The Grand Launch

Well, we finally got there!
I am more exhausted than I have ever been – well, than I have been since the last 48-hour-without-sleep trip to South America. It is mental exhaustion not just physical, although I had blissfully forgotten what standing on a market stall for nearly 9 hours in the cold does to your legs!
The last week in the run up to Launch Day could not really have been more hectic, and I honestly begun to believe things were conspiring against me. First I failed my bike test, meaning that Carl is in charge of driving the Ape still – I still have no license. Extra ‘practice’ on a borrowed bike resulted in further confidence-shattering disaster – bruised ankles and bent handlebars. Then I found out that the Ape STILL wasn’t finished – the generator was still overheating, and the fans intended to cool it all down had still not been put in. Friday was a very saddening memorial service for a much missed friend and a trip to Sheffield, and then we were into The Last Weekend.

Still no generator coolers.

Tom and Annie got married (YAY!) and I nearly ’swooned’ dramatically during the speeches in what I can only imagine was an attack of nervous exhaustion. Sunday was spent with me feeling utterly terrible and unable to put my weight on my mysteriously swollen ankle (for once, nothing to do with drunken activities – swooning incident put paid to my drinking!) – BUT Jamie worked overtime and finally got our generator going at a temperature that didn’t make the fuel tank go pop. So we finally got the Ape home (Carl still describes the white-knuckle driving experience as a ‘learning curve’), practiced a few coffees for appreciative neighbours, discovered I’d completely lost the knack of foaming milk, Ape got stored in its own warm little nest of a garage, and we spent til 11.20pm frantically making sandwiches and baking cakes.

With an inhumanely early start, Launch Day finally dawned. The lovely Carl stayed around all day to look after me as well as drive the 200 yards from the garage to the market square, (memo to self: I can probably push it, if all else fails!). One very reassuring thing was how easy the Ape is to set up. I do love my Ape. Genny gets fired up, cools the fridge, heats the espresso machine and while it is doing all that, I can grind some coffee and get the filter machine a-dripping. Everything else sits in nice little jars on shiny new shelves, and even the cash register can be folded neatly away in its own drawer. The genny is also very clever in that if we don’t need it running at full power, it doesn’t run at full power, so it gets quieter if it’s not being used. The only slight caveat is that the espresso machine is on a thermostat, and it took me most of the day to get used to the generator powering up seemingly at random as the coffee machine warmed itself up again. But overall, a happy little Ape.

And we had a great day. My milk foaming skills returned, magically. It could have been better – it was Monday, and it was raining, and we would have done much much better if everyone who gave me/the ape strange looks actually bought coffee. But, as one Ape-admirer and coffee enthusiast pointed out that people need to get used to us being there. The Ape is distinctive, but if we keep going back week after week, hopefully we’ll get a following. Only one way to find out!

We did get lots and lots of positive comments; I sold an uber-coffee to a total stranger who didn’t really know what he was buying, and even he was impressed! A guy from Drury coffee appeared as if from nowhere and gave me lots of free samples and offered his espresso machine repair service, if ever required. He also complemented me on my neat dry little coffee pucks, which did much for my ego. As ever, the cake disappeared pretty quickly. And big thank yous to all the wonderful supportive people (cake eaters) who came to visit me,or who sent me lovely good-luck messages. Jo and Graeme even brought me a little ape to go on top my grinder!

So, having almost recovered from my tiredness, I am feeling good about Doctor Coffee’s. We finally got there! It feels like this has been such a long time coming, and it’s so exciting that its all finally happening! Worth all the stress, I think. Now excuse me while I sleep until next Monday!

Isn't is a cute little Ape?

Blue Arsed Fly syndrome

(bit of a personal blog this time – this is all about Doctor Coffee’s Cafe – exciting stuff coming soon!!)

I had to text Ol today apologising for being late for meeting him, because I was doing my blue-arsed fly impression. He didn’t get it. I meant, of course, rushing round in small circles hopelessly, and occasionally bashing my head into windows.
I am actually feeling very positive now, despite meeting Ol. (only in the sense that I dropped his beloved motorbike and scratched it, not realising how monstrously heavy it was and thus shattering my meagre confidence supplies with manual bikes… Specifically seeing him doesn’t really depress me that much. But anyway-) I feel as though everything is coming together finally, and it is exciting. I have a billion and one things to do this week, but for some naive reason, I feel I can handle it.
Doctor Coffee’s Cafe is nearing physical existence. What passes for my maternal nature is kicking in, and I feel it’s Birth is imminent. (it is my child, even if giving birth to it isn’t equally painful, it is certainly equally expensive, if not more so!). The Ape van has nearly been converted fully: over the last fortnight we’ve struggled to find it a suitable generator, and found one on the second attempt. We also bought it a mini fridge, a cash register, display jars and not forgetting of course, my beautiful wonderful shiny beast of an espresso machine, and grinder. The lovely Robin and Jamie at Protruck are bringing all these elements together into one glorious whole, and it should be done early next week!

