Le temps de boire un café... : Révolution dans les cuisines

The history of coffee and its cultures has revealed to us its remarkable ability to be the place for diverse cultural developments. The fact is that, both more and less than any other type of food, it is the privileged moment of pleasure (now shared or not), of an escape whose intensity varies according to the respective doses between moderation and excess. Therein lies, no doubt, the specificity of such psychotropic drugs: the types of food that do not feed but that no civilisation can do without. A form of communion rather than communication coffee may also offer the doorway to utopia, hence its privileged relation to politics. By concentrating drinking and talking, the two sides of oral behaviour, in a social, always slightly disconnected moment, drinking coffee proves to be a complex highly symbolic action. Consequently, at a time when economic globalization is leading to cultural homogenization, it is no wonder that the espresso, the quintessence of aroma and symbols, and the most able to adapt itself to a new temporal rapport, is playing the main role and is likely to sweep aside any other tradition