Beyond their meager fair trade offerings, my real problem with Starbucks is that there are 314 of them within 5 miles of my zip code. (**Update, 9/1/05: Found out Delocator has some double listings — The actual number of Starbucks looks to be more like 250 or so. **Update, 9/5/05: The double listings have been deleted, but the distance measures are evidently messed up, at least for my zip. The actual number sits somewhere between 60 and 100, per my calculations. See comments for more details.).

That stat comes from Delocator, an anti-chain, pro-indie-biz site that points you towards independent coffee stores near you. According to them, Starbucks’ standardization “is hostile to the historical culture of the café and is dangerous, ultimately, to democratic principles.”

Starbucks is known for its ruthless competition, ousting small, independent cafés by paying higher rents — According to New Consumer mag, the company can open an outlet in 16 weeks and recoup its investment in three years.

With that kind of track record, the “good” things Starbucks does often just looks like greenwashing — And even that’s done half-ass. Fair trade coffee, according to the form letter I got from Starbucks, is supposed to be sold as a coffee of the day on the 20th of each month, or the third Tuesday of every month, according to ePebble. But the Starbucks by USC hasn’t brewed any fair trade in at least a few months.

This talk-and-no-action is nothing new; members of Organic Consumers Association have complained about it before, as has Global Exchange. So I sent Starbucks an email asking about it, and got the same form email back that told me about the policy in the first place, which also claimed this:

Fair Trade coffee, along with any of Starbucks coffees, can be requested at anytime; if need be store Partners will use a french press to brew the coffee.

Yeah? So I stopped at the Starbucks on Pico and Westwood today and asked for a cup of FT. “I don’t think we HAVE any fair trade,” said my barista. I thought she meant she didn’t have any brewed FT, but no — the two of us scanned all the bags of coffee on sale, and no FT could be seen anywhere.

Did I just stop by at an unfortunate time, or is Starbucks lying to me? (**Update, 9/3/05: Academia Nut reports that no FT coffee could be found at her local Starbucks in DeKalb, Indiana, either, on 9/2/05). I’m gonna try sending them a third email — though I may get that form letter a 3rd time — (**Update, 9/4/05: Starbucks sent me a non-form email, and I found a Starbucks that’ll brew me fair trade cofee. More details here.)

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Got this in the mail today:

Not sure how they got my name… It came specifically to me, not my roomates — which flatters me a little –

So I’m going for it! The deal: Every 2 weeks, I’ll get several servings each of 12-16 types of in-season, all organic, 90% California-grown fruits-n-veggies delivered to my door. The cost: $29 per delivery.

Yes, some people live in Rochester and have room to grow small urban vegetable gardens. That’s not gonna happen in Siel-land, partly because there’s no gardenable land, and partly because things wilt around me. And the farmer’s market near my place meets only on Thursdays — my school day, so I usually miss it entirely. When I make it there, the produce is mostly not organic — plus it’s pretty tough trying to walk back eight blocks with a ten lb bag of oranges.

I get some organic stuff at Trader Joe’s, but what’s up with all the packaging on their produce? Apples don’t need individualized compartments in four-pack plastic containers, recyclable or not. Exhibit for those unfortunate TJ’s-less people: to the left is what their tomatos come in. Unnecessary, especially if one wants just 1 or 2 tomatos, not 7. Plus, a lot of TJ’s organic stuff seems to come from far, far away places, like New Zealand. Why?

Meaning that I love TJ’s, but I’m with Paul Johnson, founder of Organic Express. According to their website:

Paul was frustrated by the inconvenience of shopping for organic foods.
Searching for alternatives, and being dissatisfied with everything he found, Paul decided to create what he was looking for.

Thus: Until an organic farmer’s market miraculously materializes near me, I have Organic Express. Hopefully their veggies won’t be overpackaged. I’m a little concerned that this’ll be an overwhelming amount of produce — but then again, I like challenges. Especially yummy ones…

**Update, 9/6/05: Got my first shipment! The only packaging: 2 small plastic bags for the tomatos and green beans. Everything came in a sturdy cardboard box — with a note to return the box, as they’ll be reused! I heart Organic Express!

**Update, 9/9/05: Stephanie at Packed in Saccharin tried Organic Espress, and she hearts it too.

**Update, 10/1/05: I found some other organic produce deliverers, and am weighing my options…

Filed in: organic environment shopping losangeles california food vegetarian

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I used to get places ahead of time. I used to get straight A’s. I used to sit down at a table like a civilized person for my breakfast cereal, then wash the bowl and spoon and put them away immediately like a very good girl.

Something went terribly wrong in my 20s.

On the upside, I’ve learned I’m quite the prolific knitter when I’m hung over. Admire to the left the baby sweater I created for my friend and mommy-to-be while in a post-binge-drinking-at-slumber-party stupor over the weekend. The pink yarn is 100% bamboo –

Still, I feel terribly dilettantish, with no raison d’être for my more-than-quarter century existence. Saturday: Went to the Basquiat exhibit at the MOCA — He OD’d when just a few months older than I am now, with a lot more to show for his short life than I have to show.

At least I’m in good company. I’ve been getting a lot of clickthroughs from Bitch PhD, not due to any of my more thought-out comments on women’s rights, but for a comment I made about procrastinating on dissertation work.

This week: I’m taking an alcohol hiatus to see if that’ll effect any kind of change in my self-motivation efforts. Slowly working up to the dissertation thing — Today I’m attacking the kitchen. My roommates’ white board notes have gone from horror (”We have ants!) to ominous foreboding (”If we keep leaving dirty dishes in the sink, the ants will never leave…”).

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If only fair trade issues weren’t so damn complicated. My friend Scott says he took a look at my blog, but that the “coffee stuff” was way over his head. I pointed him to the “Coffee Crisis Series” on the top right hand corner for a crash course. According to him, I need to make that link more prominent.

Anyway — this got us talking about trade and labor issues in general — including the problems we have in our own golden state — a couple weeks ago, LA Weekly reported on the second Grapes of Wrath situation we have going on a little north of where I am. Pretty fucking depressing. (**Update, 9/4/05: UFW’s making new efforts to organize, as reported by the LA Times. Hopefully we’ll get some better news soon. **Update, 9/16/05: An article from the Ecconomist addressing the same issue avaliable here)

Many people don’t even know what fair trade coffee is, let alone care enough to look for it. And even concerned citizens have to look pretty damn hard. As I’ve complained about before, it’s tough to find a brewed cup of fair trade coffee anywhere in Los Angeles — though the next time I’m in San Francisco, I’ll get my morning fix at Coffee to the People.

A surprising number of people I’ve met first learned about fair trade issues through Coldplay — I love what Chris Martin’s doing, despite the overenthusiastic “coachellow”-ing of his already-commercialized songs. Coldplay and other celebrities — mostly British — are working on bringing fair trade issues to the forefront. Unfortunately, loud concerts and soundbyte-plus-one-image ads don’t really allow for much insight into this complicated issue.

I guess the idea is that people will find out about fair trade then go on to learn about it on their own, like Claudia/temporal is doing. But she seems like an uber-motivated concergoer — I think the average person would just sign the damn petition and move on.

Still, it’s a start. My own strategy has been to, um, blog things. How to take down this capitalist skyscraper with a fair trade toothpick…

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With all the ado over the new(ish) Dove ads, I’m wondering if advertisements for beauty products can ever be considered positive from a feminist standpoint. If you live in LA, you couldn’t've missed the ads — Women with realistically curvy figures, celebrating their bodies in white cotton panties and bras — while selling cellulite cream.

Rebecca Traiser’s article in Salon rants against the conflicting messages women are faced with today: You’re body’s gorgeous as is — aside from the jiggly-looking parts.

In a sense, makeup and cellulite cream seem very benign, especially compared to the injecting, poisoning, and cutting and stitching up of skin involved in botox or cosmetic surgery. I realize putting makeup isn’t all fun and games — Some women feel ashamed to leave the house without mascara, which I find a little sad but also can empathize with. And in general, we use makeup to make ourselves look “better,â€? with better defined by the perennially young, sexualized images in mainstream media.

But as third wave feminism’s pointed out, playing with makeup can be a fun, even subversive practice — One that allows women to cultivate female-centric subcultures (slumber parties!) and one that gives women time and space to pamper themselves (as opposed to taking care of baby or cooking for hubby). From a time-investment standpoint, makeup wearing has at least the potential to be a positive thing for women.

For me, it’s when these beauty rituals combine with money issues that they become problematic. Because really, we could spend the cellulite cream money on the really important stuff, like vegan condoms, a green IRA, or a new business.

Full disclosure. I wear makeup everyday. I even put on eyeliner before going to the gym. I have a $50 monthly budget allotment for toiletries. Most of this money goes to The Body Shop for lotion and shampoo and stuff, but I probably spend a good $20 a month on purely-for-beauty products.

If I went makeup-free for a year, I wouldn’t have to cancel my Environment California contributions next month – I could double it. More realistically, I could put that cash in my IRA.

Okay, that’s not realistic. Seriously, I could buy nice alpaca wool to knit more baby booties or download 240 angry girl songs from iTunes. Or I could go in on that Salon.com subscription Mok and I were thinking of splitting and actually support independent journalism instead of just giving it lip service. Or I could fly out to NYC and pick things back up with that guy I met in May…

I’m not quite ready to face the world naked-faced yet, but I’m beginning to think that my eyeliner habit may really be holding me back –

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In a fit of generosity due to my student loan coming through, I signed up to donate $10 a month to Environment California when a canvasser accosted me while coming out of Trader Joe’s yesterday. Apparently, a solar-energy bill, dubbed the Million Solar Roofs Initiative, needs 2 more votes to get through the Appropriations committee in Cali. The deadline’s tomorrow.

Did anyone else in SoCal know about this? When I got home, I saw Treehugger had posted an update. But until yesterday, this was news to me — (**Update, 9/9/05: The Millian Solar Roofs Initiative got killed! It got through the appropriations committee, but died due to political feuding between the democrats and the governator! C’mon blue senators — We can do better than this. I’m disillusioned enough about the Republicans in power, without Dems adding more pain to the mix. An excellent editorial from the LA Times here.)

Anyway: I’ve no more money to spend this week, but in order not to study for my qualifying exams, I looked through Environment California’s intro packet and read about Green Century Funds, enviro-socially responsible mutual funds founded by enviro-advocacy groups.

I don’t think I’d even have an IRA if it hadn’t been for my brief stint at a mutual fund company before making a mad dash out of the 9-5 world. The company had an amazing retirement plan though, kicking in the equivalent of 10% 15% of my annual pay into a retirement fund for me, without my ever contributing a cent. Too bad I left after a little over a year — I was only 10% vested.

Still, the retirement plan converted into an IRA when I left, and now I’m gonna transfer the long-neglected thing to Green Century, converting it into a Roth while I’m at it since Suze says that’s the way to go.

Damn — I should’ve waited a few weeks before transferring all my mom’s stuff to Washington Mutual –

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Speaking of Californians without health insurance — My mom was one of those, until about a month ago when I put her in a Blue Cross HMO. Seemingly a simple, worthy task, except she wasn’t happy about the $200+ per month price tag.

Me: What if there’s an emergency, like cancer?
Her: If I get cancer I’m not going to the hospital. The ones who go die faster.

Um, okay — This is coming from a woman who has mothered an MD she’s very proud of (not me, my sister).

My sis emailed today. Says she, “I talked to mom about the importance of primary care, but I’m not sure if she got the concept. She responded by saying it would be cool if I could do dog cloning with that scientist in korea…”

And in an additional disturbing twist, my mom keeps referring to her Roth IRA as a “health thing.”

In my paranoid moments, I wonder if a conspiracy programs the un-health-insured against health insurance. They poor don’t not HAVE it, they don’t WANT it, the argument might go.

Is it overly-idealistic of me to think that if we had more female policymakers, health care in the US — and public knowledge about health care — would look vastly different? At the very least, policies that attemt to control women’s bodies would be challenged more frequently. Feinstein, the only female on the 17-member Judiciary Committee, is also the only member who’s publicly vowed to question Supreme Court nominee John Roberts’ views on abortion.

Boxer and Feinstein, our lovely Cali senators, do what they can, but they’re often lonely voices. These days I’m barraged with emails to sign petitions and donate money toward protecting women’s right to choose. Seriously, I get several a day.

If you’re at work, subvert the system through your desktop: Take a min to thank Feinstein and sign the Two Million for Roe petition from Planned Parenthood urging the senate to confirm only nominees who’ll uphold Roe v. Wade.

**Update, 10/1/05: Feinstein grilled Roberts and voted against him. The fight to save Roe v. Wade still rages on — Here’s the latest on the No on 73 Campaign.

Tags: roevwade, health, insurance, prochoice, feminism, losangeles, california

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When I get depressed about how hard it is to buy anything fair trade locally, I think of Britain, where FT awareness is much more widespread. Coldplay fans, for ex, were able to sign Oxfam’s “big noise” petition by texting “TRADE” (87233) on their cell phones during a Coldplay concert (via textually.org).

Then I remember how Chris Martin sang “Coachel-low” insteasd of “Yellow” at Coachella earlier this year. That, and his constant beseeching the fans to take pictures at specific moments during his songs, really turned me off of whatever love I had for “Yellow” when it first came out when I was in high school –

Anyway — hopefully things’ll change soon at USC, in terms of FT, if not Coldplay — The plan now: Since Starbucks seems to be the most-served coffee brand on campus, we’ll start by asking TrojHosp to ask Starbucks to switch their USC offerings to fair trade (served at:Town & Gown (USC’s official catering service, which caters to Davidson Conference Center and other locations), Cafe 84, Trojan Grounds, Annenberg Coffee Cart, and University Club, and possibly Upstairs Cafe, Popovich Cyber Cafe, and Shop Cafe at Harris Hall).

A second thing: Two locations on campus, Tutor Hall and Ground Zero Coffeehouse, currently serve fair trade coffee (Peet’s, and Roasterie Tea), though I don’t think Ground Zero’s 100%. Perhaps we can ask if we could change the coffee offered at the other outlets to these vendors, whom we have existing relationships with.

We’ll back up our argument by saying we have the support of USC Costa Rica (Sean’s group), who have already said they’ll donate the fair trade coffee they have from their Costa Rica program if we were to launch a campaign. In addition, Sean thought 3 other campus groups — Environment First (which USC-CR falls under), Human Rights Action, and Peace and Conflict Scholars — who have a combined mailing list of over 300, would be interested.

So going in with this info would, in the best case scenario, make TrojHosp decide they’ll go ahead and switch after our meeting, partly cuz it’s not too hard to switch — after all, they don’t have to swich vendors — and partly cuz they don’t want the headache of a fair trade campaign launched “against” them.

We’re gonna try to make the switch happen before FT month hits in October, at which point we can decide whether or not we want to try and launch a campaign. And if we do, we have the FT rice people, we have the free coffee from USC Costa Rica, we have a mailing list of 300 people we can try to canvass, and we have introverted, reclusive writers (English grad students) who can pen convincing letters to the Daily Trojan and beyond.

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Wow – Some really passionate American Apparel fans out there! Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – My AA tank hugs me like no other tank does, and everyone says so.

Point well taken about the allegations of the women who are suing – as of yet, they are still just that – allegations. And thanks, alisa, for pointing out that Ari’s article itself is questionable. I thought I’d done my research, but obviously not enough. I might say I trust Business Week somewhat more; BW says former workers “told stories of senior managers who pursued sexual relationships with less senior colleagues and rewarded their favorites with promotions, company cars, and apartments.� This, if true, is a serious problem.

But I think the real issue that I’m trying to grapple with is the space between celebrating a woman’s sexual freedom – to be practiced as one desires, as in the case of the anonymous poster who likes to sleep with bosses – and the sexual coercion many women feel pressured by on a daily basis, at work and beyond.

Meaning that I’m happy for anonymous if she can get what she wants in her pussy (assuming anonymous is female) – more power to her. I would love to work in a sexually open environment, if it were a gender-egalitarian workplace. But as Shree Mulay, director of the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women, points out in Montreal’s The Gazette (no link – got it thru Lexis-Nexis – free via school), “A lot of women may just go along and not make a noise about it (to keep their jobs).”

I think the “consensuality� of sex becomes difficult to back up in environments with unequal power and authority. And in our world, men usually have the power, and women often have to make the choice – go along with it, or keep the job. Yes, the choice is there. But the options, unless you really do wanna fuck your boss, are pretty unattractive.

And I personally would not like to have to pick between an oversexed work environment and a third-world-labor-exploitative one. My AA shopping’s still on hiatus, until I hear more about the lawsuits and policies.

**Update, 10/21/05: A new article about American Apparel by JANE’s Claudine Ko, and some more fully explained opinions on the part of green LA girl –

Filed in: americanapparel sex harrasment sweatshop losangeles california shopping

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I’m kinda glad my friends are gonna have babies — I get to knit cute little things –

Also, I’m really glad I got a new digicam. Her name: Pixelle.

These flower power booties are for a friend who’s still in the closet about her pregnancy cuz of work. Funny how that’s still a liability for working women… She can get a few months off, but only without pay.

Which gets me thinking about employee benefits in general — maternity leave, vacation time, health insurance — all things we skimp on in the US. Can’t blame it all on the companies. According to yesterday’s SF Chronicle (via Packed in saccharin), the cost of health care’s going up so fast that companies can’t pay for it. So they’re cutting back, “offloading costs on workers in the face of double-digit annual price increases.”

My friend and I aren’t part of the more than 6 million Californians without health insurance, but if things don’t change, we might get there. SB840 — the California Health Insurance Reliability Act — would give all Californians coverage and is in the Assembly right now. You know you hate your HMO — Send a letter (word doc) to your state senator supporting the bill.

**Update, 10/17/05: SB840 passed Oct. 5! Got a letter from State Senator Jackie Speier thanking me for supporting it :)

Filed in: health insurance knitting california

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