Isn't it CUUUTE???

On top of that, I have managed to procure some truly excellent coffee from Cafe Cristina in Costa Rica, and some gorgeous but unusual teas from Teapigs. I’ve also been practicing my cake making skills, sourced a garage in Darlington for the Ape to live in, I’m getting in customised aprons with the Doctor Coffee logo on, and attempting to get a trader’s license off Darlington Council.
The website is very nearly finished too… www.doctorcoffee.biz Carl has been helping a lot with little photo slideshows, but my own knowledge of cascade style sheets has vastly improved! The only things left to do are the Locations and Hire Me pages, which rely entirely on me knowing where I will be able to trade, which in turn relies on the traders’ license and/or Darlo markets, and also how far and fast the Ape will actually go when it’s fully laden with coffee.
We are still on a learning curve. Carl is being packed off to Pumphreys soon to get barista trained, and I am (STILL) having motorbike lessons to get my full license to actually drive the Ape. Despite disasters on more than one occasion, (two total mechanical failures on the part of Binky, one hospital trip and one embarrassing case of frustrated tears in full view of my instructor) -I am actually enjoying it. I certainly feel far more comfy on a bike than in a car!! Something about having the clutch in your hand, and being able to put your feet down to stop, seems infinitely more sensible to me. But that said, I’ve had a few off days and am still generally pretty hopeless particularly when it comes to coordination and losing first gear! Negotiating roundabouts in neutral doesn’t help either. And Ol won’t be letting me anywhere near his machine again in a looong time….(I quote: “So, is there anything else you want to break here before you go?”)
Miraculously, my uni work doesn’t seem to be suffering too badly. To my mind, it all seems a distant dream… Ah yes, I remember, I’m doing a full time PhD, aren’t I?  Fortunately, the business and the Phd are all cunningly intertwined, my coffee obsession has its uses! I can rant about Fair Trade quite happily whilst opting for ‘direct trade’ myself, for instance. But Peter and Matt have been very encouraging and reassuring on the uni front; the end of the dreaded, mind-numbing interview translations is in sight, and lo and behold, in the beginning were the words, and the words were “you must be ready to start writing up now!” I do wonder where he gets these funny ideas from… To this end, anyway, I am charged with writing my first chapter over the next couple of weeks. And two conference papers. (“Don’t think of them as papers, think of them as Powerpoint presentations! It sounds a lot easier!”). And I still have to chase up Coburg roasting company who aren’t talking to me. And edit all my fieldwork videos into something comprehensible. Again I say, who’s bright idea was this??
There is still much to be done, however, so in all this spare time I get around university, I have to find insurance for the Ape, (both vehicle and public liability), still chase up the Nicaraguan coffee, pass my damn bike test, get my traders license, convince Darlington market officers that they really do want me there as well as the burger van (ye gads…), finish the website, get some proper promotional material sorted, get Ok’d by environmental health, design graphics for the Ape and remember how to do latte art properly. Oh. and figure out how I am gonna pay for all this!! Not much then.
I am excited, I feel I can handle most of this, but I am exhausted!

APE.

Debunking Fair Trade – again.

Interesting chats with a newly-found coffee academic the other day made me realise – I’ve never yet written about Fair Trade coffee on here. Sure I’ve mentioned it quite a bit in passing, but I think the reason why I’ve not tackled the subject properly is because I am not entirely sure what I think about it.

Get past all the emotive gumpf, and Fair Trade is actually a pretty simple concept. It is a price guarantee: workers on Fair Trade cooperative farms can never receive any less than the Fair Trade rate of $1.26 per pound of coffee they produce. It is the bear minimum that can be paid. On top of this, the label also commands a $0.10 per pound ’social premium’ which goes to various development projects in the communities affected. Inside a coooperative, all members get to vote on how this money is spent. Apparently.

Given that in the past two decades, the global price of coffee has fallen below the cost of production, guaranteeing the minimum price is a great help – and since this price is set before the coffee is harvested, it is a reassurance, a return on the investment. It is also theoretically egalitarian; if everyone in the coop gets paid the same, there shouldn’t be any power struggles within the cooperative, and better still, the whole group gets to decide how to spend the social premium on projects that in turn, benefit the whole community. I have no problem with any of this.
 
