Coffee health and ethics

Coffee growing in Goias, Brazil

With it being April Fool's Day, I should flex my creative muscles, come up with some fantastic story and post it here. Or, with it being Easter Monday, I should write about Easter eggs (both the real and the "copycat" chocolate kind). In fact there is an interesting piece of news I came across yesterday relating to the ranking of chocolate Easter egg manufacturers according to their use of (unsustainable) palm oil. But I will follow my intuition and, instead, write about coffee.

I do love my quality and responsibly-sourced cup of coffee, and I am always interested to hear more about what effects it might be having on my body, as well as about where coffee comes from, how it is grown and what social and environmental effects the cultivation of coffee has. I am a regular at Monmouth Coffee Company in Covent Garden. It is my "creative haunt", as I have come to see it. I just came across this interesting, if superficial Alternet article on the (potential) good and bad effects of coffee on health/the human body: "10 things coffee does to your body". Makes an interesting read for those of us who are coffee lovers (or haters), and possibly gives us one more reason to drink coffee...responsibly.

I have to say that I don't understand how people are able to drink any more than 1 cup of coffee per day. Even only one cup can be enough to make me jittery and unfocused for the rest of the day. That is one reason why I have resorted to drinking slightly less exciting, but just as good decaffeinated filter coffee.

At least the decaf I drink is organic (at the moment Monmouth sells decaf of "Tres Pueblos", Nicaragua which is very nice), but I am uncomfortably conscious of the larger quantities of water that are needed to process it as opposed to standard coffee, which already consumes a lot. I try to drink organic or - even better - biodynamic coffee (for example, see coffee from Fazenda Camocim in Brazil) where possible. But when I can't, even when drinking from supposedly more responsible coffee buyers and sellers like Monmouth, I can't help but think of the Black Gold documentary, which makes my conscience "twitch" - even though I tend to drink the Central and South American coffees as opposed to African coffees (the documentary is about Ethiopia, the (alleged?) birthplace of coffee). I haven't seen the documentary yet, but would be interested to. I am drawn to it in the same way that I am drawn to documentaries about climate change; I don't want to watch them (as I tend to then have panic attacks and nightmares about the end of the world as we know it), but I still end up doing so.

I am not a fan of what I would call "shock therapy" or Malthusian doomsday scenarios. Nevertheless, my philosophy is that one does need to know about the "dark side", but should then focus on positive solutions rather than getting depressed about it all and/or denying that anything can be done about it. It is particularly important to believe that you and I, even as two of 7 billion people, can do something about these things. One might call it "enlightened action".