Simple Suggestion #157... Drink wasteless coffee

'Tis the season (Lent) when Tim Horton's (Canada's franchised version of the donut/coffee shop) has its annual Roll Up The Rim To Win promotion. Any time you buy a cup of coffee at Tim's, whether in a porcelain mug or 'to go,' you are given a paper cup with a special rim under which is the opportunity to win a prize -- or not -- from a new vehicle to a donut. One of our youngest daughter's friends gave her the rim for a donut he won, and she's chomping at the bit to go get it. The big problem with the whole thing is the waste of paper cups, which you see blowing around the city this time of year (I'll never understand how people can litter)! Waste is a huge problem in our world, but it's one we like to ignore, especially if we can win a prize of some sort for doing so.

A lot of Canadians love their Tim's, or Second Cup, or Starbuck's, and those fancy-schmancy Tassimo single serving coffee makers can be found in many homes and businesses (they're a particular pet peeve of mine -- every time you make a single cup of coffee, you have a tiny little plastic container that can't really be recycled because it's too small, so it ends up in the landfill -- one of those single-use wastes of resources). The good thing is that some people are realizing how silly paper cups really are, so at least they carry travel mugs.

I've found a way to enjoy coffee that is as close to waste-less as I can get... and it's my simple suggestion for today, because one of the important things about embracing Voluntary Simplicity is that we use as few resources as we can manage in order to keep the world in better shape for future generations.

My preferred method of coffee brewing involves fair trade coffee, which I've already written about at length, and a bodum, or French press, which is basically a beaker with a screened plunger that pushes the coffee grounds to the bottom. My girlfriend made me a little bodum cozy to keep the coffee hot.

The whole process makes me think about the cowboys who used to put their coffee grounds into an old sock and float it in a pot of boiling water... except there's no old sock flavour in my coffee. It's plain old deeee-licious.

Step one -- grind your fair trade coffee, and put into beaker.

Step two -- add boiling water and stir.

Step three -- cover with plunger unit and let steep for 4 minutes.

Step four -- press down plunger.

Step five -- pour coffee into a favourite, reusable mug, and fix to your liking. The tastiest coffee of all! The only trick is to watch out when you get to the bottom of the cup, as it gets a little bit thick...

Step six -- add water to the leftover coffee grounds and pour over your compost pile, or feed it to tomato plants (mine are just sprouting in the greenroom -- eventually, they'll appreciate slightly acidic soil additives). There's no little tassimo container or coffee filter or paper cups involved -- the only waste in the entire process is the bag the coffee comes in, and I'm still looking for ways to get around that... perhaps I can buy bulk beans at Earth's General Store. They seem to carry almost everything else sans packaging!

Of course, there are plenty of beverages out there that don't require the fossil fuel transportation costs from halfway around the world that coffee beans do -- like water, milk, and backyard mint tea. So really, this suggestion is mainly a reminder to look at the waste we create and to minimize it in whatever way we are able. I could, and probably should, drink my backyard mint tea more often...

Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Try here.

Simple Christmas idea #19 -- Consider a community gift

Not everyone needs their own (fill-in-the-blank)...

On Sunday morning, I was delighted to wake up to a radio program about collaborative consumption, Buy Nothing Christmas, and the Sharing Economy. Finally, finally, our media is starting to take more notice of people who are refusing to buy into rampant consumerism, people who find alternatives to following our culture's obsession with possessions. More and more of us are discovering that we can be happy with less, and that celebration does not require that we buy, buy, buy. If you like to listen to good podcasts, you can find the radio program by clicking here. It's 27 minutes in length, and worth a listen.

One of the worst things about this consumer culture in which we live is the fact that it has brainwashed us into thinking that we all have to have our very own fill-in-the-blank. But as many of us already know, the truth is that we don't all need our very own snow blower, lawn mower, apple picker, car, or basketball hoop. Some things are better held in community where many people have access to them. Cooperating and sharing with neighbours means that people use fewer resources to get along in this world. Not only that, but just getting to know the locals and sharing things between us builds symbiotic connections that strengthen community and create opportunities for the sharing of more ideas toward a better and kinder world.

If you're lucky enough to have an active community league in your area, get a membership, and find out about community-building and community sharing initiatives. Often there are playgrounds being planned or other things in the works that can use all kinds of neighbourly support. If not, it's always possible to invite a group of neighbours to gather and discuss projects that can make your neighbourhood a happier and more self-reliant place. I can't resist attaching this video about a woman who did just that. Pam Warhurst and her friends at a kitchen table in Todmorden weren't thinking about the gift they were creating when they started the Incredible Edibles project, but that's what they have done. Sometimes all it takes is one person with an idea to bestow something fantastic upon an entire community!

