The centrality of coffee?

It's odd that Tony Judt would single out coffee, and Starbucks (International Development) in particular, as a metonym for a discussion of Europe vs. America.

Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap—and refills are free. Being largely without flavor it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact...
...

....But something has gone wrong with this story. It is not just that Starbucks has encountered unexpected foreign resistance to double-decaf-mocha-skim-latte-with-cinnamon (except, revealingly, in the United Kingdom)....

America, crude; Europe, refined. Sounds like a bit of cant, to me, as a general proposition. And then to use Starbucks as an example of the failure of American culture...very strange.

Starbucks, much to the chagrin of its detractors, has had a dramatic and positive effect on American sensibilities and introduced a new phenomenon to American life: the daytime hangout, the public cafe, the third-place, which if there is anything which brings us visibly closer to "European lifestyle," that would be it. I can't speak to Starbucks success overseas but it seems that the company is proceeding vigorously ahead with international expansion and I assume that their sales justify the investment.

Of course I am not speaking to the thrust of his review -- that America and Europe are diverging, not converging . That may very well be true; it's not something about which I pretend to have any expertise. But it sure seems odd to me to use coffee, of all things, as an example. One of the most obvious changes in the USA in the past 20 years is that you can get a good cup of coffee just about anywhere, even at the Super Target in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Anyone who has traveled the USA over the past 40 years will have to acknowledge that if there was one thing which distinguished the entire country west of the Hudson River, it was bad coffee. And no place to just hangout except smoky bars and country clubs. That's not true nowadays, at least not everywhere.

Anyway, Judt's use of coffee as his leading image struck me as worth waking up  (momentarily) from my blogging vacation. And to anyone who might remark "Hey! It's just a cup of coffee -- What about health care?" I'd suggest that the comment be directed to Professor Judt. He is the one who both perceptively -- details like a cup of coffee are indicative -- and incorrectly -- misunderstanding Starbucks' significance -- used that very cup of coffee to initiate his article.

Via Crooked Timber's The centrality of coffee.