25 April - 1 May 2002
Issue No.583
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 25 April - 1 May 2002 Issue No.583 |
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Instant gratification
A great deal of kudos was once attached to instant coffee. Not to Misr Cafe, of course, which once upon a time -- how long ago it all seems now -- was the only regularly available brand. Locally produced, it bore a striking resemblance to desiccated soy sauce, something else that was not, at the time, readily available. (Indeed, I remember sometime in the early nineties going to a cinema with a not altogether unknown film director who was triumphantly clutching a bottle of soy sauce he had somehow acquired and being told by the theatre attendants that alcohol could not be taken into the theatre. So precious was this hard to come by bottle -- it was, I presume, what supermarkets rather pompously call a premium blend -- that rather than leave it in the care of the people in the box office we declined to see the film.) The thing to have in those far off days was Nescafé, now ubiquitous -- familiarity does, of course, breed what it breeds, and often justifiably so -- but then an object of desire, and something of a status symbol.
The things we consume for the state of status. From my point of view, as a newly-arrived foreigner, Turkish coffee had all the brownie points and the fetishising of its instant substitutes was beyond me. But then as familiarity breeds in one direction, so scarcity does in the other. One can do worse than remember that those were times when the hapless foreigner, making his first shopping trip to that onetime, but now defunct, Zamalek institution Sunny Supermarket would be accosted before reaching the entrance by a gaggle of men. "Psst," they would whisper, "sugar, sugar." If you happened to catch their eyes a slight nod of the head would indicate the passage by the side of the supermarket. It took several visits before I plucked up the courage to follow one of these men down the passageway, only to discover that what was being offered was not a hard drug, or an unsolicited endearment, but what the man had quite baldly stated. He was selling sugar, at that point, along with flour and rice, a black market item if you did possess bitaqet tamween card. There was, too, the occasion when, sitting in the garden of the Marriott hotel, I covetously eyed the bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup on my table. It was a very small bottle, and I do not like ketchup. But there was a moment, a fleeting moment, when I contemplated pocketing that bottle, and then of walking away with it in my pocket, the only reason being that it was unavailable elsewhere. Now, of course, I can walk through aisles and aisles of the stuff in the supermarket and feel not a twinge of possessiveness. Its not that I don't like ketchup, I positively loath it, in all its branded glory.
Back to coffee, though, which as a middle class accessory is now, in its instant form, quite clearly passé. It has passed beyond the pale, is indeed available everywhere. The thing to have now is flavoured coffee, preferably in a twee packet, with a nice stuck-on label made from recycled paper preferably bearing a composite flavour, something along the lines of vanilla blueberry mocha. Or better still, drink the thing in public, cold, if at all possible. Order, in the kind of voice that carries as only the voices of the young and upper middle class can carry -- aim for a kind of braying sound and pay absolutely no attention to anyone else around -- a vanilla blueberry mocha frappucino and then, as an afterthought, you can ask them to hold the coffee.
photo: Emad Abdel-Hadi
For a very short time, a very short time indeed, it was franchised burger places that held sway. These, though, were too obviously aiming for the mass market to hold for long the attention of Cairo's sadly lacklustre variant of gilded youth. They were simply too cheap, too many people could gain access. Now the well-heeled young, adolescent pimples punctuating the gilding, can take themselves off to coffee shops that charge the equivalent of a labourers daily wage for a cup of coffee where, in a very short time, they can become aficionados of the novelty flavour. Coffee that does not taste of coffee but of berries available only for a short season in much colder northern climes, such are the fruits of progress.
Eventually, of course, such places will cease to be fashionable, not, I think, in this instance at least, because fruit flavoured coffee is going to become everyone's cup of tea (in a manner of speaking), but because, in the end, it is not really very nice. At which point some new kudos-laden product will appear in the market ready to testify to the discernment, and yes, the cosmopolitanism, of its consumers. There is little possibility, however, that it will be anymore convincing than instant coffee was to a new arrival in Egypt 12 years ago.
How these little consumer fads creep up on those fortunate enough to wield a reasonable disposable income. And how inane they must look to those who do not. And while I'm perfectly prepared to admit that I am quite happy to peruse the cheese counter, and have a choice of cheese, if I'm really honest, I would have to admit that I rather miss those whispered sugars. Not that I'm ready to give up all the perks of consumerism, it's just that, on so many levels, I would feel a little more secure if I did not know that it is perfectly possible, in 2002, to spend rather more than the Egyptian family's average monthly income on a cake.
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