The Importance of Words
Thursday, March 7, 2013 at 12:07PM Yesterday Kyle Glanville, co-owner of G&B Coffee in LA, former Intelligentsia rainmaker, and all around well regarded figure within specialty coffee, made the following statement:
: Specificity > Vague Adjectives – Sustainable, artisanal, traceable, specialty, fresh, seasonal mean nothing now. :
This has been a longstanding complaint across the food spectrum – the adoption by marketers of half these terms, the cynical appropriation of expanding these terms to industrial practices, the ever-so-twee application of the heirloom cupcake. The dilution and back-and-forth over the terminology of organic certification. Pumping out “artisan” bread at one loaf every 6 seconds from a machine. And in specialty coffee, the use of direct trade to mean everything from breaking bread with the farmer who you see twice a year, to talking with your importer and ordering your coffees through your importer the way you have for the last 20 years. And in many circles there are, from farmers to small scale value-added food producers to coffee folk, frustrations with terms and a total willingness to throw everything out, or otherwise mock/demean/cast out anyone who uses the terms as hollow hacks or naïve schills.
Three things about these complaints:
1) There is a kernel of truth in them. Whether government regulated definitions or voluntary, non-trademarked adjectives, there are very many misappropriations and misuses of these terms. These dilute and destabilize the efforts of people who do produce agricultural products in a truly sustainable matter (and there is such a definition, see 3), or source their materials in a way respectful to producers or of high qualifications of craftsmanship (see 3).
2) If there is anger over this, at least in specialty coffee, people seem more content to whine and emote about it than actually call people out on it. Playing nice within the industry matters more than attempting to make firm definitions and parameters for some of these terms through trade associations, professional firms, or other outlets. Sustainable ag has done this for a while with regards to organic certification, decrying certifiers with loose standards, farms electing to sign on with certifiers who have standards above and beyond the stringency of the NOSB parameters, and advocating/lobbying for more stringent organic rules and norms in law. We need to constructively critical of businesses and individuals who view this strictly as a marketing thing and understand there are systems and values that need to guide businesses, not aesthetic niceties and soundbites, and this is something specialty coffee writ large is really unwilling to do.
3) The complaints about terms shows the exceptional lack of knowledge about these terms by people in specialty coffee, which is my key frustration. Having kept one foot in food justice and sustainability politics as long as I’ve been involved in specialty coffee (almost a decade now), and consistently amazing to me is the lack of interest in examining or involving oneself with sustainable agriculture or craft industries (with craft beer or cocktails being perhaps the one exception, and sometimes, not even that). There’s no awesome definition of sustainability? I’d lead you to the triple-bottom line definition and promoted by Cradle to Cradle, or the host of Food Policy Council definitions all of which take into consideration elements of ecology, financial, and social demographics and outcomes. Artisanal? The terms and definitions given to vendors by The Good Food Merchants Guild. California Certified Organic Farms, the Soil Association of the United Kingdom, and Oregon Tilth have the most strident, systemic definitions of what constitute organic and certified organic; if that doesn’t seem enough, look to Demeters biodynamic definitions and practices. Fairtrade, for all its failings on quality assurance, at least takes a serious task in democratic norms and workers rights into consideration for its certification. And no one at this point can touch the transparency of Counter Culture has produced in their Direct Trade program (and note – not every bag of theirs has it on them). Not sure what makes your “local” economy? Look at Localism 101, an organization who defines it in terms of inter-generational wealth building within community-based businesses.
These frustrations can be summed up in a recent (also-twitter based) interaction. I interacted with James Hoffman via twitter a few months ago, wherein I was critical of an exercise he held with some associates seeing if they could differentiate in taste between organic and non-organic produce that was procured from a grocery. I asked whether or not this exercise wasn’t faultily constructed – cultivar, degree of organic certification & growing practices, and geographic provenance have an impact on flavor, and with the host of non-taste-derived benefits of organics, is it fair to assess these two as equivalent (especially when, as the outcome proved inconclusive, the walk-away is that there is no major distinction between organic and non-organic, so why support it)? The response was it was just a fun exercise. Half-snarkily, I asked if they could taste the soil degradation or smell the pesticide residue in workers lungs.
As an industry we need to be thoughtful, engaged, and proactive about both words and systems. Words like “sustainable” or “artisan” are only as useful as the systems that prop them up, and only those systems can provide a model alternative for businesses who may only know those words as a marketing ploy or a half-assed definition of the term. Traceability can mean something if companies are willing to put groundwork for it. Expertise can be qualified by other experts. And craftsmanship can be delivered through the end product; hospitality isn’t just about greeting and expediting – it’s culture making. We do not need to scream from the rafters about the values of our work – our cafes, our product, our employees can do that without having to utter a word. And we as an industry need to be willing to commit ourselves and our energies to promoting, upholding, and advocating for these definitions not just for our own companies but companies of our grade and parameter. We need to be the builders, the warriors, the weavers of our craft, and start making those connections between words and systems, starting now.
