Making better coffee : how Maya farmers and Third Wave tastemakers create value
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Making better coffee : how Maya farmers and Third Wave tastemakers create value
University of California Press, c2022
- : pbk
Available at 3 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-284) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
An anthropologist uncovers how "great coffee" depends not just on taste, but also on a complex system of values worked out among farmers, roasters, and consumers.
What justifies the steep prices commanded by small-batch, high-end Third Wave coffees? Making Better Coffee explores this question, looking at highland coffee farmers in Guatemala and their relationship to the trends that dictate what makes "great coffee." Traders stress material conditions of terroir and botany, but just as important are the social, moral, and political values that farmers, roasters, and consumers attach to the beans.
In the late nineteenth century, Maya farmers were forced to work on the large plantations that colonized their ancestral lands. The international coffee market shifted in the 1990s, creating demand for high-altitude varietals-plants suited to the mountains where the Maya had been displaced. Edward F. Fischer connects the quest for quality among U.S. tastemakers to the lives and desires of Maya producers, showing how profits are made by artfully combining coffee's material and symbolic attributes. The result is a complex story of terroir and taste, quality and craft, justice and necessity, worth and value.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction
1. Creating Third Wave Values
2. Plant Biology, Capitalist Trade, and the Colonial Histories of Coffea arabica
3. German Oligarchs, First Wave Coffee, and Guatemala's Enduring Structures of Inequality
4. Austrian Economics and the Quality Turn in Guatemala Coffee
5. Maya Farmers and Second Wave Coffee
6. Cooperation, Competition, and Cultural Capital in Third Wave Markets
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"