There is obviously some flaws, however. Firstly, the Fair Trade Foundation do not certify individual farms, only cooperatives. There are many advantages of joining a cooperative anyway, but for those few independent farmers, this means that their own prices are never guaranteed, and there is no incentive to go it alone, to make your own profit or to encourage any competition. Look at me, good little capitalist…. That again, may not always be a bad thing. Certainly left-leaning Nicaragua has a long history of cooperative working and communal living, which suits this trade model. However, coffee growing is not restricted to Latin America.In parts of Africa, coffee growing operates on a tribal basis, on land shared amongst vast extended families. These too, do not get Fair Trade status, apparently because they lack the democratic element required for the social premium system. Which begs the question: Who are the Fair Trade Foundation to dictate how third world farmers should organise themselves?

Fair Trade is a price guarantee; however, it does not, and has never claimed to be a living wage. In real terms, the minimum the farmers can expect is $126 for a 100lb sack of coffee. This sounds a lot, until you realise that some farmers (like Bernabe in La Corona, Nicaragua where I stayed) are only producing 15-20 sacks a year. At the Fair Trade price, this means he could only get $1890 a year to support his family of twelve. This is not sustainable. Sure the cooperative uses its Fair Trade money to invest in community schools, electricity supply, clean water and so on, but realistically, these families still have to eat!

My biggest concern about Fair Trade however, is the aspect of coffee quality, this slippery concept which seems to affect every possible area of coffee production and retail. In the past few years, the global price of coffee has increased again, and the average is now $1.40 per pound. This alone makes the Fair Trade price irrelevant. First World buyers from big, international importing companies can and will pay considerably more for what they judge to be excellent quality coffee. I visited farms, even tiny, impoverished farms, who were selling coffee at $1.80, $2 a pound, entirely because it was really good stuff. But these people weren’t always rich, because they were only producing such small amounts of this coffee. This excellent quality coffee, when sold in the UK would not have the Fair Trade label on it however, because it was not sold at the Fair Trade price. I was always very cynical for example, about Caffe Nero’s claim that they don;t have the Fair Trade logo because they pay “better than fair trade prices” for their coffee. Now I am starting to realise what that actually means.

I have always been a horribly good little Guardian-reading ‘ethically-aware’ consumer, and always bought Fair Trade coffee unquestioningly. And to be fair, most of it was pretty good in my uneducated, non-gourmet opinion. I am not a coffee cupper. However, the Fair Trade label, and for that matter, the organic, Rainforest Alliance or Bird Friendly labels tell you absolutely nothing about what is inside that bag of coffee – only how it is grown, not what it tastes like. What is actually happening, somewhere along my tangled commodity fishnets, is that good quality coffee is sold at good prices, and marketed minus Fair Trade label. Then, the farmers in Fair Trade certified cooperatives are selling all the lower quality coffee that can’t be sold for high prices, off to Fair Trade buyers, meaning that the coffee with the Fair Trade logo is potentially of far lower quality than the non-labelled stuff.

By buying Fair Trade unquestioningly, we are therefore sending a message back to the international coffee buyers that there is a higher demand for this stuff. They of course, are keen to pay the lowest price they can for their coffee, and so are demanding more, lower quality but Fair Trade priced coffee from the farmers. Even though this price is guaranteed, it still potentially screws the farmers, because they could get a lot more money for higher quality coffee – if people would actually buy it at the other end of the chain. But we don’t, because we believe that anything that’s not Fair Trade must therefore be Un-Fair Trade. We are inadvertantly driving down the price the farmers receive, and also, driving down the quality of the coffee we consume.

(Obvious example of this: McDonald’s new McCafe’s -uuuuuuuuurgh- are promoting the hell out of serving you Fair Trade, 100% Arabica Latin American coffee. To me, this immedietely screams: “we’re gonna pay the bear minimum we can, steal as much of Starbucks’ market as we can, and still claim ‘ethics’”)

On the other end of the scale, the really, really bad coffee is still ‘wasted’ in a sense. Even though Fair Trade guarantees a minimum price, it does not guarantee a buyer. If the coffee is truly awful, the farmer may be stuck with no buyer at all, if the buyers are not willing to pay the Fair Trade minimum. Those locked into a Fair Trade certification contract cannot legally sell coffee for less than the $1.26, and if they can’t find a buyer willing to pay this price, their year’s crop ends up as chicken feed.

