[Here’s the US-wide list of fair trade coffee shops.]

Missouri

Clayton
Northwest Coffee Roasting Company. 2 locations: 8401 Maryland Ave. 314.725.8055. 50 Gay Ave. This Missouri coffee shop offers ONLY one blend of fair trade coffee in their stores: the organic Guatemala. However, I’m including them here because, while visiting, I thought there’s a clear dearth of local, fair trade coffee shops in and around St. Louis, and this sounds like a much better option than most. Tell ‘em you like the Guatemalan coffee, and that you hope they’ll carry more fair trade blends :)

Columbia
Cherry Street Artisan. This cafe gets its fair trade coffee from Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Company.

Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Company. 29 S. Ninth St. This fair trade, organic coffee shop also serves smoothies, sandwiches and breakfast items.

Kansas City
Kafe Kiskeya. 3226 East 12th St. 816.914.5096. A gallery and bookstore offering fair trade coffee and artwork.

Springfield
Mudhouse. 323 South Ave. 417.832.1720. This coffee shop serves about a half-dozen different fair trade coffees.

St. Louis
Hartford Coffee Company. 3974 Hartford St. 314.771.5282. This all fair trade roaster and cafe offers free wifi :)

MoKaBe’s Coffeehouse. 3606 Arsenal. 314.865.2009. This fair trade coffee shop has Jeff of Sustainablog vouching for it :)

Northwest Coffee Roasting Company. 4251 Laclede Ave. 314.371.4600. (Central West End). This Missouri coffee shop offers ONLY one blend of fair trade coffee in their stores: the organic Guatemala. However, I’m including them here because, while visiting, I thought there’s a clear dearth of local, fair trade coffee shops in and around St. Louis, and this sounds like a much better option than most. Tell ‘em you like the Guatemalan coffee, and that you hope they’ll carry more fair trade blends :)

[Here’s the US-wide list of fair trade coffee shops.]

Tags: fairtrade, coffee, missouri

0 Comments | Email this post

[Here’s the US-wide list of fair trade coffee shops.]

Washington DC

The Bean Counter. 1665 Wisconsin Ave NW. Organic fair-trade coffee accompanies a yummy breakfast and sandwich menu.

Black Cat. 1811 14th St. NW. 202.667.7960. A bar, performance space, and vegan-friendly restaurant that serves Equal Exchange fair trade coffee. I saw Smoosh here.

Grounds for Change. J-Street at George Washington Univ. All coffee is 100% fair trade, and the company’s a family owned and operated coffee roasting business.

Duques Hall at George Washington Univ. All coffee is 100% fair trade, and the company’s a family owned and operated coffee roasting business.

Java Green. 1020 19th St. NW. 202.775.8899. This well-loved organic eco cafe offers organic food with fair trade coffee.

Vernat George Washington Univ. All coffee is 100% fair trade, and the company’s a family owned and operated coffee roasting business.

[Here’s the US-wide list of fair trade coffee shops.]

Tags: coffee, fairtrade, washingtondc, dc, coffeeshop, cafe

0 Comments | Email this post

Kelly sent some digital pics from karaoke night in Chicago, which i wrote about a couple weeks ago. Enjoy –

Me, Anne, Kelly. I think this is at the beginning of the night, when we were still soberish.

Kelly belting it out with some guys I don’t remember.

Anne and Kelly, mid-sway –

Kelly really got into it. so did these guys.

I think this guy may’ve had a lil crush on Kelly –

Me and Anne and greenish martinis –

3 am or so — Kelly looks surprisingly sedate here –

Anne may be coming to visit LA in a couple months — I’ve heard Dimples is too serious. Karaoke bar recommendations?

4 Comments | Email this post

Being a grad student and working at home really has its privileges — I roll out of bed, turn on the coffee machine, and turn on the computer. Instantly, I’m at work. I was gonna post a picture of myself to illustrate my indolence, but after looking in the mirror, I changed my mind. Also, I don’t have a digicam.

Another benefit of my lifestyle: I can talk to Jay, the “green coffee buyer” for The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, for as long as I can keep him on the phone. Now, The Coffee Bean doesn’t carry ANY fair trade coffee. Here are Jay’s argument as to why not:

1. The Coffee Bean deals with special coffe, which, as I discussed before, generally compensates farmers fairly.

2. Fair trade certification costs money (true), which could be better spent on compensating farmers or lowering prices for consumers.

Jay seemed totally passionate about improving lives for coffee farmers. And it does seem like The Coffee Bean is working towards this — Their website boasts pictures and detailed stories of the benefiting farmers.

The problem here, though, is — How the hell would the consumer know this?

Jay’s argument: if the consumer’s really interested, Jay’s totally avaliable to talk with them — and The Coffee Bean can help them get involved and will even work with them to visit coffee farms in Guatamala and stuff.

Okay. I totally appreciate Jay’s openness — I mean, the guy gave me his cell phone number, and took an hour out of his day to talk to me, an individual coffee drinker.

However, I’m not sure I buy his argument that every coffee drinker who cares about where their coffee comes from should have to put forth the time and energy I did to find out that their coffee wasn’t made through labor exploitation.

Where does consumer activism end and corporate responsibility begin? Sure, as a slacker grad student, I have the time to research this stuff, go to FT conferences, and gab with Jay for hours on end during peak business hours, then blog about it. But is it really fair to say that if consumers “really care” about fair trade, they should take trips to Guatamala to find out what’s going on first hand?

I mean, isn’t this why we have independent auditors to begin with? Individual consumers have their own bills to pay, and can’t spend a big chunk of their time personally examining The Coffee Bean’s supply chain up close. A simple convo with the company doesn’t really cut it either. The Coffee Bean’s privately owned, and as one corporate director notes on today’s Christian Science Monitor, “It’s not credible if somebody is monitoring and reporting on themselves … you [also] need an independent monitor who has got integrity and is outside” the company.

The FT label, according to CSM, is assurance that coffee was grown in shady conditions that bode well for the land and that everyone in the supply chain actually got paid as promised. That little sticker lets consumers drink non-exploitative coffe while keeping their jobs and paying rent and putting coffee on the table for their family and friends.

To Jay: Enough excuses. Get stickered.

6 Comments | Email this post

I drank a lot and stayed over at my friend Jen’s last night, and this morning when I woke up my eyes were swollen shut. Alcohol immediately turns Jen firetruck red, but it has longer-term, more neferious and mysterious effects on my system. I didn’t feel normal until after 1.5 cups of coffee over a plantains-and-enchiladas brunch in Marina Del Rey.

Feel being the operative word. My eyes are still totally swollen shut, but the coffee de-comatosed me, at least. Those cups o’ joe, however, were probably not fair trade. If only I could order fair trade coffee at restaurants and coffee shops — kinda like the way I can ask for decaf or soy milk.

Of course, fair trade has its naysayers. Who are these capitalist meanies, you wonder? Surprisingly, not all of them are heartless, and many agree that yes, there is a coffee crisis going on, and it sucks for those farmers. I think it’s that many of these anti FT-ers just don’t quite understand what fair trade does, exactly. And I can’t say I blame them — It’s a little complicated, and under-reported in the media.

But first — I wanna clarify again that the problem is the gross coffee. Good coffee — usually called specialty coffee — makes pretty good money, usually because they require long-term contracts between growers and buyers — which means buyers have to play nice with the growers — to ensure the quality of the product. Thus specialty coffee — and this includes the stuff at Starbucks and The Coffee Bean — is not really the problem (though I still think they could make some changes). It’s the Folgers-Nescafe Frappe crap that’s perpetuating poverty.

The anti-FT argument, put simply, is that fair trade encourages farmers to grow MORE bad coffee by offering them more money than their coffee is worth. In theory, this kinda makes sense — If there’s so much coffee in the world that the beans are only worth 50 cents a pound, but we pay a livable wage of $1.26 a pound, the overcompensated farmers could, in a giddy fit, make even more worthless coffee for good money.

The problems with this theory: The $1.26 floor price is only ONE of many requirements for fair trade certification. To get that fair trade sticker, these farmers also have to put programs in place to improve the quality of their coffee AND diversify their crops. This means that FT farmers have to: 1) grow yummier coffee, and 2) grow other stuff (meaning less coffee). So as “altruistic” as FT sometimes sounds, we fair trade peeps are not just blindly handing out cash. You can get the nitty gritty details of FT requirements here.

