary enlightenment, the exchange of ideas, and the consumption of foul, rancid coffee. But just as often, they were considered places that either sheltered drunkards in need of sobering up — or sent away the sober to the local ale-house, seeking to vanquish the choking smoke. There are tales of symbiotic relationships with the newspapers in the 1700s that soon turned contentious — curiously mirroring the role WiFi Internet access plays in cafés today.

And all the while coffee went from bad to worse: from excessively boiling “badly transported, badly kept, badly roasted and badly brewed” beans to indiscriminately cutting the beans with other roasted beans and peas, chicory, mangelwurzel, and other impurities otherwise used for livestock. In some ways, it makes the coffee quality movement of the past twenty years seem like an unlikely miracle. Think about that the next time you are served a bitter, ashy restaurant espresso filled to the rim.

An article in yesterday’s Dublin Independent perhaps thought it was exalting the Nespresso espresso. However, it did more to underscore how clueless high-end restaurants are when it comes to espresso quality: The cult of Nespresso – Food & Drink, Lifestyle – Independent.ie. Pre-ground coffee that has aged for weeks in plastic pods since the second crack of roasting, idiot-proof brewing systems run by barista idiots, packaged coffee “flavors” such as “ristretto” or “cosi” (as in “sto così così”, or “I’m feeling so-so, but it’s better than when Mussolini was dictator”) — that’s the hallmark of quality in a £7 ($14) cup at heralded UK restaurants such as Fat Duck and Sketch.

Forget the Fair Trade controversies in the article for a moment. Despite the clean and convenient system, the Nespresso espresso tastes very bland and comes with a thin, monochromatic crema and a body just this side of tea. But as long as the designators of good restaurant food taste believe their superpowers naturally extend to coffee service as well as amuses bouche, restaurant patrons are doomed to bland, underwhelming coffee at exorbitant prices. It’s surprising they haven’t hired sommeliers who choose the finest boxed wine selections to go with their $400 prix fixe meals.

Oddly enough, this was one of the things I appreciated about Coi restaurant in SF. I took my wife there for her birthday last week, and they didn’t even bother with espresso service. Instead, they served Blue Bottle Coffee in individual French presses — that’s it. They scored points for acknowledging what they didn’t know and couldn’t do well, instead of merely pretending that they did (and failing miserably) like so many other high-end restaurants.

Although Fair Trade coffee has been around since the 1980s, it wasn’t until the past couple of years that it received heavy airplay. And unless you’ve been reading a rare opinion, such as this one (or the rare reader of The Economist), you’d think that to question the value and effectiveness of Fair Trade certification amounts to heretical blasphemy. Despite the volume of contradictory evidence against the panacea-for-poverty status currently enjoyed by Fair Trade, there is very little open debate on the issue. The coffee industry itself has debated Fair Trade’s claims and ethical merits for over a decade now, but the mainstream public only gets a sort of “party line”.

For example, in this month’s issue of Fast Company, we learn that “Fair trade ensures workers make a living wage”: Drink Better Coffee, Save The World – Mother Earth Coffee Co. – Jim’s Organic Coffee – Equal Exchange. Yet Fair Trade does no such thing. It merely guarantees a minimum price paid to co-operatives. Whether the co-operatives pass enough of the profits on to growers, and whether that minimum price can support living wages to begin with, are well beyond the scope of Fair Trade certification. Yet magazine publishers and socially conscious bloggers keep spreading these mis-truths without so much as batting an eyelash (or, at least, fact checking).

A smaller, but yet just as illustrative, example of this selective hearing comes from comments made on this very Web site. Following a movie review I wrote for the flawed coffee documentary, Black Gold, one reader could not be bothered to read the criticisms I raised about the movie and Fair Trade’s shortcomings — choosing instead to add a promotional movie/Fair Trade comment as if I had posted a chocolate cake recipe. Stick fingers in ears; yell, “La la la! I can’t year you!”

Which raises the question: why are so many consumers, greenies, and (worst of all) greenie preachers putting their blinders on and bestowing Fair Trade with infallibility? Is the issue that these major flaws — flaws that have inspired some of America’s top roasters to abandon working with Fair Trade altogether — represent inconvenient truths that people just don’t want to hear? Whatever it is, it cannot be explained away with simple naïveté or even just wishful thinking.

The mechanics of social activism

One today’s great ironies is that we scrutinize the caffeine in our coffee ad nauseum — coffee being something we have safely consumed as a species for centuries — and yet the Fair Trade label stamped on the bag it comes in receives virtually no scrutiny.

Is it because social activists are afraid of sending mixed messages that could frustrate the laymen they are trying to convert to the cause? Social activism is like a shark in some respects: it must remain in motion or it will die. Many activists fear that if an individual cannot follow explicit, personal instructions to do their part — even if those actions may ultimately do more harm than good — it will trigger the death of awareness.

It has been fourteen years since the death of César Chávez, and many Californians still boycott grapes. Yet most have forgotten why they’re boycotting, don’t know which grapes to boycott, and/or they have no idea when they are supposed to stop boycotting. We end up with activism for the sake of activism, regardless of whether it helps a cause or not. But is buoying awareness that much more important than actually doing any good? Is blind repetition worth the price of open discussion and debate about how each of us can truly make the greatest impact?

As another point of comparison, AIDS patients and activists of the mid-1980s were so desperate for hope that AZT, which was found to be a terribly flawed drug in the fight against AIDS, was considered better than having no hope in the pipeline at all. But unlike AIDS, few of us directly experience the malnutrition and poverty of the global coffee crisis, and we certainly don’t experience any real death. Which is why I’ve come to the following explanation…

The role of “religious” faith in social activism

People desperately want to believe they can make a clear and positive difference with a simple, personal purchasing decision — something as simple as the label on their coffee. The desire for such a simple solution to exist is so strong that we are willing to commit to the first thing that comes by and sounds promising. If we then ask few questions, we can sustain the convenient façade. We can live in good conscience (or denial, if you prefer) knowing that we’ve done our part to assuage any guilt we might have about living up to the ethical standards we hold for ourselves.