The problem seems to lie in the consumer awareness in this, and other consuming countries, which can in turn be blamed on the marketing and labelling we see in the supermarkets or coffee shops. There is little to no price differentiation any more in regards to the coffee’s quality. Fair Trade still usually costs a little more than non-fair trade, (this extra is NOT passed on to the farmer) but from the consumers point of view, we can’t see which coffee was bought for $1.80 a pound, and which was bought for less than the Fair Trade price. We either play it safe and buy Fair Trade, or we are forced to trust the ethics of the brand, and believe that when they say it’s ‘ethically sourced’ and excellent quality, it actually is.

I don’t have the answers to this. I can’t advocate buying solely Fair Trade coffee, because it may not be beneficial any more. I think the best solution is to remember that coffee is a very difficult, unpredictable, resource- and labour-intensive commodity to produce, that it is only produced in developing countries, and that it has to travel half way round the world before it gets to you. Therefore, it is always going to be expensive. Accept that, and then pay a good price for the sort of coffee you actually like drinking – ignore the guilt-trip labelling and just enjoy! 

A healthy earth grows great coffee!

 

True indeed, but it seems a healthy earth does not always make the most efficient or most profitable coffee.

 

I met a Costa Rican guy, Luis, visiting a coffee farm in Nicaragua back in January. He was quite shocked at the conditions there, saying “I don’t remember coffee farms ever being like this, even when I was young.” From what I’ve seen so far, he was right. Costa Rican coffee farms are so different, making meaningful comparisons very difficult indeed. However, this week I visited Cafe Cristina, my first small-scale farm in this country, and 100% organic. This was about as similar to Nicaraguan farms as I think I am likely to find, but still very different.

 

"Borrowed" from their website, but I love this!

The farm is owned by Ernie and Linda Carmen, and by a twist of fate, it is the same Ernesto Carmen who I met briefly at the conference in Ohio back in November, although I didn’t know this when I first contacted them. I remember cornering the poor guy at the conference and asking if I could come and visit, and he said he’d have to check with his wife! That made me smile. His wife was lovely and extremely welcoming, and showed me round their farm.

 

 

They have about 12 hectares, of which 7-8 are coffee, and one is their house and their coffee mill. The rest they are trying to turn back into natural forest. They have had the farm for thirty years, but Linda says there has been coffee on that land for at least 80 years already. They can grow between 10 000 and 20 000 pounds of coffee a year, depending on… Well, pretty much everything. The harvest varies dramatically, which I think is a result of the production methods employed. All the rest of the

I still do not really understand how this works...

processing is done on site, using machines some of which Ernie built himself! The most impressive was a machine that removed the muscelage from the beans, but without washing them and wasting all the water. It’s a vertical drum, with smooth, hard spikes in it that spin very fast. Amazingly this gets the goo off the beans without actually damaging them. Clever! I told him he should patent it but he said it wasn’t worth it. Linda also roasts coffee herself, for their own crop and other peoples. She says that roasting is the only way you can make money from coffee, it is not possible to survive just by selling it green and unprocessed. (Similarities with Nicaragua come in here…)

 

Very green - but look at the colour of the sky! We were in a cloud for most of the day.

What makes this farm stand out though is the sheer level of ‘organicness’ that Linda and Ernie employ. Such is their dedication to the environment, that they are determined to remain organic, even when this decreases the size of their crop, increases the cost of production, and according to some buyers, adversely affects the quality. Their crop is shaded by banana trees and other tall, typical trees covered in natural lichen, supporting bromeliads and epiphytes which in turn become homes for all manner of insects, birds, small furry things and endangered frogs. The coffee is not monoculture either – there are other plants growing in amongst the coffee bushes, like citrus trees and yukka, and legumes that fix the nitrogen in the soil. And Linda’s favourite, Reina de la Noche, and beautiful white flower which is actually slightly hallucinogenic which leeches something useful into the soil, and acts as an early warning system if there are African bees around – they apparently love the scent in produces at night.

 

 

Growing all this means that taking care of the coffee crop is a year round job, and they employ six people permenantly to look after it all. This task involves weeding the coffee and pulling up all the vines which grow around it that can strangle the plants, checking the bushes for fungus and leaf rust, pruning both the coffee and the shade plants, and checking the traps set for the broca weevils. Neither vines, fungus nor broca can be dealt with any other way, because Linda refuses to use any artificial fungicides, herbicides or insecticides. All this is heavily affected by the weather – too much rain (like this year) means that fungi and weeds grow faster, and this year, the coffee has started flowering already, but at the same time, there are still fruit on the bushes that needs to ripen.

Coffee Flowers - pretty but which really shouldn´t be growing right now

 So Linda has the tough choice of continuing to harvest and risk damaging the flowers and next years crop, or wasting the fruit that hasn´t yet ripened.

