The Question That Started Everything

Reading time for this act: ~2 minutes

We’d come to Vietnam for the usual reasons travellers do, the food, the culture, the adventure of exploring somewhere completely different from home. Our route was simple: Ho Chi Minh City, to visit our son, then up to Buon Ma Thuot in the Central Highlands, before finishing in Hanoi. Buon Ma Thuot had been mentioned in passing by another traveller as “where the coffee comes from,” but honestly, we were more excited about trying authentic pho and exploring highland markets.

Coffee. At the time, that meant grabbing flat whites between meetings back in London, or the occasional weekend ritual of trying a new café. We knew Vietnam produced coffee vaguely, but we had no real understanding of what that meant.

The flight from Ho Chi Minh took us above landscapes that shifted from urban sprawl to quilted patchwork of greens we couldn’t identify from up high. As we descended toward Buon Ma Thuot, Alice pointed out the rows of bushy green plants stretching across the hillsides, “What do you think those are?” she asked.

Neither of us had any idea.

We found ourselves at a guesthouse called Tented Lak, run by a local family. The place had a rustic charm, and we quickly discovered it sat right next to what appeared to be farmland. On our first morning, we followed a trail of butterflies from the guesthouse grounds into their small farm.

The first plants we encountered had large pods hanging from them that Alice thought might be some kind of fruit. We had no idea we were looking at cacao, chocolate in its raw form. A bit further along the trail, we found bushes heavy with bright red cherries that looked almost too perfect to be real.

These, of course, were coffee cherries, though we wouldn’t learn that for several more hours.

The third crop we could actually recognise, avocados were unmistakable, even to city dwellers like us.

Standing there surrounded by cacao, coffee, and avocado plants we’d never seen growing, we felt genuinely foolish. Here were three things we consumed regularly back home, and we could hardly identify any of them in their natural state. That uncomfortable realisation, that we were completely disconnected from the most basic origins of our daily consumption, lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable in our minds.

“You want to learn about the plants?” the guesthouse owner asked when we returned, probably recognising our embarrassment.

We explained what we’d discovered following the butterflies, how we’d been completely clueless about what we were looking at. He smiled with the patience of someone accustomed to educating city visitors about rural realities.

“The red cherries, that’s coffee,” he explained. “Very good coffee. My family grows small amount, but for real coffee farm, you should meet my cousin Linh. His farm much bigger, very traditional methods. He speaks English well, learned from coffee buyers who come from many countries.”

It felt like the natural next step. We’d stumbled across these crops by accident, but now we were genuinely curious. How did those red cherries become the coffee beans we knew? What did a proper coffee farm look like?

Where we discover that coffee farming is nothing like we imagined

Reading time for this act: ~2 minutes

The next morning, Linh arrived with the quiet presence of someone comfortable in his own landscape. Probably in his fifties, with hands that spoke of decades working highland soil, he carried himself with the patient dignity of a teacher accustomed to explaining rural realities to urban visitors.

“My cousin says you found our coffee cherries yesterday,” he said, his English careful but clear, each word chosen with the precision of someone who’d learned the language through necessity rather than classroom study. “You never saw coffee growing before?”

We admitted our agricultural ignorance. Linh listened with the kind of amused understanding that suggested this wasn’t his first encounter with tourists surprised by farming basics.

“Most people who drink our coffee, they never come here,” he observed. “They know coffee comes from Vietnam, but they don’t know what that means.”

The Farm That Changed Everything

The motorbike ride to Linh’s farm took us through landscapes that now looked different to our newly educated eyes. Those weren’t just “green plants on hillsides”, they were coffee farms, each one representing families, livelihoods, and traditions we’d never considered.

Linh’s farm spread across several terraced hillsides, significantly larger than the small plot at Tented Lak. Rows of coffee plants stretched into the distance, some heavy with the red cherries we now recognised, others in different stages of the growing cycle we were about to understand.

But what immediately struck us was something unexpected. This wasn’t the neat, uniform agriculture we’d imagined. Coffee trees grew alongside other plants in what appeared to be a deliberately orchestrated natural system—complex, layered, almost wild in comparison to the geometric precision we’d expected.

“Coffee in Vietnam is not just drink,” Linh explained as we walked between the integrated rows. “Coffee is family business, community business. These plants feed my children, send them to school. But also, they connect us to land, to tradition, to each other.”

He spoke with intimate knowledge of every section of his farm, pointing out details we never would have notice. The careful spacing between plants, the way they were pruned to optimise both sun exposure and ease of harvesting, the health of the soil beneath our feet that he could assess just by looking.

“These coffee trees, they are like family members,” he said, stopping beside a particularly large plant heavy with perfect red cherries. “I know each section, how it grows, when it produces best fruit. Some trees twenty years old, still giving good coffee.”

