Coffee Is Food!

Something that I think about often is that coffee is food. This idea is so simple and obvious that almost everyone takes it for granted. Working in the coffee industry, you realize pretty quickly that although coffee is everywhere, people don't generally put much thought past the grocery shelf or the coffee bar. Coffee is almost never further than a couple blocks from any of us. When you can buy it at gas stations, in vending machines, hell, you can buy coffee at TJ Maxx right now, it becomes pretty easy to lose sight of what coffee really is.

Coffee is the seed of a fruit, and not, as some would say, a fruit in and of itself. When you buy an excellent coffee from an excellent roaster or shop you can be certain that this coffee was treated as a food product, a fine food product at that. But how much of that coffee is representative of coffee as a whole? As it turns out, the specialty market is only 17% of coffee imported into the US by volume. That means the vast majority of coffee is of mediocre to low quality. I don't mean to presume that people dealing in these coffees are not treating their coffee as if it were food but I do think that it is certainly being marketed in ways that create a disconnect between farmers and consumers.

So much of coffee is provided in a setting of convenience rather than a culinary setting. Even when coffee does manage to find itself in a culinary setting it seems to more often than not be treated as an afterthought. How many times do you go to a great restaurant, the food is great and clearly of high quality, great care is taken in the preparation and then the coffee is horrible? Often a restaurant is serving stale pre-ground coffee that is prepared with little skill or understanding. Serving stale coffee is serving stale food! Preparing coffee properly should be important to a restaurant that takes pride in it's execution!

I'm not going to lay all the blame on restaurants. As consumers we would do well to treat coffee as a food. When you are buying coffee you should invest the same time and effort that you would selecting any fresh food. Also, because coffee is a food you will be rewarded for taking the time to prepare it properly in just the way that cooking a food properly is rewarding. I know convenience is not going to give up it's reign any time soon but if you've gotten to this blog it's certainly something you may like to consider.

If you haven't been to the roastery please let me extend this invitation to you. Feel free to come by and see coffee being roasted, see raw coffee from all over the world, ask questions and perhaps get a real sense that coffee is food.