Lamorinda Rethinks Its Morning Cuppa

This month is all about food. At the checkout stand all the supermodels take the month off it seems, as there are only mouth watering pictures of pies, meats, and pumpkin dishes gracing all magazine covers.  This month provides a great time to take time to think about your food; how far it traveled, what ingredients are hidden within and what nutrients will it provide? It’s also time to stop and think about how the people that grew or produced the food were treated in the process.

If you’re a coffee drinker, this may be the perfect place to start this thought process.  Coffee can be a mindless routine, a refueling of wake up juice, a blind act made every day just to get caffeine delivered, or it can be a political, social and global awakening.

Perhaps amid the hustle and bustle of this month, while drinking your coffee or while you’re perusing the coffee bean aisle you can pause and think about what your choice in bean means to the world as a whole.  

Things to consider are whether it is Fair Trade Certified, and if not, why not.  Is it organic certified? If not, why not.  Is it shade grown or did the grower wipe out rainforests to bring you the beans?

Sometimes the answers to these are simple. Right on the package you can see the labels. Perhaps you had never thought about what those labels actually mean.  I used to give fieldtrips for second graders through the cafe I owned, and  I simplified the explanation of these certifications for these labels for them in terms they could understand.  Pokemon cards were all the rage at the time, so I described a very unfair trade in which someone was left crying on the playground because they had felt cheated.  

Leaving a farmer crying because he can not feed his family because a huge corporation just cheated him of his year’s work is not what I want in my cup of Joe.  Fair Trade means that the farmer can actually feed his family, no tears needed, and provides you with a happier product.  

Some beans may not be Fair Trade Certified, but may have special circumstances that have created a very fair trade, but went around the certification process. Peet’s coffee for instance annually agrees to buy the entire crop from a shade grown farm in Panama at a fair price. That doesn’t meet the certification process which usually requires that the coffee farms are part of a cooperative.  Asking about the beans and the fair trade policy goes a long way toward understanding how the people growing the beans are treated.

Paul Katzeff, owner of the most highly rated sustainability coffee producers, Thanksgiving Coffee, has worked tirelessly to perfect the Fair Trade certification process and improve the sustainability of the entire industry.  He explained when I talked to him several years ago that although his company is doing everything right as far as environmental practices and socio/economics, if Starbuck’s shifted just one percent of its business to Fair Trade or organic it would be as if he’d multiplied his company by 100.  Every time I go into Peets or Starbucks I ask whether they have any fair trade, organic coffee. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I ask to speak with the manager, and I let them know that I would prefer that they sell coffee I could feel good about. Every voice added to this improves the odds that large corporations will shift at least part of their industry in this direction.

Thanksgiving Coffee is rated an A+ in Ellis Jones’ handy guide, “Shopping for a Better World Handbook.”  Their motto is “Not Just a Cup, But a Just Cup.”   I like having a nice helping of justice in my cup. I also want to keep the nasty stuff out, like herbicides and pesticides.  When those chemicals are introduced into the vast, complex ecosystems of the rainforest, no laboratory studies are going to predict the ramifications.  I’d really rather they weren’t swirling around in my cup either.

When buying your own beans to make coffee at home, you can find Thanksgiving Coffee at Chow and Whole Foods.  Santa Cruz Roasting Company, Equal Exchange, and Adam’s, are another very responsible growers.  Coffee brands to avoid: Nescafe, Maxwell House, Sanka and Yuban which are still doing everything the pirate’s way: burn and pillage. They’re all listed as Corporate Vilians and receive an “F” grade.

When going out for coffee, think of your local, independent coffee shops first. Chow, Papillion, and Trattoria and even the new deep dish pizza place, Patxi’s, sells Blue Bottle Coffee and all are great places to start.

You’re going to need a fine cup of coffee to wash down all that pumpkin pie this month, why not make it a cup you can feel good about?