Dude, It´s Only Coffee! 1

 That's what I said to my friend a couple of days ago.  We ran into each other in the local yuppie mart, also known as Choices supermarket, where the healthy and well-incomed like to shop.  Well, I am healthy, but not well-incomed, and sometimes I do like to buy myself a treat, and the milk is finally reasonably priced in that legendarily pricey market.  I also purchased some reasonably priced fancy chocolate cookies (more reasonably priced in other stores) as a treat.  First a little background on our random chat.

A couple of days earlier I was going to enjoy a coffee in a really nice café near where I live.  The staff and the owners are really lovely people.  If I have one criticism it is simply that almost no one there speaks English as their first language, for which reason, there can be miscommunications.  The young man serving me, a very pleasant and friendly Korean, accidentally poured me light roast instead of the musky and heady dark roasts to which my palette has been long accustomed.  

There is a history here.  I first became aware of the darker roasts when I was just 26 or so.  Another tenant in my house invited me to share a pot of coffee with her.  I had never tasted anything so good, so strong, dark and, dare I say, sexy?  I inquired and she said it was French dark roast, so that  soon turned into my favourite for coffee (still is!)  Did I also mention here that I almost never have anything in my coffee, just black and bitter, just like life, the blacker, the bitter!  But even if the light roasts taste like they were roasted for sissies, the dark roasts actually contain less caffeine, since it tends to get evaporated with extra heat.  

I don't think anyone was yet thinking much about fair trade during those days in the eighties.  I do recall the opening scene from Malcolm McDowell's film, Oh Lucky Man, featuring a coffee plantation worker somewhere in Central America about to get his hands chopped off, for whatever.  I did a little research after and it was confirmed to me that the workers on said plantations, that provide us with our morning kickstart here in the First World, have long been exploited, underpaid, overworked and treated sometimes worse than livestock.  

The following year I found a job as a telephone market research interviewer.   For just a little bit above minimum wage, five hours a day, I would be phoning random households to ask them questions about a whole variety of products and services.   I remember our two last contracts before I finally quit my job there.  The last one was about international banking.  The penultimate survey was about coffee.  Shortly afterward I had a nightmare.  I was going to work in the phone room and all the phone stalls were covered and dripping with blood.  I began to lose my voice.  With my doctor's permission, who diagnosed a strained larynx, I resigned and went back on pogey.  I am sure now, as I was then, back in the day, that it was a psychosomatic reaction, and that I was being impacted by continuing to participate in a job that caused me to enable bodies that ran against my ethics, and in my next post, I will write more about ethical coffee, among other things...