Alice asked about the harvesting process. When did the cherries ripen? How could he tell they were ready? Linh answered each question with the patience of someone who genuinely enjoyed sharing knowledge, occasionally plucking cherries to show us different stages of ripeness, explaining how timing affected final flavour.

“My father taught me,” he said simply. “His father taught him. But coffee farming, it changes now. Climate different, market different, young people want different work.”

There was no bitterness in his voice, just the matter-of-fact observation of someone who’d watched his world evolve around him while maintaining connection to methods passed down through generations.

After walking through his farm for over an hour, Linh invited us to sit outside his farmhouse for coffee. He disappeared inside and emerged with a small metal pot and ceramic cups, along with beans he’d roasted himself that morning. The brewing process was unlike anything we’d seen. Slow, deliberate, treating the coffee with a kind of respect, we’d never witnessed in London cafés.

The coffee itself bore no resemblance to anything we’d experienced back home. Earthier, more complex, with flavours we couldn’t identify but found compelling. It tasted like place, like highland soil and morning mist as well as generations of accumulated knowledge about how to coax the best from these specific plants in this particular landscape.

We were clearly trying to process the experience, to understand what made this coffee so different from what we knew, when Linh looked directly at us with the expression of someone about to share something important.

A simple question that we couldn’t answer — and couldn’t stop thinking about

Reading time for this act: ~1.5 minutes

“Do you know the hands that picked your coffee?”

The question hung in the highland air between us like a challenge we weren’t equipped to meet.

“When you drink coffee in London,” he continued gently, “do you know who grew the beans? Do you know their names, their families, how they live?”

We didn’t. We had no idea. Following those butterflies at Tented Lak had shown us how disconnected we were from the origins of what we consumed, but Linh’s question made us realise the disconnection was much deeper than just not recognising plants. We were consuming the product of someone’s labour, someone’s knowledge, someone’s daily life, without any awareness of who that someone actually was.

The Polyculture Discovery

Before we could attempt an answer, Linh stood and gestured toward a section of his farm we hadn’t yet explored.

“You want to see how they grow together?” he asked.

What he showed us next was polyculture, though we didn’t know that term at the time. Seven different crops growing in carefully orchestrated relationships. Coffee trees providing canopy for shade-loving plants below. Nitrogen-fixing beans enriching soil that fed the entire system. Fruit trees attracting birds that controlled pests naturally. Diverse roots at different depths accessing nutrients throughout the soil profile without depleting any single layer.

This wasn’t just farming. It was sophisticated ecological design passed down through generations, refined through decades of observation about what worked in these specific highland conditions.

“When my grandfather farm here,” Linh explained, “he only grow coffee. Market good then, coffee price high. But when prices fall, or weather bad, family has nothing. So my father, he learn to grow different crops together. Now if coffee price low, we still have avocado, banana, vegetables. Farm supports itself.”

He paused, looking across his integrated system with obvious pride.

“Also,” he added, “this way is better for land. Soil stays healthy, we don’t need much chemical fertiliser. Birds come, insects balanced. It’s more work to understand, but once you learn, it works better than single crop.”

The sophistication of what Linh was describing slowly became clear. This wasn’t primitive agriculture needing modernisation. This was deeply intelligent land management that Western industrial farming was only beginning to rediscover under terms like “regenerative agriculture” and “agroforestry.”

We were witnessing traditional knowledge that coffee companies would eventually market as innovation, except Linh’s family had been practicing it for generations.

Sitting in the highland sunset, realising we’d been consuming the world unconsciously

Reading time for this act: ~1.5 minutes

Sitting there as the highland sun began to set, holding coffee brewed from cherries we’d watched Linh pick, processed with methods his grandfather taught him, grown in a polyculture system we’d never imagined existed, we found ourselves in a state of quiet shock.

Not dramatic revelation-style shock, but the deeper kind that comes when you realise how fundamentally you’ve misunderstood something basic about your own life.

“How many other things do we consume without knowing anything about them?” Alice asked quietly.

It wasn’t rhetorical. We started mentally cataloguing our daily consumption back in London. Tea — where did it come from? Chocolate — beyond knowing cacao grew somewhere tropical, what did we actually know? The vegetables in our fridges, the spices in our cupboards, even basic staples like rice or wheat. We consumed them regularly but understood virtually nothing about their origins, the people who grew them, or the traditional knowledge required to produce them.

The revelation was humbling in ways we hadn’t expected. We’d considered ourselves reasonably educated people, aware of global issues, conscious consumers making ethical choices. But sitting in Linh’s integrated farm system, we realised how superficial that awareness actually was.

“In cities,” Nick said to Linh, “we’re completely removed from all of this. We buy things in packages, from shops, and never think about the process that brought them to us—or the people whose knowledge made them possible.”

Linh nodded with the understanding of someone who’d watched this disconnection develop over his lifetime.

