Do you know the hands that picked your coffee?

Following a trail of brilliant yellow butterflies through the morning mist of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, we had no idea we were about to stumble into the story that would reshape our entire understanding of coffee, community, and the hidden complexity behind everything we consume.
The butterflies led us from our guesthouse at Tented Lax, through what we assumed was decorative landscaping, into a small farm that would become our first lesson in agricultural ignorance. We’d come to Buon Ma Thuot—Vietnam’s coffee capital—as typical travelers: excited about street food, cultural experiences, and the adventure of somewhere completely different from London.
Coffee was barely on our radar beyond grabbing flat whites between meetings back home.
But standing in that highland garden, surrounded by plants heavy with unfamiliar fruits, we felt the particular embarrassment that comes from realizing you can’t identify things you consume daily. Large brown pods hung from trees Alice thought might produce some kind of tropical fruit. Nearby, bushes were laden with bright red cherries that looked almost too perfect to be real. Further along, we found trees bearing unmistakable avocados.
Three crops. Three things we consumed regularly in London. Three plants we couldn’t identify in their natural state.
“What are those red ones?” Alice asked, pointing at the cherry-covered bushes.
We had no idea we were looking at coffee in its raw form—the cherries that would eventually become the beans in our morning cups. The revelation felt both wonderful and slightly humbling. Here were the origins of chocolate, coffee, and a fruit we put on toast, growing side by side in an integrated system we’d never imagined.
The guesthouse owner found us standing there with the confused expressions of city people confronting agricultural reality. His patient smile suggested this wasn’t his first encounter with urban visitors surprised by where their food actually comes from.
“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, traditional methods. He speaks English well, learned from coffee buyers who come from many countries.”
Something about the word ‘traditional’ caught our attention. We’d spent the morning discovering how disconnected we were from the origins of basic things we consumed. The idea of understanding traditional methods—of seeing how coffee was supposed to be grown—felt like an education we desperately needed.
“Could we visit tomorrow?” we asked.
“I call him tonight,” the owner promised. “He likes to meet travelers who want to learn, not just take photos.”
That evening, over dinner of Vietnamese mountain specialties we were similarly failing to identify, we reflected on the day’s agricultural revelations. The butterfly trail had exposed a fundamental gap in our understanding of the world. We consumed coffee daily, yet knew virtually nothing about how it was produced, who grew it, or what methods had evolved over generations of cultivation.
Tomorrow’s visit to Linh’s farm felt less like tourist activity and more like remedial education in the basic realities of human sustenance.

Linh arrived at our guesthouse the next morning 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, explaining how following butterflies had led to discovering three familiar crops we couldn’t initially recognize. 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 motorbike ride to his 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. The highland air carried scents we couldn’t identify but were beginning to associate with agricultural abundance.
Linh’s farm spread across several terraced hillsides, significantly larger than the small plot at Tented Lax. Rows of coffee plants stretched into the distance, some heavy with the red cherries we now recognized, others in different stages of the growing cycle we were about to understand.
But what immediately struck us was the complexity of what we were seeing. This wasn’t the neat, uniform agriculture we expected. Coffee trees grew alongside other plants in what appeared to be a deliberately orchestrated natural system.
“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 noticed—the careful spacing between plants, the way they were pruned to optimize 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 flavor.
“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 reverence we’d never witnessed in London cafés.
The coffee itself bore no resemblance to anything we’d experienced back home. Earthier, more complex, with flavors we couldn’t identify but found compelling. It tasted like place—like highland soil and morning mist and 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.
“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.

