Alarming

Sometimes, when I'm out in public and I hear that generic ring tone on an iPhone I suddenly feel far too intimately connected with the person who is attached to that phone. "Hey? What are you doing using the tone I wake up to in the morning?" flashes through my mind and somehow it feels like that person was in bed with me, if only for a nanosecond. It became a preoccupation to change the ring tone for the morning alarm.

This was a good idea not only because that generic ring tone was making me feel a little too close to strangers in public, but also because it was causing a startled reaction when waking up every morning. Why wake up to something that startles? Eyes opening to the day should find a welcoming of some sort. So now I hear the sweet sounds of Jerry Douglas and his guitar. This transition from sleep has also made finding my first cup of coffee for the day much more enjoyable. Instead of the startled awakening and jump-up-because-snooze-was-pushed-too-many-times chain reaction, I get to arrive in the kitchen with a calm state of mind.

The ritual of preparing coffee and enjoying the extraction is a personal one and reasons for drinking it are many. As I take my time in selecting which beans I am curious about, weighing, grinding, taking in the dry notes, adding the first few grams of hot water and watching the grounds bloom, I contemplate where those beans came from. Who planted these seeds (coffee is a seed)? How did they find their way to market? Did they get stored well during transport? How was money changing hands? Were the people who grew and harvested the coffee seeds paid any kind of respectable sum?

My curiosity about coffee leads me to all kinds of information. One bit I heard recently was from a person telling her story about traveling to Africa and seeing coffee farming production practices. She relayed how one woman coffee worker had taken her hand-sorted coffee cherries (what they are when picked but not yet processed to get the seeds out) to be weighed so she could receive payment.

Sorting - Image from www.verite.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the traveling woman asked how much the worker had received for her product, it was an approximate equivalent of $20.00 for about 1000 pounds of coffee cherries brought in over 3-5 months...alarming.

So I think more about what I can do to help this situation. Becoming aware is a pretty good start. Making the best decisions I can with the information I have a little bit at a time seems like a realistic approach. It may be that I spend too much time getting to the bottom of where the coffee I drink comes from, and sometimes I wonder about the information I'm given. How do I know it's accurate? I keep asking questions, I keep looking for more details. Case in point, in writing up this blog and finding the above image, I discovered the website from which it came Verite and I learned more about forced labor in coffee production.

I also think about the other products I consume in my life. I am currently typing on a Mac. Once I found Verite and began looking around the site, I was happy to find a positive bit of news on Apple.

Image from www.verite.org

Read the brief story on Apple here.