Who? Us.

During a recent visit to Portland (20-23 April’23) for the 2023 SCA Expo, a barista, fifty or so years younger than me, asked what was the last thing that surprised me in the world of Specialty Coffee — that’s how I remember the question, anyway. I thought of one thing, and then remembered another today.

The first thing I thought of is that there seems to be a scarcity of new stuff to talk about — a paucity of surprises — such that folks fight over the few innovations and inspirations that we do have…but more about that later.

The second, bigger surprise, was that it continues to amaze me (and in myself, as well) that our specialty coffee community is not special in the way we handle bad behavior in our midst — holding ourselves out, as we do, as being a more ethically responsible industry (I believe it’s fair to say).  See my earlier post, “Who? You.”

NOW, before going further, I want to acknowledge that I have been raising this subject from a variety of closely packed angles for some time now (see Who? You. and Who’s in Charge? and Organically Flawed) but if a Curmudgeon can’t rant on his own blog, where can he?

So, as I was ranting…

… in the case of organic certification, just for example (again), it is not just within our industry but also amidst the regulatory structure that we inhabit (and we say nothing about that, either).

Even before 2016 and outside the bounds of specialty coffee, it occurred to me that despite the conception on the part of most Americans that we are free of the corruption that we attribute to most of the other nations — the truth is that we have a lot of problems here at home. One of the biggest of those problems being that our regulatory structure  (not to mention the laws that govern it) is for sale to the highest bidder. In some cases, a particular agency will just ask the relevant industry members it supposedly regulates to write its own rules, which the agency will then adopt and (ha-ha) enforce (no, not a joke).

Recently, in the case of a certain necessary and often life-saving medication, the rules that govern it have now been co-opted not just by industry insiders, which is bad enough, but by religious fanatics as well, just to add a little extra complexity and anxiety (& misogyny) to the mix.

Getting back to Organic Certification, it came to my attention several years ago that despite a certain company being in clear violation of the standards of the organic protocol, they were allowed to keep their certification, presumably by their staying in “close touch” with the USDA.  This situation, it continues to surprise me (but it shouldn’t), persists to this day.  But that isn’t my complaint here — what bugs me is that we don’t care — we don’t care to involve ourselves, or rock the boat, or get sued (I don’t want to get sued so I am not naming names here). Yet we, including me, go about our day, acting like we do and that specialty coffee is somehow different, but it isn’t and neither are we, so far, at least.

In the beginning it was understandable (or so many of us thought): you didn’t want to disrupt a nascent certification system, struggling to survive. You didn’t want to call out a specific operation for a little survival-motivated cheating, you wanted to give them room to run and build up speed and presumably get their act together later. That is what happened in many cases but in some others it established a tradition of rule-breaking that is not fading away like some now-useless, vestigial appendage — now instead it’s a well muscled arm, maybe even an over-developed lobe in the brain of the coffee certification organism that lives, vibrantly, in our midst.

I was for the merger of the SCAA and SCE primarily because I envisioned the two organizations uselessly competing with each other and, worse, establishing different and competing standards. One of the things that it has left us without (not that we had it before, we did not, but we presently lack an organization that might be able to fight some of the battles that none of us want to do individually. There is one organization that claims to do this but they are not ones to rock the boat or make things more difficult for its members to make money (which would be the necessary result, in many cases). Such an organization (the new one I am hinting at here) would not be a competitor with the existing SCA or its programs, but could be a partner in many cases and fill other needs that only a nationally-based (as opposed to globally based) organization could — just a thought, for now.