Vietnam, 2022.

We’d come to Vietnam for the usual reasons. The food, the culture, the adventure of 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, then Hanoi.

Buon Ma Thuot had been mentioned by another traveller as “where the coffee comes from.” We were more excited about the pho.

Coffee, at the time, meant flat whites between meetings back in London. We knew Vietnam produced coffee. Vaguely. We had no real understanding of what that meant.

Three things we consumed every day back home. Growing right in front of us. And we couldn’t identify a single one.

It was embarrassing. And then it was fascinating.

“The red cherries, that’s coffee,” the guesthouse owner explained when we got back, smiling the way people do when city visitors discover where food comes from. “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.”

Linh arrived the next morning with the quiet presence of someone comfortable in his own landscape. Probably in his fifties, with hands that told you everything about how he’d spent his life. His English was careful and clear, each word chosen with the precision of someone who’d learned the language through necessity.

“My cousin says you found our coffee cherries yesterday,” he said. “You never saw coffee growing before?”

We admitted we hadn’t. 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 said. “They know coffee comes from Vietnam, but they don’t know what that means.”

The motorbike ride to his farm took us through landscapes that looked different to our newly educated eyes. Those weren’t just green plants on hillsides. They were coffee farms. Each one representing families, livelihoods, traditions we’d never considered.

Linh’s farm spread across several terraced hillsides. Rows of coffee plants stretched into the distance. But what struck us wasn’t the scale. It was the complexity. Coffee trees grew alongside other plants in what looked like a deliberately orchestrated natural system. Seven different crops in carefully arranged relationships. Coffee providing canopy, beans enriching the soil, fruit trees attracting birds that controlled pests naturally.

“Coffee in Vietnam is not just drink,” Linh explained as we walked between the 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 showed us details we never would have noticed. The spacing between plants, the pruning, the soil health he could assess just by looking. His father had taught him. His father’s father had taught his father.

“But coffee farming, it changes now,” he said. “Climate different, market different, young people want different work.” No bitterness. Just the observation of someone who’d watched his world evolve while maintaining connection to methods passed down through generations.

After an hour of walking, Linh invited us to sit for coffee outside his farmhouse. Beans he’d roasted that morning. The brewing was slow, deliberate, treating the coffee with a kind of respect we’d never seen. The coffee itself was unlike anything we’d had in London. Earthier, more complex. It tasted like place. Like highland soil and morning mist and generations of knowledge about how to coax the best from these specific plants in this particular landscape.

Before we could attempt an answer, Linh stood and led us to a section of his farm we hadn’t explored.

What he showed us was seven crops growing in carefully orchestrated relationships. Coffee providing canopy for shade-loving plants below. Beans enriching soil that fed the entire system. Fruit trees attracting birds that controlled pests naturally.

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

He paused. “Also, 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 highland sun was setting. We were holding coffee brewed from cherries we’d watched Linh pick, processed with methods his grandfather had taught him, grown in a system we’d never imagined existed.

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

It wasn’t rhetorical. We started counting. Tea. Chocolate. Rice. Spices. We consumed them every day and understood nothing about their origins, the people who grew them, or the knowledge required to produce them. We’d considered ourselves conscious consumers. Sitting in Linh’s farm, we realised how shallow that awareness actually was.

Linh’s beans travelled with us to Hanoi. In the street-side cafes with their tiny plastic stools and elaborate brewing rituals, every cup triggered the same questions he’d planted. Who grew these beans? What was their story?

Back in London, the questions became impossible to ignore. Every morning flat white carried the weight of everything we’d learned in Buon Ma Thuot. We couldn’t drink coffee normally anymore.

We went to bookshops first. Surely someone had written about the people behind our coffee. We found almost nothing. Plenty about coffee as a commodity. Market trends, agricultural yields, economics. Almost nothing about coffee as culture. As community. As something passed between generations.

Libraries next. The British Library, university collections, specialised archives. The results were sparse. This led us to SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. Even among researchers who understood traditional knowledge systems, we found little that captured coffee farming as living cultural practice.

The absence was startling. A commodity consumed by billions of people daily, and the human stories behind it were largely invisible.