Coffea - 12/26/2025
I find myself yet another day in which this evening there is nothing to do but to figure out how to entertain myself. Normally I would also have the labor of figuring out what to eat for dinner as well, but past me was kind enough to save leftovers for me, and buy veggies for me to boil - thanks past me. While I was eating my leftovers this evening I had remembered a conversation I had with one of my coworkers over lunch. I had told him how disconnected I feel from the things we consume daily. One thing I had realized was that I have no idea how coffee is grown. I didnt even know what kinda of plant it came from. What it from a tree, a bush, vines? I actually had no image in my mind on how they grew, on how it looked. But yet Ive had coffee, and so many people in the US consume it daily. Coffee was a mystery to me. Many things that I eat everyday, are a mystery to me.
To answer my own question (and to find something to entertain me that is not mindless doomscrolling) I looked it up. What is a coffee plant, how does it grow? I realized that i dont even know the name of the plant that produces coffee. Maybe this is very silly to thoses aware of the whole process of making coffee. Its not that im unaware of ANY plants and how they grow. I used to live by corn and soy fields, have gone to my share fare of orchards and have observed my mom grow varies plants in her backyard. I just had this fixation with coffee in particular because for one, you can only ever by it preroasted. So I do not even know what a bean looked like preroasted. From where that bean came from? no fuckin idea. Plus, coffee is not grown in the us (outside of hawaii), so its not like I could just like stumble upon a farm that grows it.
Coffea
No, that is not a mispelling of Coffee. The name of the tree that grows coffee cherries (and the beans inside the cherry) is called Coffea. I was like so starstuck when I saw a picture of that the tree branch look liked. The fruit that it comes from has such a lovely red color, and the way the berries sit and grow on the tree so bunched together, and the leaves shape!
i also found a cool youtube video called Make a Cup of Coffee Starting From Scratch | Coffea arabica that showed from harvest to cup of coffee, the process of making coffee. I think the coolest part of the video was seeing how pale white the beans are before roasting it.
I think learning about the Coffea tree, and seeing the process of how it was made, helped me feel a bit less disconnected to world around me. I feel like there are so many things that I just absolutely know very little about. I feel a great amount of disconnect to the things I interact with, the things i eat, the places i go to. So, maybe I should try to understand them a bit better to ground myself. Maybe its the byproduct of living in such a industrialized place. Not to say we should abandon the industrialize world. I very much enjoy the internet and all the other luxuries I am lucky to have.
I do still feel disconnected. another one of my many confusing feelings. I seem to have alot of thoses. I do feel better then when I wrote my last journal, however so thats good. I do find myself just zoning into my phone alot too, and I could see that contributing to the feeling of disconnection.