 

All the coffee fruit is composted using happy worms, like on most other farms. But, as Linda points out, just using this for fertilizer adds nothing new to the soil, and you have to replace what is lost when you pick the coffee, or when it rains etc etc. They buy in complicated trace elements – all natural, not artificial – at great expense. These are then mixed into their fruit compost. Typically the companies that produce these want to sell to artificial fertiliser companies in big batches, so getting hold of these in small lots is pricey and difficult. Not only that, but Linda and Ernie have to know exactly what the soil needs, on a microscopic level, so a vast knowledge of soil chemistry is required as well.

 

Is it all worth it? Does all this work produce coffee of higher quality? Are they making any more money? The answer, sadly, seems to be No. Linda said they had survived some pretty tough times, and that you can’t get by just farming coffee, even if they took the easier, non-organic options. In Nicaragua, the farmers in the cooperative were paid an extra premium for growing coffee organically, but then the coop had an organic certification. Linda does not. Why should she shell out thousands of dollars to get a certificate telling her something she already knows?

 

Yum.

Worse still, all this organic production doesn’t actually do much for the quality. In Britain, if coffee on the shelf in a supermarket has a Certified Organic stamp on it, you can expect to pay about 50p more for it. And people do, because nowadays, customers seem to want organic products. If it’s organic, it must taste better!! This does not trickle down to the farmer. I noticed that Linda’s bags of coffee (they pack on site as well) had no mention of the organic credentials, which surprised me. They’ve put all this work in, why not market it? It turns out that organic coffee is often shunned by the buyers. A Japanese buyer once visited Cafe Cristina, and refused to buy the coffee as soon as he found out it was organic – using chemicals apparently brings out the optimal qualities! This is yet another example of the buyers creating their own market: consumers seem to want organic, and producers want to grow it – but the buyers, the middle men are apparently getting in the way of normal supply and demand! All done in the name of “quality”. And who decides what quality is? The buyers! Craziness.

 

 

Linda has got buyers in and done blind taste tests, without telling them the coffee is organic, or that is is de-muscelaged in Ernie’s machine rather than being washed in the traditional way. In these tastings, their coffee came out top quality, on par with more conventionally produced stuff. Which proves that being organic does not actually detract from the quality, but also, that cupping and quality perception is completely biased and subjective! I for one will continuing buying organic, despite what the “experts” say. And I really hope Linda and Ernie continue with their permaculture attempts – I wish them a lot of luck!

Costa Rica, Culture Shock and Cafe Britt

FANFARE! This is the first official blog from Costa Rica. I made it here after a very long and bizarre journey on a boat, on which I first experienced Japanese porn. I also didn’t get any sleep for a good 36 hours, and just to improve my mood no end, I was robbed. As such, my first day in Costa Rica was spent half asleep, queuing up to get police reports (not that I have any hope that they will find my camera etc, but merely because my insurance demands it) and then scouring San Jose in search of new USB leads. (of all the things to steal??). Consequently, my first impressions of Costa Rica were not good.

My first week here has not really done much to alleviate this. I am not a fan, so far. I am not seeing any of this Pura Vida everyone is advertising. Actually I think my vida was purer in Nicaragua. San Jose, being the capital, is huge and sprawling, a lot more pleasant than Managua, but very westernised, or at least, Americanised, and ludicrously expensive for Central America. I think I am spending more here than I would at home!! Worse still, I am now living out in the pits of suburbia, with Emma’s sister in law, Olga-Marie. She and her family are nice enough, but certainly not as daft or as outgoing as Emma, and I rarely see them anyway, they are all at work all day. There is absolutely nothing in this suburb, everyone just drives their 4×4 into the city. And its mind bogglingly ugly, especially in comparison with the beautiful mountains surrounding the area. My only saving graces here are Rosibel, the overworked but perma-cheerful ‘empleada’ (i will not say ‘Maid’) and Abuela, who is 86, healthy, carefree and can happily drink me under the table. She likes her beer.

At 86, she has an impressive tolerance for alcohol.

But what of the coffee??
Well, I have begun work very quickly so far because I am of the belief that the quicker I get the information I need, the sooner I can leave (yep, I really dislike it that much!). I found a lovely coffee shop hidden in the depths of the Mercado Central, where they roast their own coffee on site.

Smells divine

Whilst gazing in awe at the roaster and breathing in that magnificent scent of coffee, I got chatting the bloke sitting next to me. He was of the opinion that Costa Rican coffee was the best in the world. I laughed and told him that I’d just spent three months in Nicaragua where they say exactly the same thing about their own coffee. This provoked an almost violent rant about Nicaraguans – he’d never heard of Nicaraguan coffee being applauded as world class (although it has been, several years running). Nicaragua is an ugly, dangerous place, apparently, and ‘they all come over here’.I said I’d loved my time there, met some great people and the first day I got to Costa Rica, I was robbed. His response? “it was probably a Nicaraguan who robbed you.” I invited him to visit Britain someday. I think he’d fit in well…particularly with the Tory party, for instance.

