Coffee
After going to Nicaragua, picking out coffee in the grocery store has gotten incredibly difficult for me.
Fair trade coffee is ethical and provides jobs in desperately poor rural areas.
Shade grown coffee tastes better, can't be factory farmed, and preserves the habitat of neo-tropical migrant birds by keeping tropical forests intact. Also it must be picked by hand, so it is usually fair trade.
Organic coffee doesn't involve horrible chemicals and is usually fair trade.
Single origin coffee is a little more fair trade than other fair trade coffee and tastes better.
Also I'd really like to buy Nicaraguan coffee because I like to imagine that some of the cost will make it to the farm I visited.
So I just spent an absurd amount of time standing in the store reading all of these packages hoping to find something that is at the very least shade grown and not the most expensive thing on the shelf. The only time I can find something that meets all of my criteria is when I bother going to the hippie stores or the coffee shop downtown. And I'm taking 20 credit hours this semester so... when the hell do I have time for that?
Fair trade coffee is ethical and provides jobs in desperately poor rural areas.
Shade grown coffee tastes better, can't be factory farmed, and preserves the habitat of neo-tropical migrant birds by keeping tropical forests intact. Also it must be picked by hand, so it is usually fair trade.
Organic coffee doesn't involve horrible chemicals and is usually fair trade.
Single origin coffee is a little more fair trade than other fair trade coffee and tastes better.
Also I'd really like to buy Nicaraguan coffee because I like to imagine that some of the cost will make it to the farm I visited.
So I just spent an absurd amount of time standing in the store reading all of these packages hoping to find something that is at the very least shade grown and not the most expensive thing on the shelf. The only time I can find something that meets all of my criteria is when I bother going to the hippie stores or the coffee shop downtown. And I'm taking 20 credit hours this semester so... when the hell do I have time for that?