by Taylor Clark
In other words, Fair Trade is not a viable solution to the global coffee crisis. It obviously helps the lucky few who buy into the co-op system and get their farms certified, like Daniel and Reynaldo. But advocating Fair Trade as a panacea is like trying to put out a four-alarm inferno with a squirt gun; although it might help a little, it’s not going to extinguish the blaze.
There is a better answer to the problem, though — one that requires no co-op systems or guilt-inspired purchases of sour beans. It’s quite simple. Just indulge your inner spoiled brat and demand the best-tasting coffee you can get.
Bucking the Big Four
Before I launch into an argument in support of the happy global effects of conspicuous coffee consumption at Starbucks and other upscale coffee-houses, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Starbucks has never voluntarily done much to help struggling coffee growers. On the rare occasions when the company has taken steps to better the lives of farmers, it has generally only done so because a consumer group was planning a protest or a boycott. When the farmer welfare issue first threatened to tarnish the company’s public image in 1995, for example — after the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Project began exposing the horrible labor conditions for Latin American coffee workers — Starbucks responded by issuing a much-publicized code of conduct for its growers. This move won the company wide praise in the media, yet those who looked closely noted that the “code” was nothing more than a toothless statement about Starbucks’s beliefs and values. It contained no actual pledge that Starbucks would change its buying practices, only platitudes about how the company thought people should be treated with dignity and so forth.
The staving-off-protests strategy continued over most of the next decade. It’s not that Starbucks did nothing at all — the company donated millions to the humanitarian charity Care and sporadically built schools, clinics, and coffee mills in needy communities. But it was stalling from making any substantive changes in the way it did business with farmers. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Starbucks fended off criticism by explaining that a thorough study on the issue was in the works, but this study was consistently delayed by something or other. It diverted attention to its new paper cup, made from 10 percent recycled fibers (which took eight years to develop) and to its purchases of renewable power. And besides, the company maintained, tiny Starbucks couldn’t do much to change things anyway. (Despite its perceived ubiquity, it only buys a little over 2 percent of the world’s coffee.) They offered rationalizations: “We would like to give [farmers] the support they need to make changes, but it’s their country and their business, not ours,” Mary Williams, Starbucks’s longtime head green-coffee buyer, told Seattle Weekly in 1999.
When I spoke with the now-retired Williams seven years later, she held to this argument, and she unleashed a bit of her pent-up frustration about the actions of protesters as well. (Williams eventually grew so irritated with their claims, which she considered deliberately misleading, that the company barred her from meetings with consumer groups altogether.) “I remember once there was somebody outside one of our stores handing out a pamphlet with a starving child on the front, and the headline was ‘Starbucks refuses to pay their coffee farmers a living wage,’ ” she recalled. “But Starbucks doesn’t own these farms, and it doesn’t control coffee pickers. Starbucks is so far removed from that poor child that it never could have made a dent in his life. These are countries where the culture is their own worst enemy.” Even coming from the mouth of a corporate coffee buyer, this is an exceedingly cynical statement — if the company could never make a dent in farmers’ lives, why bother to lift a finger at all? — yet much of what she says is true. Companies like Starbucks can try to inspire large farms to treat their workers better, but they can’t order them to do anything. In this spirit, Starbucks recently announced an actual concrete policy change — it will pay growers a premium of up to $0.10 per pound if they can prove they obeyed certain environmental and labor codes. The program will be audited by a third party to ensure that the company sticks to it. *
But there’s another, more significant reason why the sentiment behind that pamphlet isn’t accurate: Starbucks’s astonishing success at popularizing high-quality beans has actually been keeping the coffee industry’s head above water. Let’s take a second and go back to the source of all this misery for coffee growers — the glut of awful robusta coffee. The problem, remember, is that huge coffee conglomerates like Procter and Gamble are vacuuming up these cheap, acrid beans to save money, then chemically treating them and adding them to their canned blends. This leaves arabica producers with a smaller market for their crop, driving prices downward. For these farmers, then, low-quality robusta is the enemy. Their fortunes rise and fall on the world’s demand for good coffee beans, and no one has done more to generate an insatiable global thirst for high-quality coffee than Starbucks.
