ABSTRACT
Let us begin at Zabar’s, a gourmet food emporium on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. We enter, make our way through the crowd waiting to place orders in the cheese section, move quickly past the prepared foods, linger over the smoked fish, then arrive at the coffees. There, in full-sized barrels arranged in a semicircle, we find a display of roasted coffee beans for sale—Kona style, Colombian Supremo, Gourmet Decaf, Blue Mountain style, Mocha style, French, Italian, Vienna, Decaf Espresso, Water Process Decaf, Kenya AA—and a helpful clerk waiting to fill our order, grind the beans to our specification, and suggest one of a small selection of flavored syrups.
