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Walking down the supermarket aisle in search of coffee, I have this warm inner glow. If I choose a pack that boasts the Fair Trade logo, or that of any other third-party certifying agency, I’ll be doing good just by paying a little more for something that I am going to buy anyway. The extra I pay will find its way to the poor farmers who grow the coffee, and together enlightened coffee drinkers can make their lives better. But it seems I’m at least somewhat mistaken. Certified coffee is certainly better than nothing, but it isn’t doing as much good as I fondly imagine. And the price premium I pay could be doing a lot more.

In this episode I hear about coffee that’s more ethical than fair, and about some of the ways in which Fair Trade falls short.

Notes

1. The Acteal massacre that prompted Chris Treter to get into coffee is a horrific story that continues to reverberate. Matt Earley, a friend and colleague of Chris, wrote about the struggle for peaceful existence through coffee.
2. Chris and Matt also feature in a documentary film, Connected by Coffee.
3. More about Higher Grounds coffee, including the latest news from Congo.
4. Cooperative Coffees also shares some interesting stories on its website.
5. A couple of cool additional listens: Episode 4 of Alexis Madrigal’s series on Containers is all about The Hidden Side of Coffee. And the podcast Start-Up recently told the story of probably the world’s most expensive coffee, at $16 a cup.
6. It’s easy to fall into despair faced with details of how the foods we enjoy are produced, which almost inevitably involve the kind of power imbalance that makes exploitation and maltreatment not only possible but, apparently, inevitable, not only far away in former colonies but much closer to home. In Europe and in America, producers and consumers are thinking about third-party certification for local growers. What more could be done?
7. Banner and cover photos of coffee cherries in Colombia by Neil Palmer (CIAT).

   Huffduff it

It isn’t that people don’t want to know who bred their favourite fruit and vegetable varieties, it’s just that the story of those breeders is so seldom put before us. A tribute post from @culinarybreedingnetwork alerted me to the death of Calvin Lamborn. And who is he? Only the man who gave the world Sugar Snap peas, and many other wonderful peas.

Jim Myers, no slouch as a plant breeder himself, had this to say:

Calvin is the reason why we have snap peas as a part of our everyday cuisine in the U.S and in much of the world. Most people think that snap peas have always been part of our food culture, but before Calvin’s work, snap peas were only a very minor curiosity in the garden. When he went to work at Gallatin Valley Seed Company in Twin Falls Idaho as a young plant breeder, he was given the problem of “straightening out” edible podded snow peas. He wondered what would happen if he crossed a spontaneously occurring trait for thick pod walls in the old shelling pea ‘Dark Skin Perfection’ with ‘Mammoth Melting Sugar’ snow pea. The result was completely unexpected; it did straighten the pods, but it was a completely different crop. The first variety from those breeding efforts was ‘Sugar Snap’ pea and he is responsible for releasing most of the snap pea varieties that we enjoy today. Equally critical, snap peas would remain a minor curiosity today if not for his continuous and tireless promotion of the crop. What I have learned from Calvin is that if you are trying to introduce a new crop, it is not enough to just breed improved versions. One must get it in front of the world to let others understand the novelty and benefits that the crop can bring.

Edible Manhattan has featured Calvin Lamborn, as has Civil Eats — and if you’re really keen, there’s a three-part webinar on YouTube in which Jim Myers talks about “Putting the snap back in snap peas“.

I hope Culinary Breeding Network doesn’t mind me using their image.

Syndicated to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

Science continues to be astonished that traditional foodways are actually good for the people who evolved them. This time — hard on the heels of the episode on putrid meat as a source of vitamin C — it is the Navajo people and calcium.

NPR’s The Salt reports that Navajo people, like most North American Indians, are lactose intolerant. That means that milk is of no use to them as a source of calcium. But they do like a bit of juniper ash sprinkled in the corn mush. And a gram of that ash contains about as much calcium as a glass of milk. Furthermore, the calcium in juniper ash is claimed to be more bio-available than the calcium in milk.

What we aren’t told is whether juniper has more calcium in its ash than other local plants.

21 August 2017

1. This one surprised me: Cane and beet share the same chemistry but act differently in the kitchen. There appear to be real, repeatable differences in several sweet foods made with either cane or beet sugar. And cane is better. But how is one to know? H/T Marion Nestle.
2. Solid interview with Nan Kohler, a small-scale miller in Los Angeles, about the qualities of wheats and the value of millers.
3. Maybe we should eat walnuts as de-appetizers rather than dessert, because they make you feel full, or so this press release would have you believe. Of course, you need to take most brain-scan results with a teaspoon of salt. Bonus: my musings on walnuts and bread.
4. Jeremy Paxman’s article on The terrible cost of Scotland’s salmon farms in the FT may be beyond a paywall, rather like access to wild salmon reaches. Or maybe you just need to register.
5. I love that for The Online Photographer a post on Fresh Produce is considered OT — off topic — while for this newsletter, photography is OT.

An article headline in Mother Jones screams “The Secret to Better Burgers? Lots of Flies.” The main illustration shows a cow with a fly on its tongue. I think, what? The last time we tried feeding meat to cattle in the UK, the result was mad cow disease. So I actually read the article, and there’s almost nothing in there about feeding insects to cattle, although cattle and pigs make a compulsory appearance to show how wasteful it is using animals to convert perfectly edible food into meat. Instead, the piece is just warmed up soldier fly leftovers.

And the way it presents itself on Twitter is equally misleading itself.

I’m disappointed.