I’ve been on vacation and will be back soon with new editions of the newsletter, but in the meantime, here’s something I wrote last year for “Catapult” magazine. The essay sprang from a mid-century photograph of my father in a Maxwell House lab and a comment he once made about trying to maintain quality control at the mass market coffee producer, where he worked for more than three and a half decades. For Father’s Day, here it is again. Love you, Dad.
My Father Taught Me to Pursue Excellence. Coffee Taught Me About Satisfaction.
An obsession with excellence creates an unfortunate binary: all or nothing.
My dad was the man in charge of excellence. At the office, they gave him a title for this work: Quality Control Manager. And because he worked at Maxwell House Coffee in the 1970s, they gave him a nickname, after a character made famous by another coffee company: El Exigente.
When I was growing up and my father was in his middle-management prime, a competitor company ran a series of popular television commercials featuring El Exigente, “the demanding one.” Debonair and discerning, El Exigente traveled Latin America to inspect and select the best beans from the growers there. In the commercials, the camera shows El Exigente running his fingers through mounds of beans, evaluating them in pursuit of “coffee-er coffee.” When he indicated approval, the entire breath-bated town erupted in celebration.
My father did occasionally fly overseas to coffee-producing countries, but usually he drove to his office in New York or a plant in New Jersey, where he designed processes to maintain the quality of a bunch of mass-market coffee brands being sold to American restaurants and grocery stores. Magazines like Food Technology and Chemical & Engineering News came in the mail, and he actually read them, placing within their pages scraps of yellow paper as bookmarks. Work at home involved him pencil-scratching through pads of graph paper at the dining room table piled high with charts and reports.
As a little kid, I embraced the more glamorous notion of Dad as El Exigente. I liked to imagine the blank-labeled samples of instant coffee lining our pantry were top-secret product advancements, ultramodern versions of the coffee-est coffee. I conjured images of him at work being brought trays of hot brew, slowly sniffing and sipping each cup, being relied on to choose the very best.
He was also in charge of excellence at home. My mother and we kids were subject to his judgment, and it wasn’t hard to fall short of his standards. It was Dad who checked if you had dried and put away the dishes after washing them. Whose expert nose would turn up theatrically when I, at ten years old, didn’t bathe myself thoroughly enough. Who critiqued how we peeled or didn’t peel a potato (an offensively unpeeled spud was once launched across the table from his fork).
The rest of the piece is here.