With local newspapers in deep decline everywhere, the New York Times has been doing its part to capitalize on these dying markets. The Bay Area is no exception, as evidenced by today’s story on local teahouses: Bay Area Teahouses Offer an Exotic Break from Coffee – NYTimes.com.

So why quote a tea article, you ask? With sentences such as, “Om Shan Tea is the newest of a breed of Bay Area teahouses that are reimagining the world’s ancient and diverse tea drinking customs for modern tea drinkers,” you might think some third wave tea gag cannot be far behind. But we’re actually citing the article for this line:

The Bay Area loves its coffee, but there is a certain sameness to its coffeehouses.

Nearly three years ago we noted the problem of espresso sameness at Bay Area cafés. Namely: a select few roasters are typically dominating espresso purveyors at the high end, the roasting styles tend to be very similar among them, a select few espresso machine models are used to pull these shots, and still very few places offer the option of different coffees for your espresso.

Is tea the new water?

But the article then flirts with the ridiculous through the statement, “it’s too early to call tea drinking a trend that will replace espresso anytime soon.” Ah, the old “is tea the new coffee?” adage — for which there are over 7,000 citations on Google dating back to 1994.

We’re not sure how a beverage that has been consumed for thousands of years — and is the most widely consumed beverage in the world after water — could ever qualify as the new anything. But some wannabe journalists will try to fabricate a social trend out of breathing oxygen if they could.

One of the better espresso-themed events the world over is Sydney’s annual Aroma Coffee Festival at The Rocks, which will take place this year on Sunday, July 22: The Rocks – Sydney – Things to do in Sydney at The Rocks > What’s On at The Rocks > Aroma_Festival. OK, so they’ve since fattened up (diluted?) this event to include tea, spices, and chocolate. But it’s a great place to sample the local coffee for $1 (AUS) at the locus of Sydney coffee history. Plus good music, great scenery… (OK, so it’s winter Down Under.)

In a previous article, I made the curious observation that coffee has become a lightning rod for social and environmental angst in a way that is disproportionate with just about any other export. (As if nobody buys children’s toys or clothing from Wal-Mart.) As a point of comparison, I noted that while we obsess over Fair Trade causes, sustainability, and social ethics in our coffee cups, “consumers seem free to buy the Sri Lankan Child Labor Exploitation Blend with impunity — no questions asked.”

Some readers thought I was making this up. Yet according to a report in today’s NewKerala.com, a popular online Indian news site, coffee plantation workers in India earn an average of 32% more than their tea plantation counterparts: Rubber plantations workers make more money than coffee-tea labourers @ NewKerala.Com News Channel. Something tells me there are a lot of militant Fair Trade coffee advocates at tea salons, sipping their feel-good oolong, blissfully ignorant of the disconnect.

Earth Day couldn’t pass last weekend without a multitude of feel-good press releases from coffee peddlers. We already knew that our coffee could support Ernie & Bert‘s ambiguously gay lifestyle on Public Television. Now we read about how our coffee could save chimps, help solve the energy crisis, and even how it could stamp out poverty and save planet earth itself. That’s a lot for one cup of coffee — especially when a couple years ago all you could hope for was that it didn’t taste like an oil change.

So I should get the warm fuzzies now that my cup of coffee just nudged Mother Theresa of Calcutta out of line for canonization by the Roman Catholic Church, right? Wrong, actually. Not to take away from the many good things going on around coffee, but for some reason coffee has attracted all the kooks-with-causes like flies to a bug lamp. When did buying coffee get to be like wearing ribbons at the Oscars? These days you can’t even smell a morning cup without subscribing to at least four causes and a making a dozen more statements about your personal morality. What gives?

The cynic might say that the best way to sell coffee these days is to package it with rich man’s guilt relief. Certs has Retsyn (a.k.a. “vegetable oil”), and my coffee saves the Western Wood-Pewee. But if it were merely that, why isn’t tea given anything close to the same treatment? Tea is nearly as popular, with as rich a history, and is harvested by the poorest of the poor in the world. And yet to buy a cup of tea today, consumers seem free to buy the Sri Lankan Child Labor Exploitation Blend with impunity — no questions asked.

The fact is that the world problems of hunger, poverty, exploitation, etc., go far beyond coffee. Trying to solve these complex issues as coffee-related problems is commendably better than doing nothing, but let’s not kid ourselves.

My advice: buy the best coffee your wallet and conscience can afford. Then donate cash to the causes of your choice. Every time someone has tried to meter out charity and activism by piggybacking it on a commercial product — whether it be socially conscious mutual funds or long distance telephone service that donates a percentage of profits to charity — consumers have always ended up with weaker products, less control over their charitable contributions, and less effective donations. If the research and choices involved are too much of a headache, pick your causes and labels and outsource it all by proxy. Otherwise, nothing beats D.I.Y.

You know the phrase “knowing just enough to be dangerous”? A good example can be found in the regular stream of rip-and-read medical research press releases that appear in the daily media cesspool. And scuttlebutt on the health benefits and detriments of coffee are in steady supply.

I promise not to go off on my usual tirade about mainstream media’s sorry state of science and medical reporting. But I’d like to tackle the more general issue of how food-as-medicine thinking can create a sorry world of over-anxious people and sterilized, unenjoyable edibles (and drinkables).

First, take a lot of the salesmanship buzz about the growth of tea consumption in the press these days. Inevitably, they play the health card. We learn that tea drinkers have always known it’s better for you than coffee, and now there’s proof (thanks to one study that apparently suffices as the basis for all our health care decisions). We learn that consumption of tea is on the rise because of rising interest in the health benefits attributed to tea.

Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy tea and all its yummy anti-oxidant goodness (just call them “flavor crystals”). But how much should my choice of beverage be dictated by an actuarial assessment comparing my mortality risk of cancer or stress hormones? Even if this uncoordinated media mass of medical non-sequiturs truly came to a coherent conclusion that I had a 0.16% higher risk of cancer by drinking coffee instead of tea, when does that statistic become the prime determinant of what I should consume? Flavor, apparently, is just an inconvenience.

Tea aside, coffee itself has been alternately viewed as a monster or savior, depending on your study du jour. An alarmingly obese America seems very worried about the nine-calorie coffee, despite its regular consumption for hundreds of years. Over the weekend, one cited study claimed coffee harmed sperm — arguably taking a page out of the “smoking may reduce the blood flow and causes impotence” threats you now see posted on cigarettes in the U.K.

When health concerns kill food

I’m not advocating ignorance. Everyone is capable of making personal choices based on available information. But when alarmist health-consciousness sets the standard, we all suffer.

Oddly enough, take the example of pork. While in Portugal, I was lucky enough to eat quite a bit of proco preto — literally a “black pork” that comes from a special line of pigs in the Alentejo region that’s popular around Lisbon (black is the color of the animal, not the dish). Porco preto, like any other pork in Portugal, tastes nothing like pork in America. Why? Because at some point Americans got the idea that pork was the taste of premature death on four hooves. So pork was bred to be leaner, drier, whiter, and without any flavor — and ultimately not worth eating for many.

A more famous example concerns unpasteurized cheeses (i.e., cheeses that are not pre-heated to kill off some bacteria). America can claim production of a number of good cheeses, but many of what are considered the best cheeses in the world are unavailable here due to U.S. pasteurization laws. Roquefort, Camembert, Brie … safely consumed for centuries, the real deal may carry a rare risk of salmonella or E. coli. But there’s a good reason the French call pasteurized cheese “dead cheese“.

Moderation and personal choice should always play a role in our food supplies. But when we’ve let the forces of health paranoia rule our choices, most everyone loses out. We’ve made ourselves sick and made our food far less appealing in the name of health fads and the conventional wisdom of the moment. All of which is another major reason why, when someone presents me with another study du jour that says coffee may cause additional limb growth, I just want to smack them upside the head with the third arm growing out of my back.

UPDATE: November 24, 2006:
The penny wise and pound foolish obsession on whether to label coffee as good or evil continues in the media: A cup of confusion: Is coffee healthy or not? – Nutrition Notes – MSNBC.com.

The Staten Island Advance (Staten Island has news?!) published an article today that heralds the arrival of tea as America’s new hot beverage of choice over coffee: Tea time. For all the Oolong Frappucino and Chai Latte lovers out there, hey — more power to you. These are good times with more options. But before I’m ready to believe that the availability of good coffee is just a fad waiting to be replaced with the next beverage fad, it’s worth taking a look at the recent history of high-end restaurant service.

Exquisite teas are nothing new, although, like espresso, their growing availability and accessibility is something new. But for at least a decade now, many high-end restaurants have served up dessert menus laden with variants of rare and exotic teas — the more exotic the better. (The challenge for some was to find a pot of tea that cost more than your valet parking.) Yet while restaurant indulgers have been trying to navigate a dozen choices of tea on their dessert menus, these restaurants still served only two choices of coffee: you either had it, or you didn’t.

Sure, you could have it as an espresso, a cappuccino, a latte, or a straight-up cup of joe. But the pinnacle of cuisine still considered coffee a singular and universal noun — as if served out of an industrial grade, generic-branded tin labelled “coffee”. Reading the restaurant menu, you got eight adjectives and four extra nouns with your salad course — but nothing for the last taste you went home with to remember the meal. And if you did dare order the espresso, it would be served by someone who knew next to nothing about coffee — and as an overextracted, ashy, bitter wash filled high in a fancy china cup.

High-End Dining Still Stuck In Coffee’s Dark Ages

The rude truth is that still is the case today. It was seven years ago that I first encountered a restaurant that actually offered several varietals of coffee in personal French presses (Sage & Onion in Santa Barbara). Yet even today, such a thing is still virtually unheard of in San Francisco. New, Mediterranean-themed restaurants open with elaborate wine and tea lists and yet still have a pathetic coffee service (Vignette, as an example). And with the sad closure of Café Organica this year, you currently have to drive to Palo Alto or Santa Clara to get a choice of beans for your espresso.

Given the perishable inventory and training requirements for coffee, tea is a much lower maintenance option when handling multiple varieties. But before we all go following the trend towards Monkey Picked Tieguanyin Oolong tea like lemmings off a cliff, will somebody please at least humor me with a choice of either Ethiopian or Costa Rican when I order a cup of coffee? I’m not even asking for Jamaican Blue Mountain. Is that really too much to ask? (And please — none of those crappy pod systems either. Even though that would still be an improvement.)

No, coffee has a long, long way to go before these improvements run out of gas. In the meantime, as Abraham Lincoln once wisely said:

“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”

Those crazy French love their coffee, even if it isn’t very good coffee. A market research press release on Business Wire today announced a study of French coffee consumer habits: The Expansion of Coffee Bars is Expected to Change the way French People Traditionally Drink their Coffee.

The short of it is that more French are turning to tea sales (and not the salon de thé per se), which is being marketed with health-oriented messages. And despite the public expansion of coffee bars, coffee sales are flat. However, coffee pods are the coffee retailer’s holdout for potential new business. (Though in this case, pods and their auto-robotic brewing systems might actually improve French coffee.)

Other trends noted in the study include a greater push for to-go coffee (just try to make a Frenchman go anywhere) and new coffee types that are less strong but sweeter.