Word: gourmet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Young says Tizzie is an even more discriminating connoisseur than the average Harvard student. Tizzy refuses to eat food from the Harvard Union dining hall and prefers certain "gourmet" treats...
What does the above quote describe? A fine Chardonnay, gourmet preserves, perhaps the new flavors of Skittles? No, this gushing adulation can be found in the Summer 1993 issue of The Coffee Connection News, in praise of a coffee known as "Dota Blend." The News goes on at great length about "fruitiness," "body" and "character" of various blends of beans assembled from assorted poverty-stricken Third World nations for our gustatory pleasure...
What is it that has the academics of Harvard Square passionately clutching paper cups morning, noon and night? A steaming container of coffee in hand has, for students and professors alike, replaced the tweed jacket as the fashion badge of academia. Gourmet coffee joints, once an innocous deviation from Harvard Square's more down-to-earth roasters, have become a neighborhood consuming blight, threatening to drive out all other forms of commerce. Worst of all, the trend in the Square is not even original: specialty coffee sales in the U.S. have ballooned from $1.5 billion anually in 1989 to over...
...gourmet coffee is a wine for the nineties. There is the snobbery about country of origin, the niggling distinctions about process of preparation, and the gratuitous use of descriptive yet totally inaccurate adjectives to distinguish flavor. The coffee illuminati can sip their Kenya AA or $30-per-pound Jamaican Blue Mountain while they debate the comparative merit of washed and dry-milled beans with an air of enlightened self-satisfaction...
...their descendants pledge allegiance to another? If we are to save the Square--nay, the Nation--from the advancing tide of coffee snobbery, we have little choice. We must dress up as Brits, board the next steamer in from Zimbabwe or Colombia and hurl the sacks of the offending gourmet bean into the Boston Harbor...