Linh’s question sat with us in the silence that followed, but before we could attempt an answer, he stood and gestured toward a section of his farm we hadn’t yet explored.
“You want to see how they grow together?” he asked.
We followed him away from the neat rows of coffee plants to an area where the agricultural system became dramatically more complex. Here, coffee trees grew intermingled with the cacao plants and avocado trees we’d discovered the previous day, but arranged with obvious intention and sophisticated understanding.
Standing there, we realised we weren’t just looking at farming, we were witnessing ecological orchestration that made our accidental discovery at Tented Lax seem like stumbling into the edge of something much more profound.
“In highlands, we grow together,” Linh explained, gesturing to the integrated crops. “Coffee needs some shade, cacao needs protection from too much sun, avocado trees help both. Each plant helps others. Like community.”
The sophistication was staggering. We’d assumed agriculture meant growing one thing in straight rows, maximizing efficiency through simplification. But here was a farming system based on complexity, on understanding how different plants could support each other’s growth rather than competing for resources.
“How long have farmers been growing them together like this?” Alice asked.
“Long time. My grandfather’s grandfather, maybe longer. Highland people understand plants talk to each other, help each other. We just listen and arrange.”
Linh reached up to pick a ripe cacao pod, cracking it open to reveal the white pulp surrounding what would eventually become chocolate. “You taste,” he offered.
The flavor was nothing like chocolate as we knew it sweet and tangy, floral in a way that bore no resemblance to processed cocoa. Meanwhile, coffee cherries hung at eye level, their red color now making perfect sense as ripeness indicators rather than just decorative elements.
“Everything connected,” Linh continued, watching us try to grasp the relationships between plants around us. “Coffee tree, cacao tree, avocado tree, they share soil, share nutrients, share water. When one is healthy, others healthy too. When one has problem, others help.”
Over the next hour, he guided us through this integrated system, pointing out connections we never would have noticed. How fallen leaves from avocado trees enriched the soil for coffee and cacao below. How different root systems accessed nutrients at different depths, preventing competition. How birds attracted to one crop helped pollinate others.
The complexity was overwhelming in the best possible way. Here was agricultural wisdom that treated farming as ecology, understanding plants as communities rather than individual commodities to be maximized.
“In your country,” Linh asked, “do farmers grow different things together?”
We thought about English agriculture vast fields of single crops, separated by hedgerows, organised for mechanised efficiency. “Not really,” Nick admitted. “Usually just one thing in each field.”
Linh looked genuinely puzzled. “But plants alone, they get sick easier. Insects come, eat everything same. No diversity, no protection. Why grow alone when plants happier together?”
We couldn’t answer, partly because we’d never thought about it, and partly because we were beginning to realize how little we understood about food production in general.
Walking to the boundary of his farm, Linh showed us where his integrated system met a larger operation that grew only coffee in geometric rows. The contrast was stark his diverse farm looked almost wild in comparison, with multiple canopy levels and varied textures, while the neighbouring monoculture had the industrial precision we’d expected to find everywhere.
“Which produces more coffee?” Nick asked.
“Depends how you count,” Linh replied thoughtfully. “Per tree, maybe same. Per hectare, maybe they grow more coffee trees, get more coffee. But I get coffee, cacao, avocado, better soil, healthier trees, fewer problems with insects and disease. I think better system for family farm.”
Standing at that boundary between two completely different approaches to agriculture, we began to understand we weren’t just seeing farming methods—we were witnessing a philosophical divide about humanity’s relationship with natural systems.
“You said your grandfather’s grandfather grew these together,” Alice pressed. “How do you learn which plants work well together? Is it written down somewhere?”
“Not written,” Linh smiled. “We learn by watching, by trying, by listening to older farmers. My father show me, I show my sons. Knowledge passes person to person, generation to generation.”
This revelation hit us harder than the polyculture system itself. Here was sophisticated agricultural wisdom based on generations of accumulated knowledge, passed down through families, refined over centuries of observation and experimentation. And it existed primarily in people’s heads and hands, not in books or databases.
“What happens when young people don’t want to farm?” Nick asked, thinking of Linh’s earlier comment about generational changes.
“Then knowledge disappears,” Linh said simply. “Maybe forever.”
We walked in silence for several minutes, each processing this differently. For Linh, it was presumably a concern he lived with daily. For us, it was a revelation about how precarious traditional knowledge could be and how much wisdom might already be lost without anyone in cities like London even knowing it had existed.
The weight of that realization was just settling in when Linh led us back to his farmhouse and posed the question that would change everything we thought we knew about consumption, connection, and our responsibility as people who used things produced by others.

Sitting outside Linh’s farmhouse as the highland sun reached its afternoon angle, we found ourselves in a state of profound unsettlement—not dramatic shock, but the deeper kind of disorientation that comes from realizing you’ve fundamentally misunderstood something basic about your own life.
Twenty-four hours earlier, we’d been typical travelers excited about Vietnamese street food and cultural experiences in comfortable, tourist-friendly ways. We’d known coffee came from Vietnam the way you know facts from guidebooks—abstract information without real meaning or personal connection.
Now we sat holding cups made from cherries we’d watched Linh pick, processed using methods his grandfather had taught him, grown in an integrated farming system we’d never imagined existed. The coffee tasted different than it had that morning—not because the beans had changed, but because we understood the generations of knowledge and ecological relationships behind every sip.
“How many other things do we consume without knowing anything about them?” Alice asked quietly.
It wasn’t rhetorical. We began mentally cataloging our daily consumption back in London. Tea—beyond knowing it came from “somewhere in Asia,” what did we actually understand about its production? Chocolate—we now knew cacao grew in pods, but what about the communities that harvested it? The vegetables in our fridges, 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 realized 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?
“Tomorrow you go to Hanoi?” Linh asked, interrupting our somewhat overwhelming contemplations.
We nodded. Our plan was to spend several days experiencing Vietnamese coffee culture in the capital before flying home to London.
“In Hanoi, you will see different coffee culture,” he predicted. “City coffee, café life, different from farm coffee. Both important parts of Vietnam coffee story.”
Alice and I exchanged glances. Suddenly, experiencing coffee culture in Hanoi felt like continuing an investigation rather than tourist sampling. We wanted to understand how the complexity we’d discovered on Linh’s farm translated into urban traditions—and what other layers of story we might be missing.
“Will you think about our conversation when you drink coffee in Hanoi?” Linh asked, returning to his original challenge with slightly different emphasis.
“We’ll think about it every time we drink coffee anywhere,” Alice replied, and we both realized she was absolutely right.
Something fundamental had shifted in our relationship not just with coffee, but with consumption itself. We couldn’t return to our previous casual approach to the things we ate and drank. Linh’s questions—about knowing the hands that grew our food, understanding the systems that produced what we consumed—felt like they would follow us everywhere, transforming every meal and every purchase into reminders of connections we’d been unconsciously ignoring.
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 realized 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.

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?
The questions became an obsession that drove us to London’s libraries and bookshops.
We started our search 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 available resource, looking for books that went beyond brewing guides and flavor 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.
If we wanted to understand coffee’s complete human story—the traditional knowledge, cultural practices, and communities that had been maintaining these systems for centuries—Ethiopia seemed like where we needed to go. Not as casual travelers this time, but as people following specific questions that had become impossible to abandon.
Sitting in our London flat, drinking the last precious cups of Linh’s coffee while surrounded by the disappointing few sources we’d managed to find, we realized 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.

Next time: Alice and Nick follow coffee’s trail back to its birthplace in Ethiopia’s Kaffa highlands, where they discover a 1,000-year-old coffee ceremony that challenges everything the modern world thinks it knows about coffee culture…