Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value

An anthropologist uncovers how "great coffee" depends not just on taste, but also on a complex system of values worked out among farmers, roasters, and consumers.
What justifies the steep prices commanded by small-batch, high-end Third Wave coffees? Making Better Coffee explores this question, looking at highland coffee farmers in Guatemala and their relationship to the trends that dictate what makes "great coffee." Traders stress material conditions of terroir and botany, but just as important are the social, moral, and political values that farmers, roasters, and consumers attach to the beans.
In the late nineteenth century, Maya farmers were forced to work on the large plantations that colonized their ancestral lands. The international coffee market shifted in the 1990s, creating demand for high-altitude varietals—plants suited to the mountains where the Maya had been displaced. Edward F. Fischer connects the quest for quality among U.S. tastemakers to the lives and desires of Maya producers, showing how profits are made by artfully combining coffee's material and symbolic attributes. The result is a complex story of terroir and taste, quality and craft, justice and necessity, worth and value.
From the Back Cover
"In Making Better Coffee, Edward F. Fischer offers a compelling and nuanced story about the entanglements of commodity markets, livelihoods, and desire. In this work, you will find vibrant ethnographic accounts of the sensory worlds of high-end coffee makers and connoisseurs, the complex coloniality of Guatemalan coffee oligarchs, and the struggles and resilience of Maya farmers. With characteristic care and insight, Fischer explores the (re)making of ideologies of quality and taste, and the powerful impacts these can have on everyday lives and relations."—María Elena García, author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru
"All of Fischer's talents are on display here. He deftly analyzes how moral aspiration takes shape in the exquisite qualities of Third Wave coffee. Traveling the global routes of coffee commodity chains, he reveals how markets and formations of race, class, and colonial power coalesce over generations and across communities in Guatemala. Making Better Coffee ultimately is a fascinating look at the power of story in economic life and the ways it produces marketable value, as well as possibilities of human dignity, for Mayans and others on the edge of the global economy."—Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, coauthor of Fast, Easy, and In Cash: Artisan Hardship and Hope in the Global Economy
"This is the first in-depth scholarly exploration of how Third Wave coffee, with its emphasis on exclusivity, artisan production, and terroir, is influencing and in turn is influenced by coffee producers. Fischer provides an ethnographically rich exploration of the historical evolution of the Guatemalan coffee market, paying careful attention to the economic values and ideologies that have combined to shape contemporary conditions in coffee-growing communities."—Sarah Lyon, author of Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets
"Making Better Coffee presents a compelling new analytical framework for understanding global interdependencies and inequalities, one that will assuredly influence conversations across the social sciences. Through highly accessible storytelling, Fischer reveals how dynamics of power and processes of value creation shape human experience in the most mundane and profound ways—from our tastes in coffee to our very life chances."—Kedron Thomas, author of Regulating Style: Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala