Coffee. It gets you through Monday mornings, afternoon meetings you don’t want to go to, nights spent in the library studying for big exams. Maybe you’re trying to plan a date with that one friend you haven’t seen in months, and coffee is just the drink to catch up over. Or maybe it’s the holidays, and you want to brew up a pot for your guests that would match just perfectly with those desserts you prepared. Many of us are avid coffee-drinkers but are unaware of the externalities in each cup, as well as other products we consume daily.
Maybe you walk into the grocery store and keep your eyes peeled for those organic signs, patting yourself on the back on the way out for shopping “sustainably.” Although some of us make the effort to buy organic products, in reality, those labels are not all they’re cracked up to be. As consumers we are often left in the dark, unaware of the true social and economic impacts of the products we buy.
Perhaps you lie on the other end of the consumer spectrum, and you have no interest in purchasing any organic products. All you see is higher prices, and think to yourself, “I don’t really mind if I’m ingesting some chemicals, aren’t they in everything these days?” Even if you are not concerned with the negative externalities products may have on you personally, farmers and the environment are much more directly affected than your diet. According to Harvard professor Stantcheva, a negative externality is when an individual’s consumption reduces the well-being of others who are not compensated in return. I don’t blame these types of consumers. Häger and Little et al. (2021) explain why it’s so hard to act sustainably today: “We can get what we want, when we want it, without thinking much about where it comes from, how it is made, by whom, and under what conditions, and where it goes after we are done with it.” It is unbelievably hard to be sustainable when so much goes on behind the scenes of the global food network that we cannot see.
Earlier this month, my peers and I studying in Atenas, Costa Rica toured the El Toledo coffee farm. Atenas is a semi-rural town located in the Central Valley of Costa Rica, dominated by coffee farms. El Toledo coffee farm has belonged to the Calderón family since the 1950s, and unlike most farms in the area that use conventional agriculture, has maintained sustainable practices for over 20 years. On our visit, farmer Gabriel Calderón presented us with a new perspective on consumption.
El Toledo went from conventional practices to organic after the owner, Gabriel’s father Gerardo, became ill with pesticide poisoning. Most of us who buy organic products do so in an effort to preserve our own health, but rarely do we take the time to consider the human beings in the field interacting daily with dangerous chemicals.
Gabriel explained that we should not trust the market the way it appears. We should be doing more research, seeing if that more expensive product is truly produced in a more sustainable manner. It’s wrong to just trust brands based on their organic labeling. Instead, we must hold ourselves accountable and learn more about the production processes of the brands we buy.
As an avid coffee drinker myself, I was unaware of just how wasteful coffee production truly is. In fact, a whopping 100 liters of water is required to make just one cup of coffee. It is initially produced on a tree as a fruit, which is then peeled to get the seed, dehydrated to get the nut and then roasted. The coffee fruit is edible but is thrown away on nearly all coffee farms, wasting 80 percent of what is harvested. After the dehydration process, another 10 percent of the original product is lost, and then another 6 percent after roasting. After brewing, we only end up using 0.2 percent of the original fruit.
At El Toledo, they reuse this waste to create new products. There are many delicious products that can be made from the coffee fruit other than the drink. For instance, the family at El Toledo makes coffee marmalade, flour, wine and tea (and they all taste amazing). Additionally, they do not waste 80 percent of the harvest by throwing away the fruit; now, they use 40 percent of it for these products, and the other 40 percent is composted.
Although El Toledo no longer holds an “organic certification” (2002-2016) due to the demanding cost of maintaining certification, the environmental and socioeconomic practices are much more sustainable than some farms that meet organic standards. El Toledo reduces water use, reduces coffee fruit waste, integrates native shade trees and transfers knowledge on protecting the environment to its visitors. Since water is not a chemical, the amount of water used in production is not a requirement for organic certification. Thus, your organic suppliers could be overconsuming water and cutting down forests for agriculture, but the sticker on your “organic” bunch of bananas isn’t going to tell you that.
In today’s fast-paced world, we tend to forget the labor behind the scenes of the products we consume. I encourage you to do your part by researching the products you purchase and search for the truth behind the labels. Your morning cup of joe is served to you by farmers and the environment—the least we can do is make sure they’re both being treated correctly.
