After writ­ing the last post about my choco­late and cof­fee exper­i­ment, I checked my Green and Black choco­late, and to my dis­may it was not fair trade cer­ti­fied! Appar­ently, only their Maya Gold choco­late is both organic and fair trade cer­ti­fied. I went down to my local nat­ural foods store, and I found that there were actu­ally very few choco­lates that were both organic and fair trade. I may have to do a lit­tle online shop­ping for some chocolate

I also wanted to men­tion that even in the world of envi­ron­men­tal­ism, green liv­ing, and social jus­tice, the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of fair trade does have two schools of thought. One is that it is a good start in pay­ing peo­ple what their prod­ucts are worth and in ensur­ing that peo­ple work in a well main­tained envi­ron­ment with humane work­ing con­di­tions. On the other hand, some peo­ple feel that the fair trade cer­ti­fi­ca­tion leaves out a good num­ber of peo­ple who are fol­low­ing all the prin­ci­ples and pro­ce­dures of fair trade, but they sim­ply can­not afford the certification.

I under­stand both ways of think­ing. I know that there are prob­a­bly farms and pro­duc­ers who are fair trade in all prac­tices and prin­ci­ples and every­thing but cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. I also know there are prob­a­bly peo­ple who are fair trade in name only, that is they are doing the min­i­mal amount nec­es­sary to main­tain the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and not doing any­thing above and beyond them. So, I’m not say­ing that fair trade ensures that you are buy­ing from the best source or that your money is being used in the most wise way. I do think it’s a good begin­ning though. More impor­tantly than trust­ing a gov­ern­ment or an agency to cer­tify the ori­gins of your food is doing some research your­self and ask­ing questions.

Meant to pub­lish this last night but instead of pub­lish­ing I saved it in my drafts folder

Now, there’s a title to catch your inter­est, right?

Yum. Cof­fee and choco­late. Cof­fee. Choco­late. Cof­fee and choco­late together. I need to stop right now, or I’ll need to end this post to go get some choco­late and brew a pot of coffee!

As I men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, I attended a MOPS con­fer­ence in Octo­ber of last year. At that con­fer­ence, I went to a ses­sion called “Brad, Angelina, and Oprah: Rais­ing Kids Who Can Save The World.” The premise of the ses­sion was that too many times, Chris­tians wait for a cause to become main­stream before embrac­ing it.

Chris­tian­ity at times has seemed to be com­pletely opposed to envi­ron­men­tal­ism. How­ever, we are called to take care of God’s cre­ation which he has given us. Chris­tians have also spent much time and money send­ing mis­sion­ar­ies across the globe when there is suf­fer­ing right in our own towns. How I feel about each of these issues could eas­ily fill another blog post. I’m going to try to stick to cof­fee and choco­late and save the rest for another day.

One of the issues that Tracey Bianchi touched on at the MOPS con­fer­ence was fair trade. What is fair trade? Fair trade is basi­cally a (some­times con­tro­ver­sial) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion that is given when a farmer or arti­san is able to fol­low cer­tain prin­ci­ples which include:

• Fair prices
• Fair labor conditions
• Direct trade
• Domes­tic and trans­par­ent organizations
• Com­mu­nity development
• Envi­ron­men­tal sustainability

–taken from Trans­Fair USA Basic FAQs

For me, fair trade con­nects with sev­eral impor­tant Chris­t­ian val­ues. One is that peo­ple are taken care of. If I buy cof­fee or choco­late, it is not grown in the United States. The dif­fer­ence between a farmer grow­ing cof­fee and fair trade cof­fee can mean the dif­fer­ence between earn­ing $500 (non-fair trade) and $2000 a year (fair trade). That is a sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence. Also, some­where around 80% of cof­fee grown with a fair trade cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is also organic.

Many peo­ple are famil­iar with organic and some of the ideas behind it. Organic gen­er­ally means that some­thing is grown or raised with min­i­mal chem­i­cal input and in a way that is ben­e­fi­cial to the envi­ron­ment around it. In addi­tion to being ben­e­fi­cial for the envi­ron­ment, work­ers who labor on organic farms are exposed to far fewer chem­i­cals and other toxic substances.

All this brings me back to choco­late and cof­fee. I have decided that in the month of Feb­ru­ary, I want to only con­sume organic, fair trade cof­fee and choco­late. I have pur­posely cho­sen Feb­ru­ary because it is the month of Valentine’s Day and choco­late. I wanted to do this when it would require a sac­ri­fice and not sim­ply result in me buy­ing more expen­sive choco­late while miss­ing nothing.

Jason and I have talked sev­eral times about dif­fer­ent cof­fees and how they taste. To him, each cof­fee is dif­fer­ent. Some are smooth. Some are more bit­ter. Some are darker. To me, the only dif­fer­ence is if it’s made right or not. I really can’t tell much dif­fer­ence between an expen­sive cof­fee and a cheap one. I only know if it’s absolutely ter­ri­ble, and the two times I can think of when that hap­pened, it was oper­a­tor error. So, by lim­it­ing myself to organic, fair trade cof­fee, I will pri­mar­ily be say­ing that I am only going to have the cof­fee from my home which I know to be cer­ti­fied both. This means no impromptu stops at cof­fee shops unless they pro­vide this option and no cof­fee at friends’ or family’s homes. Def­i­nite sacrifice!

For choco­late, I am hop­ing to have a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. Instead of buy­ing one type or one bar of choco­late and using that to sus­tain me for a month, I’m hop­ing to buy sev­eral types of choco­late and com­pare them. I picked up a bar of Green & Black milk choco­late today. This is organic choco­late that I have never tried before! When I bought it, I assumed it was fair trade. I had a lit­tle bit of trou­ble find­ing this infor­ma­tion at first glance on their web­site, but they are fair trade cer­ti­fied! There may be a choco­late tast­ing party in my future, who knows?

While the rea­son I am ini­ti­at­ing this exper­i­ment is because I want to do some­thing, if only for a month, that impacts oth­ers in a pos­i­tive way. I also want it to be a sac­ri­fice to do it. I am hop­ing that this month will be an expe­ri­ence in taste, tex­ture, and aro­mas that I have never expe­ri­enced before.

Stay tuned, and I’ll have you drool­ing even more over choco­late and cof­fee!  If you’re inter­ested in join­ing my exper­i­ment, leave a com­ment!  If you blog, I’ll link up to you, and if you don’t blog, you can send me e-mails and I’ll post your thoughts.

If you’re inter­ested, here are a few links to infor­ma­tion about fair trade and organic products:

Organic Cof­fee Reviews (With a side of social activism)

Fair Trade Cer­ti­fied | TransFairUSA

Grounds For Change | Organic Fair Trade Coffee

Mar­ket­place | Chocolate