Starbucks has done such an excellent job of making coffee connoisseurs out of average Americans, in fact, that competition for the world’s best beans grows fiercer every year. As a result, specialty-coffee companies are paying more and more to secure a good supply, which is exactly the sort of trend that helps farmers. It’s all tied to quality; if the brew tastes good, then the company that roasted the beans probably paid a decent price for them. Even Starbucks, the perennial punching bag of Fair Trade advocates, paid an average of $1.42 per pound for its coffee in 2006, which is $0.16 higher than the Fair Trade price. (Historically, though, Starbucks has typically paid a few cents less than Fair Trade rates.) The company has also won praise from Oxfam for doing 30 percent of its business directly with growers, leading all major coffee buyers. This isn’t necessarily benevolence in action, mind you; it’s only the reality of the marketplace. Every bit as much as farmers need its cash, Starbucks relies on loyal growers to satisfy its ever-increasing need for high-quality beans. If gourmet coffee roasters don’t pay a stable price, their bean sources disappear.
In contrast, the conglomerates that suck up bad beans share none of these worries. Because they will remove the taste from the coffee and reinject it with synthetic flavorings, quality is not a concern; they’ll just buy whatever’s cheap. And the so-called Big Four coffee conglomerates — Nestlé, Procter and Gamble, Philip Morris, and Massimo Zanetti (which bought Sara Lee’s coffee brands, including Hills Bros. and MJB, in 2005) — buy an enormous amount of coffee. All told, they provide 60 percent of America’s coffee supply, and they make massive profits at it. According to Oxfam, Nestlé earns a profit margin of 26 percent on its world-spanning instant-coffee business. For coffee that will be chemically reconfigured anyway, the multinationals will gladly pay as little as $0.25 a pound for raw beans.
If you’re seeking a culprit for the plight of coffee growers, look no further than the Big Four — and, by extension, those who purchase their exploitative coffee products. After all, these conglomerates have long been ratcheting up the amount of robusta in their blends, yet consumers have kept torturing their own taste buds without protest. In 1989, major blends like Folgers and Yuban were 50 percent robusta; today, they’re 65 percent robusta. As long as people accept this ongoing trend, farmers will suffer. Oddly enough, the roaster Paul Katzeff — a man so steeped in Left Wing radicalism that he once protested farming conditions in El Salvador by pouring buckets of fake blood on the steps of a hotel where an SCAA convention was taking place — explained the state of affairs quite lucidly. “At Starbucks, they don’t want to harm anybody, and they don’t want to help anybody,” he told me. “They just want to make money. They’re neutral. I wouldn’t say to Howard Schultz that he’s a murderer for not buying enough Fair Trade coffee. But I will say to other companies who buy as cheap as they can that their actions are killing people — starving them, keeping a living wage from them.”
This is why concerned coffee drinkers should revel in their gourmet habit. It’s a simple formula: more demand for good beans leads to better prices for growers. Helping lift farmers from pove
rty, then, isn’t so much a matter of hectoring companies like Starbucks (even if the company isn’t the human rights champion it claims to be) as it is of making sure people never drink the cheap and exploitative coffee offered by conglomerates like the Big Four. Pushing consumers to cultivate a high-quality coffee habit might seem like just another utopian scheme, no different from Fair Trade advocates prodding people to buy based on ethics. But unlike Fair Trade, gourmet coffee is already an entrenched part of mainstream American life. Plus, while consumers don’t always consider the ethical status of their coffee, everyone wants a high-quality product.