Blue skies... good coffee

What we were drinking, however, was coffee from Cafe Britt. Cafe Britt are based up in Heredia, a big town about half an hour from San Jose. They have the biggest wet mill in the country, and offer Coffee Tours for tourists. I decided it was a good place to start, so I headed up there on the full day, Coffee Lovers Tour.

It was actually really fun. Definitely designed for tourists, they turned a trip round the plantation into a theatre performance. The ‘actors’ obviously love what they do and put a lot of energy into their performances. But at the same time, it was still informative. We zipped through the plantation,

Hats not compulsory

where our guide, Jose-Antonio, showed us the different layers of the bean with a giant plastic demo bean (Made in China), and interestingly pointed out that you only actually use 20% of the coffee berry. The fruit flesh, muscelage, and parchment are all removed, as is the moisture content. Costa Rica has actually passed a law saying farms have to recycle this fruit – and so at Cafe Britt, they mix it with chicken manure and use it as fertilizer. They also keep the dried parchment after trilling, and mix it with fibres from banana leaves to make paper. Guess where my next Lovely Notebook is coming from??

Cafe Britt buys in coffee from over 1000 different farms in Central Valley, and process it all at Tierra Madre, their huge beneficio or wet mill. They also sell three types of coffee, at different levels of quality. This made me prick up my ears. They definitely associate ‘organic’ produce with quality. Their ‘first grade’ coffee, the expensive stuff, is organic certified, and shade grown at altitude. This is marketed as Cafe Britt’s own brands; they do a dark roast, a light roast and an espresso roast. The second grade is still considered gourmet, and is shade grown at altitude as well, but they are allowed to use chemical pesticides on this stuff as necessary. This is where you get Cafe Britt single origin coffees, from Volcan Poas, Tres Rios and Terrazu, specific coffees from specific areas. These two types are exported and sold nationally with the Cafe Britt logo. The third grade stuff is ‘café convencional’. This is not gourmet, it is not exported, and Cafe Britt do not put their name on it. It is not grown at altitude, and is not shaded, and consequently all manner of chemicals are used to force the stuff to grow where it would not grown naturally. So I asked where it went. Jose mumbled something about ‘national companies’, but wouldn’t give me names. I can draw my own conclusions!

A very clever machine

All of this coffee is processed at the same mill, however. Here, they call the depulping machine a chancador, not a despulpador, but its effectively the same thing. Except it is HUGE. And fully automated. No handcranking here! Same process as Nicaragua – beans are poured in to water, and the ones that float are removed; they are bad beans. But instead of becoming chicken feed, this stuff is sold to other food companies, as it is used to make coffee flavourings! Interesting! After squidging the beans out, this clever machine actually sorts the coffee for you – there are three different ’sieves’ to feed the beans into the three classes of coffee. The third grade sieve has to be made of harder materials, because the beans it processes are likely to be underripe, and therefore the fruit is harder to remove. Ingenious! Better still, Jose proudly claimed that, despite its size, this mill only uses 50% of the water is would normally require. All the ‘aguas de miel’ or dirty water is recycled – fermented anaerobically to make biogas, then filtered so that the remaining water can be used to irrigate the next crops.

The big pool where the waste water is purified

The washed beans are still dried naturally in the sun, and raked by hand. Cafe Britt also roast on the premises. Another huge machine can roast 100 tons of coffee per month. As such, they also have a cupping lab and expert cuppers to create the roast profiles of each batch of coffee. We got a very brief cupping demonstration as well, and I managed not to get it up my nose this time!! They can also decaffeinate the coffee (more, they say, for international markets than for Costa Rica. They agreed with me, decaff coffee is like nonalcoholic beer – pointless!) We even got a rather fun, hand drawn demo of the decaffeinating process (Swiss water method – ‘like giving the beans a sauna’).

Nice drawings, makes it all so clear!

Even more interestingly, the left over caffeine forms a white powder,which they sell to the likes of Coca Cola for use in energy drinks (BLEURGH!) and to the pharmaceuticals industry – it is that which goes into painkillers where they claim it’s ‘non-drowsy’!!

