I actually do know what good coffee tastes like.

So, before I write about cheap coffee, I want to state that I am actually rather picky about the coffee I drink. In fact, when I owned a natural foods store about 30 miles south of Iowa City, Iowa, I carried and served coffee from Cafe del Sol, which was probably Iowa’s first premier coffee roaster.

I had a friend who knew the owner and arranged for me to visit. The owner, Stephen Dunham, gave me a tour of his facility just outside Iowa City in nearby Coralville and explained the virtues of his roasting process. He explained that the most common type of coffee roaster uses a heated metal drum to roast the beans. The hot metal drum rotates and the beans scorch against the inside of the drum as they tumble. It’s a closed system and the chaff that breaks off the beans as they tumble can ignite and form a kind of tar on the beans. When people complain about the bitter taste and acidity of coffee, they are actually describing an undesirable byproduct of the roasting process.

Cafe del Sol uses a system that roasts the coffee using hot air that is forced up through the beans and has an exhaust system that sucks out any chaff that breaks off from the beans. The result is a cleaner product that showcases the bean’s true character.

When I’m working with fine quality beans, I use a burr grinder to grind them and I prefer using the Melitta cone filter method to brew coffee with water that is just coming to a boil. I’m quite partial to Kenya AA and Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.

So, just to reiterate, I actually do know a thing or two about good coffee.

But I also know when I’m overpaying for a mediocre product and there’s a lot of mediocre coffee masquerading as premium out there. After staying overnight in a house with only decaf, I happened to stumble across an ultra-cheap coffee combo that I think is perfectly drinkable for every day use. I’ve certainly paid a lot more for a lot worse coffee.

Dollar Tree sells a six-ounce bag of a medium roast called Breakfast Blend and a six-ounce bag of espresso called Café El Morro, each for a dollar. Each one is okay to drink if you’re in a pinch, but blended together they’re surprisingly decent.

I use 21 grams of coffee to make a pot that comes up to the eight cup line on my carafe. The two six-ounce bags blended together equals 340.194 grams. At 21 grams per pot, that means I can get 16.1997 pots out $2.00 worth of coffee. There are quite a few grocery store chains that are selling 12 oz. bags of their store-brand coffee for about $10.00 that do not taste nearly as good as my Dollar Tree hack.

I figure I can make a year’s supply of drinkable coffee for about $45.00. I could easily spend $225.00 for a year’s supply of coffee that is so not worth it.

If I just need some go-juice to get started in the morning before work I’ll be perfectly happy with my Dollar Tree blend. Then I can splurge for a truly premium bag of freshly roasted single-bean coffee and savor it when I have the time to really appreciate it.

There’s a sight that brings a smile to my face when I stand a short distance in front of my parent’s gravestone. I can look out and see all the old farmers I grew up working for who lived near us: Eddie and Virgene Uthof, Lloyd and Dorothy Kern, and Willard and Hulda Menz. It’s like the old neighborhood is still together in a quiet little cemetery a half-a-mile out of town in the countryside.

This was a group of farmers who all grew up in the 1920’s and ’30’s and sharing equipment and labor for jobs like baling hay and shelling corn was common.When they had been teenagers, large crews of neighbors took turns using a 20-ton steam engine to power a machine called a thresher that separated grain from the plant stalks.

It was hard work but it was also an extremely important social event for the whole neighborhood. They were called Threshing Parties and there was a festive atmosphere to the whole enterprise. It took large crews of neighbors – men, women and children – to do the work and provide all the food required to pull off a big operation like that. I could tell from the way the old-timers talked that those had been some of the happiest days of their lives.

I was lucky enough to get a sense of what that life was like and to hear their stories, but even then I was aware that I was experiencing something that was ending and never coming back. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in the early 1970’s, a man named Earl Butz, told American farmers they should get big or get out. A few years ago, I talked on the phone with our neighbor, Virgene Uthof, on the night she passed away and we talked about how the old neighborhood was not like it used to be. It’s all big farmers now.

I think in many ways I have been looking for, and almost never finding, that same sense of camaraderie and appreciation in my own working life that I experienced with those old farmers then. I knew that I was working with others toward a common purpose and that my work was valued. I have almost never experienced that in my adult working life.

I was never really prepared for office politics. I seem to be a magnet for the petty, niggling coworker and the supervisor who acts as their enabler. I still feel like I have talents to give, but I work in a lot of places where I’m not really wanted on the team.

I even moved to a small town and owned a natural foods store because I wanted to be my own boss and feel a sense of connection to a community. Instead, I always felt like I was caught between a nativist group of townspeople who didn’t want outsiders coming to “their” town and the town’s cultural elites who did not think I was sophisticated enough to be in “their” town either.

I have wanted to have a sense of connection to others through my work and for my work to be treated as having value. For the most part, that has just not been the case.

When I think of how the old farmers I knew are now near each other in that cemetery back home, I think of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” and how the characters at the end of the play speak to each other in the cemetery they now occupy. It’s an image of the afterlife that seems out of place in the world I inhabit.