Update, 2/4/06: In fact, part of the reason some coffee’s gross tasting is the coffee crisis itself! Desparate farmers are forced to pick their coffee cherries early, in order to sell the stuff for money before the banks come after them. Of course, this means that these farmers are making gross tasting coffee — and selling it for disgustingly low prices.

Lastly — FYI to the lone commentor on my last post: Kona coffee is grown in a region of Hawaii, which, as Jen hates having to point out to “mainland” people sometimes, is a part of the US. I’m not sure what that really has to do with my point in the last post, but there you go — and thanks for reading –

3 Comments | Email this post

My poor roommate’s lil sis — She’s crashing on our couch this week — I think it’s a mini vacation away from her parents — and every morning I quietly shuffle past her peaceful face only to wake up the whole neighborhood grinding my coffee beans. Seriously — why are those coffee grinders so fucking loud? I’m not THAT proud I grind my own beans –

Add that to the list of coffee issues we need to address. For now: picking up from the history lesson yesterday and moving into the present –

What the current problem is: Basically, we have too much coffee in the world — specifically, too much bad-quality, gross tasting coffee grown by farmers who don’t realize (and big producers who don’t care) that the coffee they’re growing is pretty shitty stuff. Combine that with a coffee-consuming world that also, for the most part, doesn’t realize or don’t care that they’re drinking shitty coffee, and you get farmers selling yucky coffee below cost, and Americans picking up supersized tubs of Ralphs brand coffee for $1.99.

The seemingly simple solution: Grow less coffee.

Of course, there are different opinions as to how to de-java — which is why we have both fair trade lovers and fair trade haters.

Tomorrow — The controversy examined. For now, I have to go apologize to Layla’s sister. Maybe I can appease her with a cup of joe –

Update: CoffeeGeek provides a more detailed take into how the “Big four” coffee companies (Nestle, Kraft, Proctor and Gamble, Sara Lee) encouraged Vietnam to enter the gross coffee market, creating the coffee crisis to line their pocketbooks.

Tags: fairtrade, coffee, nestle, kraft, proctorandgamble, saralee, vietnam

2 Comments | Email this post

Sometimes I think about my dissertation and feel so overwhelmed I run down the block to the 7-11, buy a cheap bottle of wine, and drink it with my roomates while watching a movie. But as of yesterday, I’ve given up my Netflix account — a Pavement DVD’s arriving tomorrow, and after that, it’s bye bye to those little red envelopes, invitations to distraction…

I have weird coping mechanisms, not an addictive personality — but one thing I’ll fully admit to being addicted to is coffee. I started drinking it as a sixth grader — one of the few privileges of going to a boarding school — and have pretty much stuck with it since, despite the insomnia and stuff as a pre-teen. My eyes water when I don’t drink it soon enough after waking up — I literally cry if I can’t get my java.

The wine’s never fair trade — 7-11 doesn’t carry that kind of stuff. But I was thinking today that although a lot of people have heard of fair trade, most people don’t know what it is, what it’s for — really, anything about it.

Which is really understandable, since we’re really, really removed from the whole food production process. (Note to Jen: That stuff you like in your hotdog bun was once a happy, squealing piglet. Like the ones made by icing, except alive and wiggly.) I’m not surprised most people don’t even know there’s a coffee crisis going on — I wouldn’t, if it weren’t for USFT.

Coffee problem 101: It pretty much all began in 1989. Until then, all the coffee-growing countries got together every year to decide how much coffee to make — kinda like what the oil countries do with oil — to keep prices at a certain level. In 1989 though, new countries — like Vietnam — started growing coffee, and the annual meeting ended without setting this quota.

So with more countries making coffee, and with countries already making coffee making more coffee in this quota-less environment, we got a coffee glut and prices plummeted. Of course, it was the small farmers who were affected (understatement).

Thus, the coffee crisis.

I know you all wanted to know but were just afraid to ask. And BTW — I did talk to the Coffee Bean guy this morning, for like an hour. His name’s Jay. Details TK.

** Update, 7/27/05: Conversation with Jay of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf here.

fair trade

2 Comments | Email this post

The procrastinating personality I’ve been cultivating has kept me from actually getting started on this, but last week my doc told me to record all my physical and mental sensations for the next three months or so.

Why, you may ask? Or maybe not, if you know me and my sometimes-sudden (Jen: sometimes?!) mood swings — they may be just intense PMS. Or, my doc thinks, the swings could be related to drinking. I responded “I can stop, I just don’t want to.” She countered: “that’s straight out of the AA book.”

For those of you who don’t know me that well — I’m well-adjusted, totally normal, and only drink about as much as Anne, maybe less. Seriously.

Some of these “symptoms,” though, seem relatively healthy — “Craving for sweets,” for example, is just part of Jen’s personality, as is “Nervous tension,” for Maureen, when she’s driving. And what about “Confusion”? I’d like to think that my quarter-life crisis is actually a healthy response to a world where many, many people suddenly wake up at 40 and realize their lives have no meaning –

But more importantly, this “diary” reminded me of the food diaries dieters are encouraged to keep when losing weight — a practice that not only consumes dieters with guilt and takes up a lot of time that could be used doing more important things, like drinking, but can also color nearly all aspects of life with weird food obsessions.

I left that land of obsession a while back, but the rest of the world has somehow normalized it. Bizarre eating behavior — and efforts that enforce it — is almost de rigeur now. The things I run across in the last couple weeks:

1. Maureen has me reading I’m Not the New Me — written by a somewhat overweight girl doing Weight Watchers, not really losing weight, and blogging about it on pound.
2. On Salon.com today, there’s a girl upset that her parents won’t get her an apartment unless she loses weight.
3. The latest TIME magazine reports on pro-ana and pro-mia sites, which characterize eating disorders as a “decision to pursue perfection.” Curious? visit ceruleanbutterfly.

The girls noted here are all “normal,” in the general sense of the word — I mean, their lives and habits seem like understandable reactions to the society they’re living in — In the sense that Jen’s sudden obsession with cupcake frosting (”food porn,” she calls it) is normal (Jen — can you email me that pic of you hitting on a pink frosted cookie with sprinkles?)

And unrelatedly — it took me a little while, but I’ve now reset my settings to let anyone post comments. Sorry ’bout that — Write me.

4 Comments | Email this post

In February, I went to a fair trade conference. This makes me sound like I’m somewhat of an activist, but embarassingly, I’m so not. A girl in the department sent an email to the grad student listserve asking if anyone would be interested in trying to get fair trade coffee on campus. I wrote back — yes I would — and the next thing I knew I was on a plane to Chicago for the 2nd Annual United Students for Fair Trade conference. In February, no less.

Snow sucks. But my college friend Anne, who lives there, researched bars in the two-block radius around the hotel I was staying in — which took us — me, Anne, and Kelly, another college friend — to Manhattan’s. Not exactly the city’s hotspot, but we knew no one, and we happend to be there on karaoke night. Some rounds later and Anne runs up to the “stage” area when she hears a Stones tune — nevermind that girls we didn’t know had the mic — and gets about half way though before realizing that no, this isn’t the Stones. As for me — Anne introduced me to a guy she was dating at the time. Then when his friend introduced himself like five minutes later, I waved him off, saying yeah, you’re anne’s guy, already met you. Kinda embarassing, but in bars you don’t frequent, there are no consequences.

Except the hangovers. The next morning two USTF leaders bounced up and down on my bed singing a song in Spanish — all I remember are “avanti” and “socialismo” — in an effort to wake me up. I made it for the afternoon sessions.

But I still learned enough that weekend to get really, really depressed about the world, with its money issues — which instead of inciting me to action, made me feel really helpless. Someone described it to be like trying to take down a skyscraper with a toothpick. And now, CAFTA’s been passed in the Senate, while most of the US public doesn’t know what CAFTA is, and most of those who do — like myself — don’t know what we can do about it.

Part of the trouble is that local info — the info that makes you feel like you can do your little part — is really, really hard to find. Take The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf for instance. There’s one walking distance from me, so when I got back from the conference, I sent them this message:

Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 12:46 PM
To: ! Comments
Subject: fair trade coffee

Dear Sir or Madam: I was wondering if your stores offer fair trade coffee. As a frequent Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf customer living near your headquarters in Los Angeles, I am concerned that the money I spend on my coffee may be contributing to international trade injustices. Please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks, Siel.

This is what I got back (excerpt):

Good Morning Siel! Thank you so much for taking the time to contact us! I can greatly appreciate your concerns…. We currently do not provide any Fair Trade coffee; rather, we choose to foster long-term relationships with coffee growers directly…. We are able to pay a higher price for our coffee, far exceeding the current coffee prices.

Without providing exact numbers (because I don’t have them available), we typically pay twice per pound as the average coffee company…. We also enter into long term contracts and relationships to ensure that we are always purchasing the highest quality product and paying a fair price for the coffee we purchase….

Which boils down to: The Bean, though not fair trade, pays fairer wages for their coffee than, say, Nescafe. Which is very pretty-sounding, except we still don’t know how much The Bean’s growers are paid unless you make a concerted effort to find out (I’ll try calling them tomorrow to pin down an exact number), compared to the FT price guarantee of at least $1.26 per pound for growers.

I’m not saying The Bean’s horrible — In fact they seem nice, compared to a lot of other companies out there. They recycle, for one, as the largest U.S. company awarded Certified Green Restaurant status by The National Green Restaurant Association. I don’t want to be an anal coffee prude who snubs all coffee without my seal of choice — that seems terribly yuppie — but I also think FT does a lot of great things — both for coffee growers and for coffee consumers.

Bean? Or no Bean?

Update, 7/23/05: Chicago karaoke pics here.

Tags: fairtrade, chicago, usft

0 Comments | Email this post

The free DVD player that my friend Scott gave me a few months back is broken already. This is after I went through a month of trying to contact COBY, the manufacturer, to send me a remote control for the damn thing, which Scott had lost.

Now I have the remote, but the DVD player just makes weird, clucking noises when I put a DVD in. Scott’s sister had won the cheap thing in some drawing. Free electronics are not to be trusted.

Today, trying to get rid of it, I had to do some serious research — I didn’t want to just dump it in the trash, but “recycle dvd player” in google only brought up recycling companies competing for business wastes. Finally, I found the Department of Public Works Bureau of Sanitation (Update: I don’t know why the info moved to a different site) website for LA County, which has a Hazardous Waste (E-waste) page for residents.

The easiest thing to do, if you live in LA, is to drop of your “e-waste” — unwanted electronic equipment — at U.C.L.A. S.A.F.E. Collection Center (PDF) on any Saturday between 8:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. Don’t go on any other day — they only take e-waste on Saturdays. They also don’t take computer software or business waste.

So I’ll be there this Saturday — incidentally the only day I have off from work these days — with other green-mindeds in LA, sharing electronic woes.

I need a DVD player, by the way.

U.C.L.A. S.A.F.E. CENTER, 550 Charles E. Young Dr. West Los Angeles, CA 90095, 1-800-98-TOXIC (1-800-988-6942)

Update, 8/31/05: This SAFE center is more than a little difficult to find. I recommend going N on Gayley until you hit Strathmore. Make a right on to Strathmore, then a right on to Charles E. Young Dr. If the road looks like an alley, you’re on the right track. — To your left, you’ll see what looks like an open garage with lots of junk. That’s the place, but you’ll need to go past that to the intersection where you can make a Uie, come back to the garage-like place, put your car in park and hand over what you’ve got to the college-age, rather disgruntled recycling center workers –

Update, 2/5/06: It’s now illegal to throw batteries in the trash. Recycling greenly isn’t any easier, however.

Update, 10/10/06: Here’s a list of all the hazardous waste drop offs in the city of LA –

Update, 1/10/07: The e-waste recycling options haven’t exactly gotten better, but here’s something listing where you CAN go recycle, as well as a brief look at a company trying to make e-recycling easier.

Tags: dvd, dvdplayer, recycle, ucla, losangeles

3 Comments | Email this post