Finally, we have a humanitarian reason to pay four dollars for a latte: the more snobbish we are about the coffee we drink, the better things work out for the farmers who produce the beans. And really, the true problem has always been that we’ve never paid enough for our coffee. A dime for a cup of Joe was a fantastic value in decades past, but who ever said it was fair? As Kenneth Davids, a top coffee taster and the editor of the Coffee Review, points out, the best wines in the world sell for thousands of dollars a bottle, yet the globe’s best coffee is cheaper per cup than a can of Coke. So those who feel guilty about spending a small fortune on coffee might want to tell themselves this: maybe they’re just paying what it’s actually worth.
7
What’s in Your Cup
It probably didn’t make anyone choke on their oatmeal, but still, readers of the New York Times on the morning of January 7, 1927, must have at least paused in bewilderment for a moment when they spotted the peculiar item on page 21, buried amid articles on steamboat inspection and contraband whisky confiscation. “Coffee Challenge,” blared the headline, “Minnesota Drinker Invites All Comers to Championship Contest.”
The drinker in question was one Gus Comstock, a barbershop porter in the remote town of Fergus Falls, near the North Dakota border. Comstock, it seems, was blessed with a unique gift: the man could drink a lot of coffee. Months before, he had set the first-ever world coffee-drinking record, downing sixty-two cups of it over a ten-hour span. But two challengers soon bettered this mark; H. A. Streety of Armadillo, Texas, declared that he had knocked back seventy-one cups in under nine hours, while Perry Wilson of Canyon, Texas, managed a seventy-two-cup effort in the standard ten hours. (Apparently, Texas was something of a coffee-drinking-contest talent mill.) Stung to the quick, Comstock announced his plan to take back the crown for good, pledging not to quit until he had surpassed his goal of one hundred cups of coffee consumed.
A few days after the Times story, a mob of spectators packed into the Hotel Kaddatz to witness Comstock’s bid for liquid-intake immortality. The contender got off to a blistering start, downing fifteen eight-ounce cups of black coffee in the first hour, his incredible coffee-drinking ability dazzling the crowd. As the contest wore on, Comstock showed his versatility: he sometimes threw in cream and sugar, sometimes cream or sugar, sometimes nothing. After several hours of robust imbibing, Comstock took a short break and submitted himself to a physician’s examination; aside from a mild fever, the doctor said, he was in “pretty good shape.” But as the Times reported a few days later, “the rest threw Gus off his stride,” and his swigs grew “somewhat labored” toward the end. Finally, Comstock had to give in after seven hours and fifteen minutes of action, with an impressive final tally of eighty-five cups — a record no challenger has broken since.
This quest for coffee-drinking greatness raises a few important questions. First, just how bored do you have to be before watching a guy drink coffee for seven hours sounds like an entertaining prospect? But more relevant to our purposes, what was in the coffee he was drinking? Shouldn’t eighty-five cups of caffeinated coffee — more than five gallons of the stuff — have killed him or at least left him a quivering mess? Well, yes. Fortunately for Comstock, the competition-grade coffee at the Hotel Kaddatz must have been little more than hot water with a hint of coffee flavor. If he had tried his stunt at a present-day Starbucks with the chain’s brawny drip brew, he would have consumed 13.6 grams of pure caffeine, well over the fatal oral dose of five to ten grams. In truth, he would have grown too shaky and disoriented from caffeine intoxication (an actual medical condition) to get even halfway to the record.
Comstock likely wasn’t all that concerned with what was in those cups — fixated as he was on securing a prominent position in the history of Western civilization — but today’s coffee enthusiasts obsess over the smallest details of their daily brew, down to the specific farm from which their beans hail. Unlike Comstock’s day, when a man could get national media attention for drinking five gallons of coffee, * coffee lovers now focus on quality, not quantity. For modern aficionados of the bean, less is more; the perfect one-ounce shot of espresso is the gourmet coffee world’s holy grail. And since café goers today are so finicky, coffee companies come up with ever-more extravagant claims about the quality of their wares — everyone wants the consumer to see their product as the finest gourmet indulgence available. As the coffee veteran Gary Talboy put it, “I’ve never met anyone in this business who claimed to sell almost the best-quality coffee.”
