A lot of books, obviously depending on what mood you’re in and viewed from a certain angle, slantwise or squintlike, hover on the edge of self-parody: the Bible; poetry, particularly if American; pretty much everything on a Booker shortlist; Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; Ottolenghi’s cookbooks. Like most things, the best approach to books is to view them with a mixture of open-minded curiosity and outright hostility – is this thing actually profound, useful, interesting or an irritating waste of time and money, a bit of a joke, offensive, crass or just stupid and worth avoiding at all costs?
The Book of Coffee by the philosopher Julian Baggini, with a foreword and afterword by the co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters, James Hoffmann, presents the classic duck/rabbit book self-parody problem. Indeed it often seeks to anticipate the reader’s confusion and scepticism and make this uncertainty into part of the performance. At times it’s hard to tell whether one is being gently enlightened or elegantly teased.
For those who don’t know, Hoffmann is the high priest of contemporary coffee culture, whose YouTube videos about grind size and extraction have millions of views, and he sets the tone with a kind of childlike, hyperbolic sincerity. The Book of Coffee, he suggests, is ‘philosophically transformational’ – which is a striking claim for a very short, large-print size, whimsically illustrated volume devoted to a beverage. Nonetheless, he presses on with disarming earnestness: ‘This drink has spread to be a truly global thing, intertwining itself into every culture in every country on the planet. We really do like coffee a lot.’ The gist of Hoffman’s highly caffeinated set up is that coffee is both trivial and universal, banal and indispensable, and that somehow ‘this drink could be a pathway to discuss philosophy and the very meaning of life’.
Baggini then kicks in, claiming that Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906) is ‘the wisest book I have read’. All I can say is, wait till he gets round to Schopenhauer. Okakura’s project, Baggini explains, was to elevate tea into ‘Teaism,’ a quasi-spiritual philosophy grounded in Japanese aesthetics, ritual and attention. Baggini’s aim is to ‘take the tea out of Teaism’ and replace it with coffee, thus producing ‘Coffeeism’ – ‘a philosophy for everyday life, a religion of the here and now that requires no gods or anything supernatural’. If you’re wondering whether the whole enterprise is a bit of a spoof, Baggini anticipates your objection: ‘To a westerner, the idea of centring a worldview on a hot beverage can sound comical, pretentious or both.’ So he proceeds with complete composure, daring us to decide whether any of this is to be taken seriously at all.
Coffeeism, we are told, ‘invites us to reject the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane’. It proposes ‘a spirituality which is focused on the immanent rather than the transcendent, the impermanent rather than the eternal, the material rather than the immaterial’. Zen and Taoism make their expected appearances; so, too, does the café, reimagined as a modern agora, ‘a site of logos’, where reading, writing and conversation coalesce into a form of secular contemplation.
This is all, in a sense, entirely reasonable, if also completely fantastical. The modern café, like the old coffee house, does perhaps ideally function as a space of informal intellectual life, a place where ideas are exchanged, though not so much in my local Starbucks. This tends to be full of young people wearing massive headphones or the sad, the lonely and the elderly, desperate to use the filthy, overflowing toilets.
Nonetheless, one can only admire Baggini and Hoffmann’s ambition to reclaim coffee from productivity culture and ‘pivot this drink from being the driving force behind excessive hours and a poor work-life balance into being a drink that lets us contemplate meaning and purpose in a different way’. Instead of a means to an end, coffee, in their reckoning, should be an end in itself, an occasion for mindful attention, how we drink it becoming a signal of how we seek to live.
Here Hoffmann’s expertise usefully grounds Baggini’s philosophy: his discussion of brewing is really rather interesting. Making a fancy cup of coffee is rather technical and requires a set of choices, careful adjustments and care – water temperature, grind size, extraction time, etc. And so, in this sense, I get it – Coffeeism not just as a set of vague ideas but an actual practice, one that demands a certain discipline.
By pushing its premise to the edge of absurdity, The Book of Coffee ends up doing something quite clever: it forces you to decide whether the joke is on it or on you. Because if meaning really does reside, as the authors insist, in the small, repeatable rituals of everyday life, then perhaps coffee is as good a place to start as any. Milk, two sugars. Live, laugh, love.
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