Sumatra

The last batch

The coffee I love comes from a place I never think about.

A bag of coffee beans was the only thing on my mind when I walked into my neighborhood mom and pop shop. I asked the owner for the usual Sumatra dark roast. As he filled the plain brown paper bag with beans, he mentioned it might be hard to get after this last batch runs out.

For a moment the only thing on my mind was going without these beans I'd found after lots of trial and error. It's a smooth, non-acidic, water-processed decaf that I mix with a small amount of caffeinated beans. The result is an espresso my body feels supported by without feeling jittery.

I felt it in my solar plexus before I fully understood what he was saying. A thud. The low-grade anxiety of finally having found something that works and now being told it might not last.

That was my first reaction. Not thoughts about the place the beans came from, or the people who grew them. Just the subtle dissonance of personal inconvenience. Darn. I was relying on this.

But then he went on to describe devastating floods, loss of life, and suffering in the region where the beans are grown. Many people had died. And in that moment I realized that my first thought had been disappointment that I might not be able to have my favorite coffee every morning.

“Do you know where Sumatra is?” the shop owner asks. I think about it for a moment. My mind quickly shuffles through a map of the world, and my sense is that it’s in Asia somewhere. Southeast Asia? The owner, who I’m guessing by the name of the shop and his accent may very well have origins in that part of the world, explains that it’s an island in Indonesia. But he keeps things practical and tells me again that the supply he has now might be the last shipment for the foreseeable future.

I start considering the flooding, the suffering. The death toll. I hadn’t heard anything about this in the news. Coffee is so ever-present and available in the US that the places it comes from can start to feel abstract. A flavor, a name on a bag. Even a brand. Take Arabica for example. I vaguely thought it was a region, but it’s actually a type of bean grown in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world.

Sumatra, to me, had been a kind of shorthand for something I liked that was earthy and smooth. Not a place where actual people live and work, and navigate weather and uncertainty. And loss.

Coffee doesn't grow everywhere. It comes from a relatively narrow band of the world. Places that have the right climate conditions, elevation, soil, and labor. It depends on seasons, stability, and on the land itself. People use their hands to tend it, harvest it, process it, and send it across oceans.

And somehow, all of that becomes something I scoop into a grinder in my kitchen.

I hadn’t really considered that I was in relationship with any of it.

That the thing I rely on each morning is made possible by forces completely outside my awareness. That it connects me, however indirectly, to a place I couldn’t confidently locate on a map just moments before.

I take the bag from the owner, thank him, and walk out of the shop.

Later, I’ll make it the same way I always do.

But something about it has shifted.

Far from here, the conditions that make this experience possible are changing.

And what I had taken for granted feels different now.

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