“When I was young boy,” he said, “more people in cities still had family in countryside. They knew farming, knew seasons, knew difficult work to grow food. Now, city people and country people, we live different worlds.”

What struck us most wasn’t guilt about our ignorance, but amazement at the complexity we’d been oblivious to. Linh’s farm represented not just agricultural production, but generations of accumulated wisdom about soil health, plant relationships, climate patterns, processing techniques, market dynamics — an entire body of expertise we’d never even known existed.

And this was just coffee. How many other traditional knowledge systems were operating invisibly behind the products we used daily? How many Linhs were there in the world, maintaining sophisticated practices while the people who benefited from their knowledge remained completely unaware of their existence?

Standing to leave, Linh offered us a small bag of beans from his integrated farm to take to Hanoi, then home to London.

“When you drink this coffee with friends,” he said, “maybe you tell them about polyculture farming, about traditional knowledge, about connection between farmer and consumer. Maybe they become curious too.”

In that moment, holding coffee beans we’d watched grow in a system we’d never imagined, we knew Linh had given us more than agricultural education. He’d provided a lens for seeing the world differently. One that revealed hidden complexity behind everything we took for granted, and the profound human knowledge required to sustain us all.

How a simple question in Vietnam sent us to London’s libraries — then to Ethiopia

Reading time for this act: ~1.5 minutes

The bag of beans from Linh’s farm became our constant companion through the rest of our Vietnamese adventure. In Hanoi’s bustling café culture, street-side establishments with tiny plastic stools, elaborate brewing rituals, social customs we were just beginning to understand, every cup triggered the same questions Linh had planted: Who grew these beans? What was their story? What traditional knowledge made this coffee possible?

Back in London, those questions became impossible to ignore.

We couldn’t drink coffee normally anymore. Every morning flat white carried the weight of everything we’d learned in Buon Ma Thuot. Where did these beans come from? Who picked them? What did their farming system look like? Did they use integrated methods like Linh’s polyculture approach, or something completely different? Were traditional farming practices being preserved or abandoned? What stories were hidden behind the simple transaction of buying coffee from our local café or Tesco’s?

The questions became an obsession that drove us to London’s libraries and bookshops.

We started in the obvious places, coffee sections of major bookstores, certain someone had written about coffee’s human stories, about farming communities, about the traditional knowledge we’d glimpsed in Vietnam. We combed through every resource available, looking for books that went beyond brewing guides and flavour profiles to explore the people behind the beans.

We found almost nothing.

What existed focused on coffee as commodity, economic analysis, market trends, agricultural techniques divorced from cultural context. But virtually nothing explored coffee as culture, as community, as repository of generations of knowledge like what we’d witnessed with Linh.

Libraries became our next target. The British Library, university collections, specialized agricultural archives. We searched systematically for research about coffee farming communities and their traditional practices. The results were frustratingly sparse and academically dry, full of technical language that missed the human stories we were trying to understand.

This led us to SOAS. The School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Surely academic specialists in Asian and African cultures would have documented communities like Linh’s. Even there, among researchers who understood traditional knowledge systems, we found little that captured coffee farming as living cultural practice.

The absence was startling and increasingly infuriating. Here was a commodity consumed by billions of people daily, yet the human stories behind its production seemed largely invisible in accessible English-language sources. Where were the books about farmers like Linh? Where was the documentation of traditional polyculture methods? Where were the stories of how coffee knowledge passed between generations?

But we did find one thing that kept appearing in every academic paper about coffee’s botanical origins: Kaffa, Ethiopia.Coffee’s birthplace. The region where Coffea arabica evolved in wild highland forests, where people first discovered coffee’s potential, where the plant began its journey around the world.

Back home, drinking the last of Linh’s coffee while surrounded by the disappointing few sources we’d managed to find, we recognised something fundamental had shifted in our identities. We weren’t just curious tourists anymore. We’d become cultural investigators, driven by questions that felt increasingly urgent.

What traditional knowledge was disappearing while people like us consumed coffee unconsciously? What stories needed documenting before they were lost forever? How many other Linhs were there in the world, maintaining sophisticated systems while remaining invisible to the people who benefited from their expertise?

The research frustration clarified our purpose. If the stories weren’t written down, if the knowledge wasn’t being documented, if the connections between consumers and producers remained invisible, then maybe we needed to go find those stories ourselves.

Looking back, we can trace everything to that moment in Buon Ma Thuot when Linh asked his simple question about knowing the hands that picked our coffee. But it was only in London, surrounded by the absence of answers we were seeking, that we understood what he’d really given us: not just awareness of our ignorance, but a sense of responsibility to bridge the gap between consumers and the traditional knowledge that sustained them.

The adventure had begun. Ethiopia was calling. And we finally understood we weren’t just following curiosity anymore—we were answering a call to document stories that might otherwise be lost.