I'm going to begin with cappuccino. I am not drinking cappuccino right now, and usual I don't. I find it pricey, and like most fancy coffee drinks, rather pretentious. And I am not Italian, so for me there is no real cultural reference to uninspiring beverages made of bitter espresso and milk foam. I have had cappuccino before, and at times have even enjoyed it frequently, but always with attendant excuses. I suppose that it could be even said that cappuccino was my beverage of choice in 1990 and 91, but not so fast. In 1990 I was drinking it whenever I visited Taf's Cafe on Granville Street (still open, haven't been there in years). Quite simply, it was a very convenient place to sit at times, given my activity in local street ministry and my healthy disdain for food courts and places like McDonalds and Burger King. They also had a minimum charge policy, so the cappuccino was usually my ticket for an extra half an hour or so.
In London, in 1991, almost all the coffee was horrible. This was post-Thatcher London, and it was bleak. So, one more time, it was cappuccinos. I didn't know yet about cafe Americanos. It was just 1991. Cappuccinos had taken hold in the late seventies, in Vancouver, and to me it was just pretentious. Just give me coffee. Regular, black and bitter coffee. No fancy names. That was still before Starbucks, of course. I remember one young woman just gushing about how much she loved cappuccinos, a tall, pretty, middle class young thing from a privileged home and she was just like a little girl being fed gelato. That was during the rise of yuppies, such as her rather annoying boyfriend.
Just yesterday, I was in a Blenz with one of my clients. They were featuring a special deal on cappuccinos, all creamy white and beguiling in a colourful paper cup. And I thought, what a disgrace! It was the presentation of course. Regardless of what I think of the beverage, if they are going to honour and respect its Italian origins, then the least they can do is present it properly, which is to say in a ceramic cup, preferably with a saucer underneath. Yes, I also know all about the importance of reducing paper and plastic waste because of the environment, and I never order beverages in disposable containers, and for both reasons.
Neither will I go into detail about the ridiculous variety they have pushed some of these beverages derived from Italian coffee drinks. Lavender latte, anyone? How precious. How very twee. All served to you in disposable plastic or paper beverage containers, and no guarantee that the disposed cup will be recycled at the end of the day.
Now there is nothing at all wrong about Italian coffee drinks, and some of them are rather nice. But it seems that anything novel or beautiful that comes our way from distant lands is going to be somehow bastardized by capitalist consumerism. A drink meant to be enjoyed in a lovely ceramic cup at a table, while sitting down, is just one more item to be dumped in a paper cup and carried off to one's work or school, or in the car or on the bus and so anything beautiful about it has been completely lost and destroyed by our rampant consumerism.
I am not going to go so far as to call this cultural appropriation, which to me is rather a useless term whose sole purpose is to get people angry, hostile and defensive. It does make me wonder about why white middle class Canadians are so pathetically bland and characterless that we are constantly grasping at the beverages, foods, clothing and music and art from other countries and cultures. (Just don't get me started about dreadlocks on white people.) And we are not doing this just to honour their cultures, nor to broaden our experience. We rather are showing ourselves to be empty, formless, without purpose, absolutely bland and flavourless, and that we are not going to feel complete as human beings unless we are always gorging on whatever fare comes our way from seemingly more authentic cultures, and even that is not going to make us feel complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment