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.

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