As much as I rely on it each morning, I recognize that coffee is a luxury item. Ditto with sugar and chocolate, but we’ll get there. After spending time in Europe, I couldn’t go back to coffee dripped through paper. Similarly, if it weren’t for the Greek students introducing me to the wonders of the stovetop espresso pot, I might not have made it through my year in England, land of instant ‘coffee’.
During my first year back, my final year of college, I relied on my little curvy pot (still my favorite after all these years) and pre-ground Lavazza (which is, of course, excellent commercial coffee). Following graduation, I moved to the West Philly neighborhood where I’d been spending much of my time. I became a member of the Mariposa Food Coop there, where what to my wondering eyes did appear but bulk bins of amazingly good coffee beans. Although I still didn’t have my own grinder, I was hooked on the Bolivian beans (Full City Roast), and was delighted to find them again at the People’s Food Coop when I moved to Ann Arbor the following year.
Back then, I didn’t know much about the history of Equal Exchange as a company; before the establishment of third-party certification through TransFair, the ‘Equal Exchange’ name seemed more like a fair trade label and less like a brand name. Mostly, it was difficult to find organic coffee beans at all; consumers were just starting to be educated about the fact that ‘gourmet’ coffee was both better tasting and more expensive because it was grown in its natural shade, and commensurately slower to harvest. Being already addicted to high quality coffee, I was completely happy to pay gourmet coffee prices for beans that were organically grown and fairly traded. Truthfully, it seemed like something too good to be true.
It wasn’t a far stretch for me to extend the food politics of the U.S. that had led me to start eating vegetarian and organic—unsafe and unfair farm labor practices, pesticide overuse, the growth of corporate farming, pollution of land and water resources—to the global politics of the cash crops of coffee, sugar, and cocoa. Giving up meat had required a conscious awareness of what I was eating and what went into producing it; that awareness began with animal farming, but I carried it into a consideration of the origin of my plant-based products as well. Buying these products was never about whether I was getting more vitamin C in an organic orange versus a commercial one; it was about knowing that no one was getting cancer from crop-dusting so that my juice could be a little less expensive. Principles of ethical consumption are such a basic part of how I make food choices that it’s hard for me to relate to people who seemingly don’t care where their food comes from, or aren’t at all concerned about whether what they paid for it matches the ‘true’ costs of producing it.
Returning to coffee: flash forward to ten years later, and I am completely at the mercy of my fairly traded, organic, shade grown coffee bean supplier. I haven’t abandoned drip coffee altogether — we do have a drip coffeepot, acquired during my partner’s first post-doc, for which I faithfully grind the beans fresh each day. We use a reusable gold filter in it, which makes it taste more like presspot coffee: the pot and filter combined were probably the best $30 I ever spent, as we’ve used them nearly every day for nearly a decade now, and they are still going strong (besides having to replace the pot once after an unfortunate encounter with a porcelain sink). On the days when I haven’t cleaned the coffeepot the night before, I do use my old school presspot (replaced last year after an unfortunate encounter with a ceramic dish). And on the day after that, if I’ve been particularly lax about doing the washing up, I go back to the little stovetop pot, and am reminded of how much I like americanos made that way.
I haven’t gotten to the point of using only bottled water to make coffee (most likely because I haven’t gotten to the point of drinking bottled water in my house), but I can’t be budged on which beans we purchase. While I buy almost entirely organic, and am happy to support a variety of processed food companies and local farms in their choices to go organic, I only buy fair trade certified coffee, sugar, and cocoa. It’s precisely because these inessentials are such a big part of my life that it’s so important to me to participate in their consumption in an ethical way. I’m not moved by the claims of retailers or roasters that their beans are fairly traded despite their choice not to become third-party certified. It may or may not be true, but that’s not the issue for me: transparency and accountability are important elements in a community-oriented business practice, and I choose to give my $8 per pound to those companies willing to open themselves up to the external evaluation.
Of course, I know that I’m getting the highest quality product as well, so it’s not like there’s any hardship involved. I’m easy: chalk it up to food snobbery, if that goes down more smoothly than anti-capitalism. I just find it amusing and rewarding that it’s possible to have both in the same cup.
