I studied Sociology in college. Sociology is basically just a fun way to say I studied people and why social structures exist. And the biggest thing I learned is that nothing is pre-ordained. Everything in the world is based on complex social structures, but none of them are necessarily good or bad—they’re good or bad based on the meaning we assign them. 

This mode of thinking would sometimes get me in a rabbit hole of nihilist thinking—if nothing matters then what’s the point of anything, really—but it also helped me realize that we have an immense amount of control of the world around us. Not always, and not over everything, but if there’s a system in place that we’re unhappy with, we can work to dismantle it. There’s nothing that says this system has to be the one we use—especially if it’s broken. 

Dismantling existing systems is an interesting idea, and something the coffee world has been talking a lot about, especially in light of the coffee price crisis. So I decided to talk to a sociologist, Noa Berger, to see what she thought about the structures and systems that we use to understand coffee. I met Noa at Re:co, which is a lecture series that focuses on big problems in the coffee industry, and while I was traveling in Paris, I got a chance to learn more about her work and how she takes her sociological lens and applies it to the world of coffee.