The Coffee and Tea Festival! (#3)

Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of the Coffee and Tea Festival!. We have three posts to visit today from certification, to the consumer push towards Fair Trade, and finally to some great ideas for cooking with coffee. Lets begin. There has been a lot of debate over certifications. There are 7 or so that a plantation can receive. An article over at Coffee and Conversation discusses whether or not promoting shade grown coffee is a good conservation stradegy or not. Primarily, the authors argue for rigorous shade-certification programs to prevent premiums from going to farms that do not truly preserve biodiversity, and strong linkages between organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade certification. Further, to discourage conversion of primary forest to coffee, certification could be withheld for new farms, for a specified period, so that farmers are not rewarded for clearing forest. These certifications are a way for the coffee industry to give back to the environment in most cases with certifications given for shade grown, bird friendly and organic just to name a few. Another certification is the Fair Trade seal in which the buyers agree to pay fair market value to the farmers in coffee growing countries. (There are other goods that can be bought Fair Trade, too, however.) GreenLAGirl has been on a campaign trying to steer Starbucks into serving more Fairly Traded coffee. In what she calls The Starbucks Challenge, she is asking coffee drinkers to request fairly traded coffee when they visit their local Starbucks. This has lead her to research the company indepth over the past several months. She offers this post in which she shares... [a] communique with Marc Gunther of Fortune Magazine regarding his article, How UPS, Starbucks, Disney Do Good which praises Starbucks as an uber-socially conscious company. She is challenging this industry leader to really step up to the plate when it comes to taking care of the global coffee market, living up to it's own policy, goals, and missions, and in treating their employees across the board. Starbucks has down great things for US coffee and she is pushing them to give even more. Our last stop for this festival is over at Thought for Food. This post tells us that if we use.. 3 teaspoons finely ground coffee 1/4 tsp. sweet paprika 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper 1/2 tsp. garlic powder 1 tsp salt 1/2 tsp black pepper 1/2 tsp dry parsley flakes that we can create a great coffee rub for beef. Now, I have not tried this yet but think next time I cook, I might just try it with some coffee. That is it for this weeks edition. Please keep your submissions coming and hopefully we will get some posts on tea for next week! I am still looking for a person or a few people to host the festival in April. Please let me know if you think you are interested. I will fill you in on what it takes, etc. Thanks for reading! Have a great week. Past editions: Week 2 Week 1 Introduction ..be bold Tagged: Coffee, Tea, Coffee and Tea Festival