Video from KarmaTube

And while I'm on the topic of making our communities' future kinder, I'd like to invite you to click this link and sign a petition to encourage the City of Edmonton to become a community that supports Fair Trade and Fair Trade farmers by using Fair Trade products. It's another way to gift our world by doing something small to make it a better place...

Simple Christmas idea #7 -- Choose charitable gifts

Gifting that keeps on giving...

Buying Christmas presents from charitable groups, fair trade organizations or local fundraisers means that not only the gift recipient will benefit -- you'll be helping others as well. I'm too late to promote the Just Christmas Fair, which usually happens the last weekend of November, but Ten Thousand Villages and Earth's General Store are good places to go Christmas shopping for fair trade items in December. I usually pick up my Christmas Chocolate from EGS, and love to see what's new at Ten Thousand Villages every year. If you know of any other earth-friendly Christmas gift shops, please let me know!

An excellent place to shop

It's almost time to go into very rainy Banff (I may have to find an umbrella or just sit in a coffee shoppe), but first I want to tell you about Wednesday. I was fortunate enough to have it off, but as usual, many errands suddenly appeared, one of which was taking my daughter's forgotten lunch to school. That provided me with an opportunity to stop on my way home at a marvelous little store that sells a lot of excellent necessities. What's not to love about a place that helps consumers to reduce their ecological and social impact on the planet and its inhabitants? My mission, besides taking a few pictures for my moodlings, was to pick up some fair trade chocolate bars and chocolate chips.

Earth's General Store (EGS) has been in operation for twenty years, which is an excellent run for an environmental establishment in a province with a far-less-than-stellar environmental track record. The proprietor is so environmentally aware, he doesn't even spend energy to light up his signs -- they're simply painted. When I first discovered EGS several years ago, it was situated above a music store on Whyte Avenue, but it made a newsworthy, environmentally-conscious move in 2010, when many people-powered vehicles were employed to carry store merchandise 13 blocks to the new, disabled-accessible location. Some folks carried stuff via transit, too, if I recall correctly. The new location is bright, spacious and colourful.

The store's owner, Michael Kalmanovitch, has long been an advocate for sensible consumerism. He keeps a blog for EGS that provides information about the products he sells, and he's responsible for the Activist Agenda, a weekly newsletter that encourages activism for many different causes. His customers are encouraged to ride their bikes to get to the store, and to bring their own recycled bags and containers for purchasing product. Those who do are given special tokens that they can donate towards assisting charities like the Candora Society of Edmonton and others further afield. Michael's desire that we all consume less, consume wisely, consume locally, consume fairly, and love lots more is taken seriously by many of his patrons. I wonder -- does he keep a running tally of charity monies that EGS has donated through its token program? I'd bet it's a rather impressive sum already.

Just to give you an idea of some of the things you'll find in EGS:

Lovely, certified organic produce, some of it local this time of year...

(peaches from BC, not Chile).

"100 Mile" foods... (don't you love the fast food sticker?)...

an impressive bulk food section with many vegetarian and vegan options

(don't forget to bring your own recycled plastic bags)...

organic baked goods from local small business owners...

all sorts of organic personal care products

that even the David Suzuki Foundation would be proud of... 

environmentally-friendly cookware, underwear, 

diapers, menstrual products, towels...

everything you need to be a successful composter

(including red wiggler worms, if you so desire),

and plenty of knowledge -- books about

everything we can do to aid the enviroment, on loan.

If you've yet to discover Earth's General Store, I'd highly recommend a visit. To my mind, it's difficult to find businesses these days that aren't just pretending to be green. EGS is green in the truest sense! While some of its items might seem pricey, keep in mind that they cost what the larger chains would be charging if they were treating their suppliers and their employees fairly, or if they factored in the true costs associated with the production of the item (organic cotton and fair trade chocolate are not cheap if the labourers are being treated with dignity). We all need to support businesses like EGS for the sake of life on our planet. If you know of other environmentally-aware business people, I'd love to hear about them.

Simple Suggestion #6 of 100... Drink fair trade coffee or tea

At the Social Justice Institute that I attended on the weekend, there was a session on Fair Trade running at the same time as the workshop I gave. I wish I could have bi-located, as there's a lot about Fair Trade that I don't know. What I have learned about Fair Trade is that for a product to be Fair Trade certified, its production is carefully scrutinized in regards to fair labour practices and safe working conditions, whether wages are appropriate, and whether the product is produced using environmentally sustainable practices. What I just recently learned (through chatting with the reps at the Fair Trade booth on Saturday) is that not only can we drink Fair Trade coffee and tea and enjoy fair trade chocolate and other cocoa products, but there are more and more products being certified as Fair Trade: spices, vanilla extract, molasses, sugar, and quinoa to name a few.

