Coffee Culture

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 973 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Urban baristas in a US city and Chinese managed coffee bars in Italy.

Laurie Taylor talks to Geoffrey Moss, Professor of Instruction in the Department of Sociology, Temple University, about the subcultural lives of hipsters who are employed in Philadelphia. Such young people have taken low-wage service sector jobs, despite their middle-class origins and educational background, because they enjoy the city's hipster subculture. Working within cool, noncorporate coffee shops with like minded colleagues blurs lines between work and leisure. For those that are artistic, barista life has provided a flexible work schedule which allows time for creative pursuits. But this new research suggests that these subcultural lives are now greatly diminished by class, race and gentrification.

Also, Grazia Ting Deng, Lecturer at Brandeis University's Department of Anthropology, explores the paradox of “Chinese espresso". The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. So why is espresso in Italy increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars? Deng investigates the rapid spread of Chinese-owned coffee bars since the Great Recession of 2008 and draws on her extensive ethnographic research in Bologna. She finds that longtime residents have come, sometimes resentfully, to regard Chinese expresso as a new normal and immigrants have assumed traditional roles, even as they are regarded as racial others.

Producer: Jayne Egerton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before this BBC podcast kicks off, I'd like to tell you about some others you might enjoy.
0:05.0	My name's Will Wilkin and I Commission Music Podcast for the BBC.
0:08.0	It's a really cool job, but every day we get to tell the incredible stories behind songs, moments and movements,
0:14.7	stories of struggle and success, rises and falls, the funny, the ridiculous.
0:19.1	And the BBC's position at the heart of British music means we can tell those stories like no one else.
0:24.6	We were, are and always will be right there at the center of the narrative.
0:28.6	So whether you want an insightful take on music right now or a nostalgic deep dive into some of the most famous
0:34.3	and infamous moments in music check out the music podcasts on BBC Sounds.
0:38.6	BBC Sounds music radio podcasts.
0:44.0	This is a Thinking Loud Podcasts from the BBC and for more details and much, much more about
0:49.7	thinking aloud, go to our website at BBC.co. UK.
0:54.3	It won't be a second, I'm just picking up an espresso.
0:57.3	Oh, that's just picking up an espresso.
0:57.5	Oh, that's refreshing. Hot and strong. And nowadays it's an almost well taken for granted
1:10.2	punctuation mark in our everyday lives, but it wasn't always so.
1:14.8	T.S. Elliot may have been depicting the banality of J. Alfred Prufock's life
1:20.0	by describing it as being measured out in coffee spoons,
1:23.5	but there was nothing but now about the desperate search for a good cup of coffee
1:28.0	in the days before almost every city,
1:31.0	almost every city street could boast a Nero, a Costa or a Starbucks. From my
1:36.4	student days in Sitka I can still remember the real excitement of learning that a
1:41.2	cafe in the high street had a real hissing espresso machine.
	...

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