At the top of the boasting heap sits Starbucks, a company that spent decades cultivating its image of luxury and refinement. Its beans, the Starbucks Web site tells us, are “the world’s best.” Every shot of espresso the company pulls has both a “billowing body” and a “dark, intense heart,” which makes the product sound more like a mythological sea creature than something you can drink. The chain’s marketing department is still as crafty as ever, but now, with forty million customers to please each week, Starbucks is having a tougher time maintaining its reputation as a top-notch roaster. How, customers might ask, can something be both a gourmet delicacy and a mass-produced product you can find at almost any grocery store?
In a sense, asking if Starbucks sells truly top-quality coffee is like investigating whether McDonald’s dishes up the best hamburgers money can buy. Both are huge chains, which seems to disqualify them from the start; their focus on efficiency and throughput means they spend as little time as possible on each individual product they serve. But McDonald’s doesn’t portray itself as the Godiva of beef, nor does it charge the highest prices in the marketplace. Starbucks, on the other hand, undoubtedly makes its customers pay gourmet prices. In fact, according to British government statistics, in En-gland a cappuccino now costs more than a line of cocaine. If consumers are paying that kind of money, shouldn’t the product give them a similar thrill?
Or are they getting too much of a thrill already? After all, coffee drinkers don’t just worry about the quality of what they’re buying; they also wonder if their favorite daily habit is bad for their health. And despite Starbucks’s marketing savvy and its real estate machine, one tiny molecule has always been a crucial component of the company’s success: caffeine. Why else would the chain’s customers need to come in every day, if not to stave off withdrawal from an addictive drug they must have just to feel normal? And our cravings for coffee can be fiercer than we realize, even overriding our other little joys in life. For instance, in one eye-opening 2005 survey sponsored by Dunkin’ Donuts, pollsters found that respondents were more inclined to give up sex than they were to give up their daily cup of coffee. *
Though we often don’t perceive it as such, caffeine is a drug. With 90 percent of Americans taking some form of it habitually, caffeine has become so commonplace in society that food and beverage manufacturers often don’t bother to inform consumers if it’s present in a product. But it’s there, far more frequently than we realize. Here’s an example: we all know that soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Barq’s Root Beer contain enough caffeine to give us a decent jolt, but who would have guessed that Sunkist — an orange soda — has more of it than either of those two? Caffeine isn’t some naturally occurring part of the soda-manufacturing process, nor does it have any noticeable flavor; it’s always an additive, mixed in by beverage companies specifically for its pharmacological effects. What’s mo
re, fully 70 percent of American soft drinks contain it — a fact that has helped make caffeine the most widely used psychoactive drug on the planet.
Which, depending on your opinions about the issue, would make Starbucks the world’s biggest pusher. That’s not an exaggeration. To some, caffeine represents an insidious public health threat — no better than a socially sanctioned form of amphetamine — and Starbucks has done more to promote and propagate the drug than anyone; the caffeine content in the chain’s drip brew blows away every major competitor. That venti latte will give you more than a buzz, critics say; it’ll destroy your body and debilitate your mind. When we add the worries about the company’s calorie-packed pastries and whole-milk-and-syrup drinks to this stew of caffeine- and quality-related concerns, a dilemma becomes clear: health-conscious consumers have ample cause to second-guess their Starbucks habit.
Coffee is a cornerstone of modern life, and the busier we all become, the more we rely on it to pull us through the day. But how much do we really know about this little bean and its effect on our bodies and palates? It might seem a simple concoction, but coffee is deceptively complex; we’ve grown so accustomed to its presence in our lives that we generally fail to appreciate this. “Coffee is a very tricky and complicated beverage — much more so than wine,” Kenneth Davids, one of the world’s top coffee tasters, told me. “At any given moment, there’s much more going on chemically. And when you roast it, there are so many changes inside the bean, it’s almost volcanic.” Fortunately for us, science — aided by some true coffee fanatics — has unlocked many of the secrets of this mysterious bean.