I like the Java Jive, and it likes me” so harmonised the Inkspots, precursors of doo-wap, back in 1940. Americans have been slurping down coffee in vast quantities long before that, in fact for much of the 20th Century coffee was America’s drink. A 1939 survey showed that 98% of the country’s households drank coffee. After WW2 consumption rose steadily until the early 60’s, when the average American was downing almost 50 gallons a year. Individual Americans consumed 10 lbs of coffee beans apiece per year or a total of 2.4 billion lbs for the nation as a whole. And what awful muck it was!
Then the coffee went cold. Younger consumers came to regard it like booze, a palliative for parents and squares, they preferred recreational drugs or sugar fixes via Coke and Pepsi, depending on their cultural background. Sales of those acrid blends peddled by Maxwell House and Folger‚s went into a much deserved free-fall. To what demographic sector do they now flog instant coffee do you reckon?
Until very recently unless you went to a foreign restaurant I don’t think you could ever find a decent cup of coffee in America. Most often what you got coast-to-coast was a foul smelling, over-stewed and acidic ulcer-inducing nastiness, brewed by the gallon, an absolute travesty of what decent coffee should be. The Italians and the French (to a lesser degree) who know a thing or two about decent coffee could only raise their eyes to heaven in horror at the thought. In Britain of course we were in the same boat as the Americans, but at least we could get decent tea. In America you still can’t even do that.
Then out of Seattle, of all places, along came Starbucks. By the 1990’s Starbucks had proved that you could sell half-decent coffee to the masses, and in the process turned itself into a seemingly recession-proof mega business. The real measure of Starbucks' success, however, is that it has helped turn America into a nation of java junkies again. During the nineties, the number of coffee drinkers rose by almost forty million. More than ten thousand new coffeehouses have opened since 1996.
Of course Starbucks and all the other coffee houses across the nation have taken coffee into areas at which the purists and true “barista” can only throw up their hands in horror. Concoctions such as the Frap-pucino, the Caramel Macchiato and what have you. But then again, purists and would-be elitists always do tend to get a bit sniffy at the democratisation of what they see as their pet areas, particularly if they are European and the democratisers American. You should just hear them get off on the subject of American oenologists......
Such people are fools and worthy of contempt. The point they miss is that now you can get a passable cup of coffee (at least a paper one) almost anywhere you go in America, whereas before you could not. That is a significant change for the better. You can even get decent French and other wines in quite ordinary cafes, whereas even a decade or so ago all you got was domestic plonk, if you could get wine at all. As America goes, so goes the world. In this respect, if nothing else, we should all be truly grateful. If once in a while we are subjected to pretentious American bores fulminating on these matters we should be indulgent, it is a small price to pay for the gift we have been given.
So all we need now is for the Americans to do the same democratisation job on tea. Where is the entrepreneur who is going to do a Starbucks on tea? I like a decent cup of coffee, but I LOVE tea. I can’t really start the day unless I have my tea. Tea is wonderful and seemingly infinite in its variety. Tea is to be treated with respect. Tea bags are an anathema and serving tea with milk and sugar is only something you might do stuck up yer Himalayan peak, as it were.
In America tea is not treated with respect. Ghastly pitchers of packaged iced tea with lemon are served as an accompaniment to a meal in all sorts of places that should know better. If after a meal you ask for tea in any restaurant of pretension they invariably arrive with an absurdly grand box stuffed with garishly packed tea bags. They then bring you a pot of hot water and a cup in which you are expected to dangle the tea bag like a hopeful Eskimo at an icehole. In lesser joints you get a tin pot of warm water and a mug with a Lipton teabag in it, plus an odd look if you speak with an English accent and happen to be in what, in an election year, are now referred to as the “red states”. In new agey or “health” food restaurants, it’s the same thing, only with herbal tea bags, and that ain’t tea at all. I actually once spotted some loose leaf tea in the second hand section of the Bhodi Tree bookshop on Melrose, called Lama’s Armpit I think it was. Can’t say I liked the look of it much, bit dusty like the books there. In America you can’t even be sure you won’t get tea bagged if you make a point of going to an Asian restaurant, unless that is you’ve been there before.
With all the addictive power of coffee, with few of the negative side effects and numerous health benefits the time has now come for the democratisation of tea via the good offices of American business. Just as Starbucks has spawned thousands of coffee houses and introduced Americans to what coffee should actually taste like, so the time has come for someone to make a fortune by finding a way to serve tea properly infused, in a cultural ambience that appeals to most Americans. However strange that may look and whatever odd concoctions are the result, if it catches on every true tea drinker world over should not sneer at the novelty or denigrate the corporation for exploiting tea pickers, but give thanks that getting a decent cuppa becomes universal and not something to be practiced by consenting adults in the privacy of the home.
George W. Bush’s America expresses a side of America I find extraordinarily unattractive and regressive. The collective infantility of the American reaction to terrorism may be deeply worrying for the rest of the world and is to be resisted, but I still like the way America has of taking any idea, product, an art or craft, any philosophy or spiritual creed and blowing it wide open and available to everybody. That is in the essence of freedom. So long as America retains that dynamic, whatever happens this November, Bush and the nasty men behind him can only enjoy a brief ascendancy.
If, as it has now been said, it is true that all esoteric knowledge is out there and available to us all, if we have the wit and the self discipline to find it, then we should be grateful and not get hung up on false gurus, inflated magi and New Age sillinesses any more than we should insist the old ways are the only true way.
As it is with Zen, so it is with Lavazza and Oolong. Things are getting better, though it does not always seem that way.
