On a whim recently I bought a 2 lb. can of ground coffee imported from Vietnam. Now, before you start snickering, Vietnam is one of the world's largest coffee producers. It's known for very high quality coffee, and, though I didn't know it when I bought the can of Vietnamese coffee, for extremely poor quality mass-produced, robusta beans grown for bulk export. I was curious, and, honestly, the coffee was bargain priced at a discount grocery store, so I didn't expect much. But I had heard about how fanatic people get about the Vietnamese coffee known as Cafe Sua Da, often sold at tiny street corner shops, or carts, and made from Vietnam-grown robusta beans.
What I got was even less than I expected; to start with, it wasn't what most people think of as coffee. Oh sure, there were coffee beans used in the . . . blend. But there were other substances as well; the coffee was an odd reddish color, it had a nutty, almost cereal like taste that was sweeter than I'd expect from black coffee. But the real evidence that pointed to adulterated coffee was in the form of the coffee grounds, post brewing. They were sticky, and oddly soft, and almost impossible to remove from the re-usable mesh coffee filter. Moreover, they left what I can only describe as slime, so that I had to use a fair bit of elbow grease to clean the filter, and the coffee maker. I now know that those are all symptoms of coffee that's been adulterated with additives, ranging from chemicals, to sweeteners, to ground corn or wheat or soy. In other words, I bought what industry experts refer to as fake coffee.
I dumped the rest of the coffee, but paused to read the label.
There wasn't a label, really. Sure, there was the brand name in big letters, and the words ground coffee in slightly smaller type, but nothing about "100% Coffee," or any of the other nutritional information I'd expect—even on imported coffee.
I have since learned that Vietnamese coffee exporters are notorious for adulterating coffee, that most major American coffee packagers buy cheap, poor quality, bulk Vietnamese coffee, produced under growing conditions that are bad for the soil, destroy native woods, exploit workers, and result in bad coffee.
I'll be watching for fair trade coffee.