Buy a Toyota Prius, drive all you want, and global warming is no longer your responsibility.

It may seem harsh, but we are all more like Pontius Pilate than César Chávez in this regard: rather than actively question or doubt, we are happier to live in blissful ignorance by washing our hands of further responsibility. Perhaps it’s only fitting that we now consume our ethics in the same way we consume our apples: in low-commitment, bite-size, pre-sliced, “fun size” wedges that prevent our hands from getting too dirty.

BBC World Service radio recently aired a program (make that programme) that tracked a kilogram of coffee from its origins at an Ethiopian coffee farm to retail coffee houses in the Western world: BBC NEWS | Business | Tracking the true cost of coffee. The article mentions the gross imbalance in the distribution of profits as the coffee passes through the hands of middlemen, but it also touches on the gross imbalance of infrastructure and labor costs in the respective countries that the coffee passes through.

Not that Ethopian coffee growers don’t deserve more of a living wage for their efforts, but a fair and balanced perspective is required before the health of the entire coffee supply chain can be holistically addressed. As an analogy, we’ve heard about how much prescription drugs must cost to support continual drug development — i.e., that the price of successful drugs on the market must somehow also subsidize the research and development (R&D) costs for the many failed drugs. However, what pharma companies won’t tell you is that they spend more money for marketing than on all of their R&D. (In short, we all pay more for prescription drugs not so much to fund new drug research, but rather for the opportunity to see more Cialis ads.)

The article points to roasters as having the highest profit margins in the chain — which is probably true. Unfortuantely, they place few numbers and statistics behind this claim.

No, I’m not slated as the latest guest movie reviewer for TV’s Ebert & Roeper. (Though I would love to be backstage to witness Robert Roeper tell his guests, “My show. Got that? It’s my show now!”) But last night, KQED aired a coffee-crisis-themed documentary for PBS’s “Indepedent Lens,” titled Black Gold: Independent Lens . BLACK GOLD | PBS.

We first mentioned this documentary back in January 2006. Last November, the Mission district’s Roxie Theater gave it a weekend showing — and at first I rued missing it. But after watching the movie last night, I’m glad I didn’t spend the money. PBS will also be airing this documentary on various affiliates in the coming weeks, so check your local listings.

Although the movie is of interest because of its subject matter, it largely fails as a documentary. Other reviewers have similar thoughts, calling it “nearsighted” and “not particularly well-grounded”. In short, it seems best targeted to a rather green audience (in terms of both naïveté and environmentalism) who is either new to the global coffee crisis or is seeking further validation for their newfound Fair Trade ethics. The film offered no original nor particularly insightful perspectives.

What Black Gold does provide seems more of an autistic auteur’s interpretation of the modern, social-issue-driven documentary: a lot of footage of the destitute, a few random statistics thrown on screen showing how little growers receive, and spliced in footage of big business coffee in the Western world. But rather than connecting all the pieces together for us in a cohesive cause-and-effect argument, it leaves us with disconnected factoids and a cloying sense of emotional appeal.

“And therefore, how could you not buy Fair Trade coffee!?”

Sure, it’s not the Chewbacca defense, but, “Huh?” There are no financial breakdowns of what percentage of the price of coffee goes where in the whole supply chain. There’s no critical examination of how co-operatives work, or not, for small farmers (Fair Trade ensures a minimum price is paid to co-operatives, not growers — everything beyond that isn’t addressed). But perhaps the movie’s worst offense was the glaring omission of the role of the Big Four and Vietnamese robusta coffee behind the global coffee crisis.

Starbucks gets a bit of unfair treatment too. Their stock price might soar on the “hot air” thermal currents created by a faux image of Fair Trade goodness (only 3.7% of their coffee is certified as Fair Trade), but lumping them in with the Big Four was a bit extreme. Unlike the Big Four, at least Starbucks popularized the notion that customers’ coffee tastes could evolve beyond stale cans of Yuban.

The movie’s producers have a clear Fair Trade agenda, but they do little to clearly justify it. The global coffee crisis, and the inequities of globalization, involve complex issues. Far too complex for overly simplistic platitudes such as “buy Fair Trade coffee” as the natural and only solution to the mess. For example, just reference today’s Vancouver Sun — where a Fair Trade researcher concluded, “Consumers should never believe that problems of poverty are so simple they can be alleviated just by buying a certain label.”: Make sure your fair trade coffee really is, researcher says.

So at best, the movie offers the emotional appeal of a Sally Struthers telling us what “just a few cents per cup” could do. But wouldn’t higher incomes help the lives of just about anyone in the world living below the poverty line?

But at worst, the filmmakers’ techniques of storytelling with disconnected facts, emotionally-charged imagery, no legitimate attempt to connect the dots, and a drawn conclusion without clearly supporting arguments is on par with what the American public received as justification for the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003.

As for the movie’s redeemable merits…

My favorite part of the film, however, was seeing Caffè Artigiano‘s Sammy Piccolo (who is called ‘Salvatore’ Piccolo in the footage) competing at the 2005 World Barista Championship in Seattle. Sammy placed third that year. If only The Roxie offered you one of Sammy’s espresso shots, it would have made it worth the price of admission.

Canada’s The Globe and Mail reports that a showing of the documentary film, Black Gold, at the Sundance Film Festival this week motivated a viewer to charity: After seeing coffee doc, Utah doc pays for school.

The documentary depicts the disparity between rising coffee prices and declining earnings of the world’s coffee growers.