So. What can I conclude from this? 1.) I can’t afford to do many more ‘tours’ like this….
But sensibly. There is a lot of information about quality that can be drawn out from here, but for once, this doesn’t seem to lead to more waste. The waste at Cafe Britt, despite its huge size, seems very well managed. I think however, that it is exactly because of its size and success, that the company is able to manage its waste so well. It has the facilities to purify water and compost fruit on a huge scale, and can access markets for by-products of production. This is a very successful, nationally recognised company, but that does not necessarily mean it is typical of the Costa Rican coffee industry. What is typical, remains to be seen!

I didn´t see anyone looking like this, but its a nice image.

Nica Vs Tico

this time next week I will be on my way to Costa Rica. In a boat. I’ve already stayed in Nicaragua a month longer than I was expecting too, but I still reckon I could learn so much more if I stayed even longer… But I have a hubby and ferrets back home who I miss a great deal….

As for the coffee, one of the main reasons for this trip was to do comparisons between quality and waste on small, organic farms here, and massive commercial plantations in Costa Rica. Making those comparisons has so far been very easy, but not necessarily impartial. Telling people I am going to Costa Rica has met with mixed reactions, but none of them particularly positive.

One thing I love about Nicaraguans is the fact that they are all so opinionated. They are informed too, though, and very willing to voice their opinions, loudly and passionately, at every available opportunity. General consensus seems to be that Costa Rica is ‘bonita’ – pretty, but ‘caro’ – expensive. There are a lot more tourists there, which means the people are accustomed to seeing foreigners and I shouldn’t have to endure anymore “Chelita” cat calls and hissing from the ‘machistas’. Woohoo!!! But, at the same time, a lot of Nicas have warned me that ‘Ticos’ are ‘cerrado’ and ‘frio’ – not was warm and welcoming towards tourists as in Nicaraguans are.

When I have asked about Costa Rican coffee, I can rarely get past issues of national pride. Of course, all Nicaraguan coffee is much, much better than Tico coffee. ‘They don’t have the right geography’ (I am assuming this means climate, the volcanic soil, shade from cloud forest and altitude sound pretty similar to me). ‘They don’t do organic’ erm…. That remains to be seen, but I’m pretty confident they do. ‘It’s not good quality’ – why not? ‘it’s all machines, they don’t use traditional methods’. Ok, but I’ve still never worked out the advantage of ‘traditional methods’, other than the romance of it. I get the impression that farmers here would use machinery, if they could get hold of any. Such is national pride in their coffee however, that I’ve even had people tell me, including a respected journalist from one of the major newspapers, that sometimes Nicaraguan coffee is shipped to Costa Rica, repackaged and sold on as Tico coffee for a better price, meaning, of course, that Costa Rican coffee is only famous for being good quality because it’s actually Nicaraguan…..

You can’t engage in any debate like this in Nicaragua without dabbling in politics, which usually results in impassioned rants about the woeful state of the country, from both right and left wing supporters. Both sides agree, however, that the coffee industry is suffering immensely. From a Sandinista perspective, the country, and coffee production is crippled by the fact that Nicaragua is proudly left wing, and the ‘Gringos’ (Americans) won’t help, and won’t buy the coffee for this reason alone. The revolution bankrupted the country, (true, from whichever political perspective you happen to take) and all industries are still reeling from this. For the average Sandinista supporter, coffee growing is very much a nationalised, internal occupation, you grow your coffee to support your family and that’s it. There is little awareness of private investment, or of private companies actually profitting from the industry. Most of the big cooperatives here are government agencies. In turn, the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) is the party of the poor, who trust that they will provide. Who else do they have?

From the more right wing vantage point, both liberal and conservative, the coffee farmers are surviving but not succeeding, and this is because of a lack of vision, a lack of stimulus to desire more than just a means of survival, and that way of thinking is a direct result of years of Sandinista government. The farmers feed the cooperatives, and the cooperatives feed the government. No-one works in coffee for themselves, so no-one makes a profit anymore. They say, before the 80s, everything was better for coffee. But after the Sandinistas took charge, there has been no private investment in El Campo and coffee has, effectively, stagnated. There is no development. (this may well be true, but although the Nicaraguan revolution happened in the late seventies/early 80s, the International Coffee Agreement also collapsed in the 80s, and the price of coffee crashed. So certainly in Nicaragua is impossible to tell whether the current situation is a result of revolution or world economics!)

Nicaragua has the natural resources to be a very rich, prosperous country. But it lacks the organisation and infrastructure to make use of it’s natural advantages. And this is, undeniably, a result of decades of political upset, revolution, civil war, foreign intervention and governmental corruption, and that applies to both left and right.