The whole point of Fair Trade is that farmers in developing countries aren't being exploited by large corporations, but are being treated fairly and using their land well. It means we might pay a bit more for the pleasure of indulging in their products, but isn't that better than decimating their lands and families? Unfortunately, a lot of big name tea, coffee and chocolate companies are more concerned with getting their commodities at the lowest price than they are with ensuring their producers are being treated fairly. I don't know about you, but I can't support injustice like that. I'm willing to pay a bit more (and perhaps cut my consumption in half to afford it) so that there's no "slavery flavour" in what I eat.

If you want to know more about Fair Trade and the good things happening in Canada in that regard, check out www.fairtrade.ca, and buy Fair Trade whenever possible. If it's not possible where you live, ask for it. We consumers have the power to effect change, but sometimes we have to speak up and act for that change.

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? See here.

Fair trade chocolate, again

This morning, Avaaz.org is in my inbox with an appeal asking that we use its handy-dandy email form to send letters to chocolate companies that have dealings with chocolate exporters in Ivory Coast. Apparently, Laurent Gbagbo, recently defeated president of Ivory Coast, is clinging to power in the country, backed by militias who are being supported with funds from corrupt cocoa companies. The country is on the verge of civil war, and UN Peacekeepers are in danger, too. Alassane Ouattara, the winner of the recent democratic election, has yet to get anywhere near his rightful place as leader of the country. Avaaz urges, "Chocolate lovers of the world, let's flood popular brands like Nestlé, M&M/Mars and Hershey's with messages to end trade with Gbagbo now and commit to working only with the legitimate government."

If you want to participate in Avaaz's efforts, here's a link: https://secure.avaaz.org/en/ivory_coast_chocolate/?cl=907308509&v=8161

Avaaz has provided all sorts of information regarding its reasons for this initiative. Here are two that caught my attention:

Hot Chocolate: How cocoa fueled the conflict in Côte d'Ivoire - A report by Global Witness, June 2007:
http://www.globalwitness.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/cotedivoire.pdf%20

Ending Child Trafficking in West Africa: Lessons from the Ivorian cocoa sector - Anti-Slavery International, December 2010:
http://www.antislavery.org/includes/documents/cm_docs/2010/c/cocoa_report_for_website.pdf 

As good as all of this is, it doesn't quite go far enough yet. If Avaaz really wanted to have an impact, they might suggest that consumers vote with their pocketbooks and stop buying chocolate from those companies that deal with unethical cocoa sources. So far, people haven't quite put the pieces together to the point that fair trade chocolate is the only chocolate of choice. But my mother-in-law has gotten the message, and this year for Christmas, she gave our family some marvelous fair trade bars and chocolate chips! It's one way to ensure that consumer power is supporting the good of people and the planet.

Fair trade chocolate isn't yet a choice where most people buy chocolate. Maybe it's time we approach our convenience/grocery store managers and suggest that they consider supplying Cocoa Camino bars, or the Ten Thousand Village brand. Know of any others to suggest? Let me know!

Simple pleasures... and fair trade chocolate

This week is my husband's birthday, so I made chocolate chip cookies. Homemade chocolate chip cookies at our house are fairly rare and rather expensive, because I've given up on the usual chocolate chips you buy at any grocery store. The company that produces them buys cocoa without caring about anything but passing on low prices to consumers. The only way I can be sure that human trafficking, civil war and child slavery aren't ingredients in my cookies is by buying fair trade chocolate chips, which are usually at least four to six times more expensive than the other kind.

Up to five years ago, I was an oblivious chocolate lover, never giving a thought to labour practices in equatorial countries that produce cocoa. But as Carol Off, CBC journalist and author of Bitter Chocolate: Investigating the Dark Side of the World's Most Seductive Sweet (2006, Random House Canada, ISBN 0679313192) says, "as consumers, what we want is cheap goods. But what we should know is that when we consume something that is cheap, generally someone is paying for it someplace else. That's the message about chocolate."

When Lee and I attended Mark A. Burch's workshop on Voluntary Simplicity and Nonviolence the year before Carol's book came out, my eyes were opened to many things I really didn't want to see. When I heard about children -- the same age as my girls -- addicted to drugs and forced to work on chocolate plantations to the point of exhaustion and death, I almost cried. That and many other violences built into our consumer culture made the weekend workshop tough to take in, and I carried the grief and guilt twins around for about a week afterward. But as Mark says, guilt is only good for about ten seconds, and then you have to do something with it. So I did my own research and made a lot of changes, one being that I began to buy fair trade certified chocolate whenever it could be found.

The cost of fair trade is what chocolate really should cost in terms of paying its producers an equitable wage for what they do. Fair Trade also means, usually, that farmers employ more organic methods to grow cocoa berries, leaving soil, air and water in better condition than non-organic growers do.

