At home, I made a coffee with the espresso equivalent of a tea bag. The house had no shortage because my housemate Pete favoured the porous sachets of cheaply ground coffee over the 250-gram bags of single-origin which I bought for $22.

“What are you drinking?” a friend, Jay, said.

“Pete’s espresso bags,” I said sipping.

“Why?” she said.

Since living with Pete, I began wondering whether my interest in the food and drink scene—specialty coffee, natural wine, degustations—had turned to snobbery.

“I just bought a six-pack of limited release New England IPA Raspberry Sour beers,” I said to Pete a few days after he moved in. “Do you want one?”

Pete lifted an eyebrow. “I’m alright, thank you,” he said, grabbing a warmish can of Emu Export instead.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew, before living together, he had more modest tastes. (Pete used to live in a shed which I visited once. The shed had a desk, bed and an old fridge containing three beers and a sweet potato, which he eventually pan-fried on a bunsen-burner-style stove for dinner.)

In more carefree, and arguably happier, times, I also used to eat a solitary vegetable for dinner. Not because I couldn’t follow an Ottolenghi recipe. Food was just sustenance, and good food was a rare luxury.

I was less fixated on having, say, Geisha coffee or Italian natural wine at every opportunity. Or dining at farm-to-table restaurants where the server provides a short bio on the animal that inspired the dish: "The bird in the duck confit was named Jeremiah. He’s from a lake five minutes down the road, and he liked to eat wholemeal bread and crap on onlookers."

After several years working in hospitality, I did admittedly become slightly too passionate about tasting-note wheels and uncovering specific tropical fruits in exotic wine varietals. So passionate, in fact, I made a habit of critiquing every drink and meal. I never thought, though, I’d be the man who’d snub an instant coffee or an Emu Export. Until I did at a dinner party.

“Want an Emu Export?” Pete asked.

“Pffft, no,” I said, swirling a Sicilian orange wine and pecking at aged manchego. I then resumed a monologue—that Pete had interrupted—on the shortcomings of modern capitalism.

Other friends added opinions on how to solve the world's problems, too. And we would have continued debating into the night, depleting the wine and any leftover reserves of humility had not Pete, who’d been observing the discussion in silence, suggested the world would be a better place if we lived more like bonobos. He then sipped a can of beer and ate a handful of nuts.

“And how will banging and eating bananas all day reverse the effects of global warming, Pete?” another friend said.

Pete wasn’t entirely serious, of course, just an ad lib comment to lighten the discussion which had turned very heated. He was talented like that: not taking life too seriously. He did, after all, seem to ease through days with a bonobo-ish peacefulness.

I meanwhile felt day-to-day like the bonobo’s distant cousin, the pygmy marmoset, the monkey that looks always jacked on 30 espressos, because keeping up to date with trendy wine and coffee and wanting every meal to be of an excellent standard requires a lot of time, careful planning, money and, therefore, begins to induce anxiety.

Had I crossed the line from fussiness to pretension? Obviously. But we do tend to peer past those logs in our eyes. So, to be sure, I eventually asked Pete.

“Do you think I’m particular?” I said after we had just disagreed on where to stock up on food for a surf trip. I suggested a French Patisserie while Pete insisted on a petrol station. He allowed for a nano-second pause before blurting, “Yes!”

I hated the idea of being pretentious, which is why I decided that morning to try Pete’s coffee bags as well as microwaved porridge.

The brew tasted like instant coffee, only more watery and bitter, and the porridge was like flavourless sludge. Not making a hand-poured single origin and an elaborate cooked breakfast, though, meant I had 30 minutes to spare before work. I was relieved, free.

“How’s the coffee?” Jay said.

“Drinkable,” I said.

I reclined into the chair and looked out of the kitchen window. A honeyeater landed on a neighbouring acacia. The bird fluttered on a branch, eating the nectar from a newly blooming flower. The morning sun filtered through the peppermint trees and I took another grateful sip.

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