Talk delivered at Geographies of Taste: Italy and Africa Between Cultures and Shared Traditions, Treccani’s event on food as a bridge between Italy and Africa, promoted by IDIAF (Institute for Italy–Africa Dialogue) and the Treccani Cultura Foundation.

 

What Would Coffee Taste Like If It Grew in Europe?

Let's try a simple thought experiment. Imagine that coffee had never originated in the Ethiopian highlands, nor grown in the forests of Kenya or the mountains of Central America. Instead, imagine it as a Mediterranean plant, or even a crop native to Northern Europe. A plant growing in Sicily, Provence, Andalusia, or across France, Germany, and Poland.

What would coffee taste like today?

To answer that question, we need to take a step back to a time when coffee was not yet a global commodity, but a local plant. Coffee originated in East Africa, most likely in what is now Ethiopia and South Sudan, where it grew wild. It did not begin as a commercial beverage, but as a ritual, medicinal, and social plant.

The earliest forms of coffee consumption involved neither dark roasting nor standardisation. The beans were fermented, boiled, or coarsely ground, often together with the fruit's outer skin, or even mixed with animal fat to create a kind of energy bar. Coffee was not considered "strong" in the modern sense of the word. Instead, its flavour was complex, vegetal, at times bright and acidic, at others naturally sweet.

When coffee spread from Ethiopia to the Arabian Peninsula between the 15th and 16th centuries, it became a cultural beverage. The first coffee houses emerged as places for conversation, politics, and poetry. Coffee was still an expensive product, treated with respect, and roasting remained a functional technique rather than an ideological one. Its purpose was to preserve the beans and make them stable, not to erase their identity.

Between the 17th and 18th centuries, however, as European powers expanded across the globe, coffee gradually ceased to be a drink rooted in a specific cultural context and became a strategic commodity. Until then, throughout the Arab world, and particularly in Yemen, coffee cultivation had been carefully protected. Beans intended for trade were often roasted or boiled specifically to prevent germination. This was far from accidental: it was a deliberate strategy to stop the plant from being transplanted elsewhere and to preserve the agricultural and commercial monopoly over coffee production.

The turning point came when coffee entered Europe as a colonial product. The balance shifted with the rise of the Dutch East India Company, often regarded as the world's first true multinational corporation, an economic organisation with commercial, logistical, and military power.

Through botanical espionage and colonial expansion, the Dutch obtained fertile coffee plants from the Arab world and transplanted them first to Java, in present-day Indonesia, and later to other Asian colonies such as Sri Lanka. From there, coffee began its journey across the globe, eventually reaching the Caribbean and Central and South America.

In the modern world, the value of coffee became increasingly detached from its origin and agricultural quality. Instead, it came to depend on quantity, production stability, and the ability to be replicated and traded on international markets. Coffee had become a commodity. Cultivation was adapted to the demands of global trade, standardised, and made transferable. In the process, coffee was progressively disconnected from its agricultural and cultural roots, becoming a raw material serving a much larger economic system.

It was in this context that roasting took on a completely different role. Rather than highlighting the character of the coffee, it became a tool for creating uniformity. Dark roasting made it possible to conceal defects, differences between harvests, storage issues, and variations in agricultural quality. Pushing coffee towards highly developed roast profiles made it predictable: a South American, Asian, or African coffee could end up tasting remarkably similar, especially when brewed using methods designed to emphasise bitterness and body.

If coffee had grown in Europe, this process would have been culturally unthinkable.

Just consider how we treat the crops that are native to our own regions. Wine is not standardised; it is celebrated through appellations, vintages, and terroirs. Olive oil is not made uniform but evaluated for its strengths and flaws, its acidity, and its aromatic complexity. Even bread, despite being an everyday food, carries strong local identities through specific grains, traditional techniques, and regional craftsmanship.

Coffee, however, has long been distant from the people who consume it. Grown in equatorial countries that have historically been exploited, it has been simplified and blended for centuries. The Western taste for coffee is not the result of a natural preference, but of economic and geopolitical necessity. Dark roasting became the norm because it suited a system that placed little value on agriculture while demanding enormous volumes at the lowest possible cost.

At this point, the original question takes on a new meaning. What would coffee taste like if it grew in Europe?

It would probably taste much closer to what many people today consider "unusual"—the flavours we now associate with specialty coffee. A return to the true character of this tropical seed: bright, floral, fruity, aromatic, and vibrant. Our vocabulary would likely resemble that of wine. We wouldn't talk about strength, but freshness; not intensity, but balance; not about coffee's ability to wake us up, but about its ability to be tasted.

The key point is that taste is not a biological fact, it is a cultural construction. The brain learns what to consider "good" through repetition, storytelling, and social norms. For generations we have been told that "good" coffee should be full-bodied, bitter, black, concentrated, and heavily sweetened, not because those qualities are inherently superior, but because they fit a system that could not afford complexity and relied on the colonial exploitation of equatorial producing countries.

