On pumpkin spice lattes and political purism
Coalition-building belongs in coffee culture. And all those workers and producers consumers claim to care about already know that.
Few coffee drinks enrage as much as the pumpkin spice latte. The overly sweet sugariness, the cloying clove bitterness, the god damn seasonality of it all. Starbucks rolling out its new Pecan Crunch Oatmilk Latte boils blood of RGB tote bag-holders everywhere, clutching her face a little closer. It churns a “real” coffee fan’s stomach to even consider the nasty thing.
But that’s dumb. Moreover, it’s closed-minded and gets in the way of moving coffee, politics, and coffee politics forward.
I, for one, love a pumpkin spice latte. It was only a few years ago that I got into fall after many years deriding the whole shebang. I mostly don’t drink coffee with anything added at all. I love the winey cleanliness of a washed Kenyan coffee, the funky strawberry notes of a Yunnan coffee. But when the mood strikes I strike back. Just this morning I walked through the Irish wind for a harvest latte, a tea-based fall drink and PSL cousin, a gluten-free raspberry bakewell in my other grubby paw.
Yet that’s not considered half as interesting, at least to coffee industry people, as those washed and natural beans I described. That’s because many coffee people don’t practice tolerance, the holier-than-thou take on PSLs a red flag. United States-based would-be activists don’t practice much tolerance, either. These funneled, often unconscious thinking patterns create siloed, weak structures and communities. Purism is blight. Tactical coalition building is generative.
Purism sucks in coffee as much as it sucks anywhere. What are we even talking about when we talk about a PSL? This is no “in defense of the PSL,” not even the history of the uniquely American corporate sugar bomb. But let’s wonder why the pandan latte, a gorgeous creamy concoction popular on loads of menus these days, is considered different than its pumpkin-y cousin? One could argue venture-backed origins, or just the legacy behind a drink, but the pandan latte is well-funded at this point1, too, as is boba, the chai latte.
The real issue is of semiotics, framing, and narrative. Pumpkin spice lattes are for basic idiots, but flat whites are for Serious Coffee People. I love the bright green, nut-topped pandan latte at Jollidaze in Seattle’s International District almost as much as I love the luscious avocado and taro bubble teas at neighbor Oasis Tea Zone. Those are considered “cool,” whereas PSLs, right up there with Rolling Rock and box wine, are considered “bad.”
For instance, these are all coffee shops. Some evoke minimal aesthetic tastes, others are more comfortably second wave-looking, more still horny pre-dawn hangouts. There are drive-thrus, bakeries with fine coffee programs, even Michelin star-holding restaurants crafting coffee better than those shops might. None of these are “good,” and none of these are “bad.” But Marshall McLuhan was right when he described in The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects that the packaging of a thing is much the thing itself. And, as he also wrote in that anti-corporate text, “we must live with the living.”
That is a decent enough creed to underscore why purism sucks in politics, too. The self-assigned “allies” of marginalized folks in the United States have become memes of themselves, hammering signs in their front yard while dialing up the cops the second the wind blows sideways on their street. No one can tell them otherwise when it comes to their beliefs; These are the Alamo Square Kamala Harris voters who watch a longtime Black neighbor’s house burnt to the ground.
The red cap-wearing politicos were always memes of themselves, their kids killing each other at school but scoffing at the idea of solving the problem. No one can tell them otherwise when it comes to their beliefs; These are the Southerners who ignore numerous calls to avoid Hurricane Helene devastation since Marjorie Taylor Greene politicized her 1.2 million Twitter followers by saying the event was a Democratic weather attack.
Political purism is ahistorical. In This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century the Engler brothers detail time-tested tactics to incept, sustain, and catapult political movements that move the needle. Rather than the always-trendy nihilism and inward-gazing that befalls many a cocktail party professor, these two span the globe showing the myriad methods people have used to dethrone oligarchs and autocrats2.
On coffee’s consumption side, Starbucks Workers United (SWU) is a modern example of such nonviolent organizing that dents corporate overlords. This is no virtue signaling; Minimum wage workers throughout the United States brought one of the worst multinational coffee cabals to task in 2021. Forbes reports earnings, net margins, and total sales nationally and internationally have been mostly down across the board the last three fiscal years. The first California stores to unionize were in Santa Cruz; steward Joe Thompson, a nonbinary then-teenager, ran for city council before going further into labor organizing.
I sat on the Vox Media Union for a few years and SWU asked us to support the Starbucks workers. I took party hats, posters, and flyers to a few San Francisco cafes. The vibe in the Castro location was mixed: homeless folks who hang out at the shop each day told me how proud of the staff they were while busybody grab-and-go customers buzzed in and out. The three staff on the floor were excited about their movement’s prospects.
The vibes reminded me of working at McDonald’s in high school, a true sense of camaraderie amongst the nearly 100 workers at the restaurant. When the lunch rush hit, it didn’t matter if folks liked me or became my lifelong political allies. I have to imagine most found my ongoing singing at the fry station irritating (my manager told me so, so I don’t have to imagine that one at all). At that Starbucks, I have to think those three didn’t know each other before working at the shop, before their uprising began. I have to doubt they all align on electoral political choices or even goals for their longterm careers or lifestyles. But when it came to achieving a political goal, there was no need to fold in those concerns.
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but political power building isn’t always the post or video you like or share. There’s a historical materialist perspective to these discussions and divisions that’s important, especially when considering commodities and labor. The raw materials blended into a pumpkin spice latte come from mostly smallholder farmers, many of whom are selling and participating through cooperatives. The drinks themselves made by service workers in specialty shops or anywhere else, are made by the hands of the working poor.
Judging someone’s drink choices can be a lot like asking them to put locally sourced gas in their car; It’s not the most intelligent way to argue, nor effective. Hi-NRG’s Hong Kong-inspired lattes hit hard for me; for some, it’s a cutty bang after work in the park that does the trick. In both cases, there are ways to avoid purism and instead consider where someone is at, approach them in that place, and win them to your side from there.
In 2016 I joined Communidad de Communidad in protesting outside a Donald Trump rally in Northern Washington. Literally two sides formed: Those headed into the dusty rodeo arena where Trump was set to speak, and those of us across the street yelling at them. An 18 year old approached me and a friend, telling us it was his first election. “I plan to vote for Trump,” he told us, “and I want to know why you think I shouldn’t.” I think about what I said to that kid all the time.
So while we look to get ultra-processed foods out of our communities (including shittily made coffee drinks) right alongside corrosive conspiratorial thinking (including debunked bullshit on “both sides”) let’s let our homies live a little and drink what they fucking want. When grandma mentions her longing for a PSL, perhaps you, as concerned with these issues as you think you are, offer up your favorite non-Starbucks cafe, or even spend the morning making your own PSL syrup from scratch with grandma right then and there. It could be the difference in keeping her off Fox News for thirty minutes, in remaining committed to a better world rather than further dividing our precious, precarious communities.
The Southeast Asian leaf’s market share is growing. According to firm Grand View Research “pandan tea's popularity in Asian cultures is increasingly influencing North American consumers, particularly in metropolitan areas with diverse populations and a rising interest in Asian cuisine and wellness practices.”
The story of Otpor, a student-founded movement to oust Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, always stuck with me when it comes to creative, expansive movement building. Street theater, comedy shows, general strikes, and eventually backing political candidates brought one of the "Butchers of the Balkans" to his knees. And Otpor did so through the open-mindedness required of working across generations, income classes, power levels, you name it. Coalition building across communities is how programs can really start to reallocate resources: the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and even the Methodist church understood that in late 1960s Chicago.