California is known for many things, including its rich farmlands. If you go down into the Central Valley, you will find farms and plantations growing everything from avocados to peanuts: this is some of the richest farmland in the country. No wonder Sacramento residents are so often found shopping for their family’s groceries are farmer’s markets that feature a wide variety of fresh, locally produced foods! It is much easier to be a so-called “locavore” in sunny California than it is in some of the colder, less bountiful states across the country.
Unfortunately, however, there are certain products that are not so easy to find in California. For all the talk of eating locally produced foods that you can find in Co-Op meetings and foodie blogs all across wireless Internet, there are certain menu items that have come to be considered “essentials” in the American diet that just cannot be found in neighborhood markets. One of these staples is coffee. For the average Californian, coffee is something to be enjoyed every single day of the year: a cup with breakfast, a coffee break at 10:30 a.m., or maybe a single espresso shot after dinner to help with digestion. Coffee can be a good excuse for a first date or a networking meeting; a coffee break during work can be a great way to get to know your coworkers, or to boost your energy you’re your concentration for the long slog of the afternoon ahead. But whatever you use coffee for – pleasure or necessity – it is certainly not something that you can find growing locally, even in beautiful, fertile California.
So what is a Californian to do? If you go to the supermarket, a lot of the coffee brands that you will find are imported from other countries, but without any kind of consciousness as to how the workers or the land were treated. Typical name brands often only give the growers a miniscule fraction of the profits that they receive from the sale, and this is something that is hard to justify in the mind of a eco-conscious and humanitarian consumer. But you still want your coffee in the end, so what should you do?
If you go to certain organic or specialty markets, you can typically find products that are labeled to be “fair trade”, a certification that you can research more in-depth with your wireless Internet connection. This means that the price was set by the seller/grower, which allows them to have more autonomy and generally more income. So you still might have to accept the fact that the coffee beans traveled thousands of miles from Honduras or Colombia, but at least, the hope is, their growth did not completely pillage the local earth and population of farmers. You can also order fair trade coffee with wireless Internet. Some websites will actually show you pictures of the farmers and testimony from them directly. You can also use wireless Internet to research the non-fair trade brands that you might be tempted to buy based on lower prices. When you see how they buy their beans, you will almost certainly switch to fair trade based on principle alone!