To question the flavour of coffee today is therefore to question a history that spans centuries. It means recognising that behind every cup lie agricultural, economic, and political choices. It means accepting that changing our taste is not an aesthetic whim but a cultural act—one that restores value to the people who grow coffee, work the land, and care for regions that have long been treated merely as suppliers of raw materials.

For centuries, coffee was treated as a colonial commodity: something to be purchased cheaply, transported across great distances, standardised, and made as stable as possible over time. In this context, dark roasting did not emerge as a matter of taste but as an industrial solution to the problem of uniformity. Pushing roast development beyond a certain point reduces variability, softens the differences between harvests, botanical varieties, climatic conditions, and farming practices.

A highly developed roast pushes the bean into a thermal range where chemical reactions begin to converge. Simple sugars are fully transformed, organic acids are broken down, and the most volatile aromatic compounds are lost. The result is a more compact sensory profile dominated by roasted and bitter notes, one that makes coffee immediately recognisable and predictable, regardless of where it was grown.

This sensory simplification served a very specific purpose. It allowed Western markets to avoid asking difficult questions about agricultural quality, farming conditions, producing regions, and the people behind the crop. Roasting became a levelling tool: a technology capable of turning very different raw materials into a product that met the demands of mass distribution while moving further and further away from the true complexity of the coffee plant and its environment.

This simplification affected not only the product itself, but also the way our brains learned to recognise coffee. When, for decades, a food is presented with the same narrow and repetitive flavour profile, the perceptual system adapts. The palate stops seeking complexity and starts seeking familiarity. Rather than looking for new information, it looks for confirmation.

From the perspective of perception, a very developed roast produces dominant and easily decodable stimuli: bitterness, roasted notes, and body are strong, unambiguous signals that require minimal cognitive effort. The brain quickly associates them with the idea of "coffee", creating a stable and reassuring sensory memory, but one that is poor in nuance. In this sense, taste is no longer exploration but habit.

When, on the other hand, the aromatic profile opens up and organic acids, natural sweetness, and floral or fruity notes emerge, the perceptual system is placed in a different condition. The brain does not immediately recognise what it is experiencing; it has to consult memory, compare, and slow down. Perception becomes an active process rather than a passive one, and for many people this is initially destabilising, not because the flavour is "wrong", but because it disrupts a learned model.

Gastro-perception teaches us that we never taste with the tongue alone. We taste with our expectations, with the cultural context in which we are immersed, and with the language we have available to name what we perceive. Changing the flavour of coffee therefore also means changing the way the brain is allowed to interpret it. It means moving from a food product that simply needs to function to one that can tell a story, that can carry with it a history, a geography, and a sense of responsibility.

This is where the question of taste inevitably intersects with the colonial dimension: for too long, coffee has been treated as an abstract commodity, detached from the plant, the soil, and the people who grow it. A product whose value is determined by distant financial markets, according to speculative logics that have little to do with the reality of agricultural labour. This has created a profound paradox: entire communities of producers who work under difficult conditions, often at the limits of human and environmental sustainability, without their efforts being recognised, because the price of coffee is tied to commodity exchanges rather than to the true value of the food itself.

To maintain certain price levels, the system needs to compress labour costs, exploit vulnerable workers, and sustain forms of agricultural labour exploitation that are not exceptions but structural consequences. Recognising coffee as food, as a living plant, and as the result of specific agricultural practices also means restoring dignity to those territories and those farmers; shifting the conversation from the market back to the land, from speculation back to cultivation.

Understanding that coffee has a different taste from the one we have been accustomed to is the first step—not because that flavour is "better" in an absolute sense, but because it forces us to ask questions. Never before has the issue of food been so central: climate change, fragile soils, and unstable supply chains are imposing new priorities upon us, and educating the palate also means educating our way of seeing. Sensory maturity becomes a form of ethical maturity.

Knowing the seasonality, authenticity, and agricultural consistency of a product generates awareness, enables more informed choices, and offers the possibility of directing one's money with purpose, moving away from sustaining vicious cycles and instead contributing to the support, recognition, and strengthening of virtuous agricultural systems. Every act of consumption becomes, in its own small way, a political choice.

And perhaps this is where the initial question finds a deeper resolution. What would coffee taste like if it were grown in Europe? Perhaps it would have a radically different flavour: one that our brains had been educated to consider worthy of attention; a complex, imperfect, and variable flavour; a flavour that does not exist merely to wake us up, but to make us think.

Ultimately, for us, changing the taste of coffee has never been merely a technical matter, but an exercise in perceptual and cultural re-education, a way of reminding ourselves that what we eat and drink every day is not a neutral function, but the present and future of a new idea of politics, one that passes through food, the land, and our everyday choices.