Chocolate used to be a luxury afforded only by the wealthy on a regular basis. And when you pay the price for fair trade chocolate ($19.75/kg at Earth's General Store), it becomes a precious commodity once again. My girls understand about the problems with cheap chocolate. Suzanna even did a school presentation on it. We've stopped giving out mini-chocolate bar Halloween treats. We never gobble an entire chocolate bar all at once any more. One small piece, savoured and appreciated, is enough. These days, I make ginger snaps, orange shortbreads and oatmeal cookies a lot more often, saving fair trade chocolate chips for special occasions.

I suppose I should also be writing to grocery stores, governments and chocolate giants about refusing sources of tainted chocolate, but then I should also be advocating fair labour practices around almost every item I purchase. It gets overwhelmingly complex when I think about it. But being someone who wants to keep things simple, the simplest thing I can do is vote with my purchasing power, buy fair trade, and share what I've learned with others so they can do likewise. And you can join me!

Coffee and me

I have a love-hate relationship with coffee. I guess that's probably not unusual -- many people tend to come down on one side or the other when it comes to the strongly flavoured beverage, though with more recent developments in flavoured and iced coffees, even coffee haters have made exceptions.

I probably would have been a militant coffee hater if it weren't for the fact that I ended up with Type 1 (Juvenile) Diabetes at age 17. Suddenly, juices and soft drinks were taboo, and even milk had to be factored into my caloric intake. No- and low-cal alternatives in the fluid realm were required. Water? Too boring for a teen aged palate. Diet soft drinks? A person can take only so much aspartame, ugh. Tea? Too old-ladyish. Coffee? Too predictable, too bitter... or so I thought.

I started university seven months after my diabetes diagnosis, and discovered the world of flavoured coffees at Second Cup and Java Jive. Rare was the day that my best friend and I didn't end up at one counter or the other for a morning coffee... and the flavours were enough to tempt my taste buds. Butter Pecan, Hazelnut Creme, Columbian Supremo, Dark Roasts, Light Roasts, and Roasts in-between. It wasn't long and I was hooked.

After four years of coffee addiction at the U of A, I was fortunate to spend a year with a travelling performing troupe. The coffee was pretty dismal in the US, but our cast spent a lot of time in Eastern Canada that fall, and I introduced my cast mates to the joys of Second Cup, where, the Europeans said, cappuccinos were almost as good as the ones they had at home. They weren't much into flavoured coffees, but espresso passed muster in Canada. When our cast got to Europe, there wasn't any flavoured coffee to be found, so I delved into the espressos and cappuccinos that my European friends enjoyed... and loved them! What's not to love when you're sitting on the piazza overlooking Firenze with a frothy cappuccino in hand after a day of checking out Michelangelo's David and wandering the winding ways of the old city? Cappuccino is still my favourite caffeinated beverage.

But my love affair with coffee of any variety is coming to an end. I feel it with every cup. Caffeine affects me now in ways that I can't control. My hands have a perpetual shake due to a hereditary condition known as Essential Tremor, and the shake is even worse with coffee. I could take medication to eliminate it, but that means taking a relaxant that might make for driving drowsiness. (I could give up driving entirely, but that's another moodling for another day.) Besides, I'm not much for taking any more medication than I already do (six shots a day).

What's worse than my shakes or the meds to control them is that it's hard to justify the drinking of coffee when there's so much wrong with the coffee industry. True, Fair Trade sorted out some of the inequities in some places -- and made me feel better about my morning habit when I changed from Maxwell House to Kicking Horse -- but now that Fair Trade coffee has become an industry unto itself (with even Starbucks and McDonald's serving "ethical" coffee, and Walmart jumping on the Fair Trade bandwagon because it's a profitable enterprise), if a large retailer chooses to support a particular Fair Trade cooperative, it can freeze smaller, morally driven coops out of the market altogether. I'm scratching my head and wondering. How fair is my Fair Trade beverage?

As strong as these issues have become in pressing me to find another beverage of choice, there is one more that holds more weight than personal health or ethics. It's that the earth's atmosphere can only take so much pollution before things get extremely messy for all its inhabitants. I'm already contributing to that pollution enough by heating my house. I can't get through our Canadian winters without creating some fossil fuel emissions, but guess what? I can get by without coffee that has to be transported halfway around the world by fossil fuel-inefficient cargo ships.

I don't have to drink coffee. I grew and dried a lot of wonderful French mint this summer, and my best friend introduced me to homemade lemon balm tea (and gave me a plant) so there are alternatives from my backyard. Old ladyish teas, maybe, but I'm getting there. Backyard tea mixes are healthier for the planet, and for me. I know this is true. I know I should want this if I'm living simply. Honestly, though, I don't really want to give up coffee. I love its aroma. I plain old like it. Maybe I need to wean myself off it by halves, cutting back from my 14 oz mug first thing in the morning, to seven oz. Then from seven to three? Three to 1.5? The first sip is always the best, so maybe I could get by with 0.75 oz? And heck, if I cut it back that far, I can probably live without it, right? But not without a healthy planet.