Is there a human consciousness that lives on after we die or do our atoms just split up and find new adventures? If we are just atoms that split up, that actually doesn’t sound all that bad to me.

I like to imagine the afterlife being like a piece of music called “Star Dawn” by Alan Hovhaness. It’s a 14 minute-long symphony that imagines a space flight taking off from Earth and landing on a distant planet. The music of Alan Hovhaness reminds me of a spirit world because he uses bells a lot and when I hear the “tinkly” parts of his music I think of a world that people can sense but maybe not see because it is a world that exists within arm’s reach but just out of sight. In this piece, the “tinkly” sounds combine with “bing-bongy” sounds that make me think of flying through space. If my Spirit leaving sounded something like this music, I think I’d be okay with that.

Since the old neighborhood isn’t what it used to be and I don’t have the same connection to it anyway, I think I would like to wind up at The Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Prairie City, Iowa.They are restoring the Iowa countryside to be like what the natural prairie was in 1840 before the land became dominated by industrialized agriculture. I honestly do not know if there is a personal God who knows the number of hairs on my head or if we are all part of The Energy that makes up The Universe, but if I could be a part of a landscape that can make use of me, well, then that sounds like a pretty satisfying way to live on.

I once had occasion to shadow several cooks of Nepali heritage who had been refugees from Bhutan. I observed them cooking a meal, writing down every ingredient as it was prepped and every step as the dishes were made. I then turned my notes into a standard recipe format that others could follow.

There was a very skillful interpreter on the scene, but, for the most part, a potato is a potato and an onion is an onion. However, there was one mystery ingredient that kept popping up that we had trouble identifying. The interpreter, who is a fantastic cook herself, knew what it was but could not come up with the English word for it. The first cook we observed had bought it in bulk and stored it in an old honey jar, so no help there.

It was a white, slender, crystallized flake with no hint of aroma. When I took a pinch of the flakes and popped them in my mouth my first thought was, “It tastes like vegetable soup.” I went home that night, fired up the Google machine, and went off on a search. Because of that hint about vegetable soup and because my partner and I like to peruse mom-and-pop ethnic grocery stores for fun, I was able to figure out – fairly quickly, really – that the mystery ingredient was none other than Monosodium Glutamate – the dreaded MSG.

I’ve never given MSG any real thought beyond doing the cultural shorthand that a lot of people do: MSG = Bad. It’s the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome thing, right? But what did I really know about it? Given it’s reputation, it would not have surprised me if it was made from the same stuff as lawn fertilizer.

I came across an article published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition called The History of Glutamate Production by Chiaki Sano. In 1907, a Japanese professor wondered what it was about the taste sensation he got from his wife’s soups that he just couldn’t put his finger on. It wasn’t exactly sweet or salty or sour or bitter which were the four accepted categories that taste buds were supposed to be able to taste.

What professor Kikunae Ikeda thought he was tasting did not match those categories, at least not exactly. With his wife’s help, he was able to determine that a type of seaweed called kombu, which was a traditional flavoring agent of soup stocks, was the source of the unique flavor.

He figured out that an amino acid called L-glutamate was responsible for a new taste he called “umami.” He was able to concentrate L-glutamate and crystalize it. MSG became one of the most widely used food additives across SE Asia because it adds great flavor to vegetarian dishes. There’s a parallel between MSG and Nutritional Yeast, which is also used to give umami flavor to vegetarian cooking, but which does not have the negative reputation that MSG does.

Both MSG and Nutritional Yeast are derived from fermentation. For MSG, the bacteria strains Corynebacterium glutamicum, Brevibacterium lactofermentum, and Brevibacterium flavum produce L-glutamate when they gobble up the sugars in molasses and beet sugar.

Nutritional yeast is made from the Saccharomyces cerevisiae bacterium and is also grown in beet sugar or molasses. It is then deactivated by heat and does not go through a crystallization process like MSG does. It’s vegan-friendly, tastes similar to Parmesan cheese, and has about as positive a reputation as it gets in the natural foods world.

For the sake of accuracy, I picked up a bag of MSG when I recreated the dishes made by the Nepali cooks. I’ve made the dishes with and without MSG and I do believe that adding MSG makes a noticeable difference. For those too freaked out by the thought of intentionally consuming Monosodium Glutamate, Nutritional Yeast can be substituted for MSG teaspoon for teaspoon.

As for me, I don’t think there is anything to get wigged out about and it sounds like chefs like David Chang aren’t either. There’s a reevaluation of MSG going on in the chef world. When cooking for myself, I’ve been adding it to soups and vegetarian dishes, though I don’t usually include it when cooking for others. It adds a different dimension of flavor and since it is a crystal it dissolves and blends cleanly.

It’s crazy how MSG and Nutritional Yeast can be so similar and have such wildly different reputations. I do think Jeffrey Steingarten’s comment about MSG probably says it all: if MSG is so bad, how come there aren’t a billion Chinese people walking around with headaches all the time?