Costa Rica, as far as I can tell at the moment, are rich enough, and prosperous enough, to have developed the infrastructure sufficiently within the country to allow coffee farmers to access international markets, and this access is, for the majority, independent of the government. Consequently, the quality of the coffee, whether Nica or Tico, is irrelevant. Costa Rica can market their coffee internationally, Nicaragua can’t, or at least can’t so easily. And this fact is inescapable, even if the Nicas are right, and they really do produce better coffee.

Never talk religion, politics or coffee.

The coffee process – on a tiny Farm near La Corona, Nicaragua

I stayed on this tiny, remote farm with the Cano Salgada family, near La Corona

The coffee grew everywhere – I had to fight my way through it to get to the “toilet”

Baby coffee plants are called “Little Soldiers” – these are around 2 or 3 years old

Picking had to be done over several weeks, as not all the cherries matured at the same time

Information about the mushrooms – instead of using chemical insecticides, they use spores of a fungus which infect the brocas (coffee weevils) and make them explode! Cool in a gruesome sort of way, and of course, all organic.

My hosts, Bernabe and Maximina – coffee basket in hand

I got to pick coffee! It was actually pretty difficult only picking the ripest berries. Harvesting goes on for about a month.

Picking is all done by hand – on this farm, by only two people

Where the coffee is depulped – cherry flesh is removed from the beans using a machine (kept in the locked shed for fear of theft!)

All the used cherries are composted as fertiliser for the next crop.

Beans are washed in running water to remove the mucelage (called “miel” – honey)

Rinsing like this also removes any bad beans – rotton ones or those with bugs will float to the surface.

The water (agua de miel) just runs off into the land – this water is seriously acidic and dirty and is a major pollutant.

The bad beans are just discarded and either rot on the ground or eaten by chickens

The washed beans are dried out to about 40% humidity on racks suspended off the ground, and turned over every 20 mins

These are good beans, still in their parchment. All the dried beans have to be hand sorted.

These are bad beans. Differences are difficult to spot and sorting like this takes HOURS.

A week´s work – about 120lb of excellent quality coffee

From experiences on Finca El Ranchita, 2km outside the village of La Corona, Matagalpa.

The farm is owned by Bernabe Cano Salgada, he lives with his wife Maximina, one son, one daughter, one daughter-in-law, one neice and seven grandchildren, although he has another son and daughter and more grandchildren living elsewhere as well.
The farm is 5 manzanas (a manzana is 1.73 acres), 2 manzanas are coffee, the rest is maize and chiltoma (a type of chilli) crops and pasture for their 12 cows. There are also quite a few chickens.

The coffee is all organic, no fertilizer or pesticides are used. It is also grown under shade of banana, orange and avocado trees and some remaining natural forest. The farm lies at an altitude of about 800m above sea level, and is irrigated from the Penas Blancas river that runs through the Yasica Sur mountain range.
The coffee is entirely arabica, a mixture of caturra and bourbon varieties.

Harvest season for the coffee is mid november to mid december. All the picking is done by hand, with baskets tied round the waist to hold the cherries. The coffee trees are tall, some over 8ft, and occasionally the trees have to be half pulled over to reach the cherries at the top. (i am not much below 6ft so i was actually very useful in this respect!) Harvesting takes a month, even with such a small crop because not all the cherries become ripe at the same time, and so each tree has to be picked repetitively until all the fruit are mature.

Bernabe and his daughter in law, Antoña, seem to do the majority of the harvesting by themselves, working ten hour days. Maximina works in the house, and their son Leonardo looks after the maize crop. Antoña’s 4 children all try and help pick coffee too, but only the eldest, 12 year old Lucy, can actually work effectively, (when she is not at school) the others (all under ten) can’t reach the trees!

After picking, the coffee has to be depulped (that is, removing the fruit flesh from the beans) the same day. First the cherries are tipped into a tub of clean water. Those that float are bad – either with bugs in (making air holes) or sometimes with only one bean inside the cherry, not two. These bad beans are scooped off the top, and composted.

The depulping machine mixes the cherries with just enough water to soften the fruit, and then simply presses the fruit until the hard beans in the centre squash out. The beans will sink and the fruit floats. The beans are then let out the bottom of the machine, and the cherry pulp removed from the top. Bernabe drains the fruit pulp and then feeds it all in to his worm farm where is is broken down into great compost.

The depulped beans, still in their muscelage, are left to ferment. Early harvested beans ferment for 18-24 hours, those later in the harvest for 36-48 hours. This has to be carefully monitored as over- or under- fermenting can ruin the quality of a whole batch. Generally, the longer it ferments, the sweeter the flavour, but it can easily get too sweet and taste alcoholic!

After fermentation, the beans are washed again, in running water. Any flesh remaining will float and can be removed and composted. The water also carries away the muscelage called Miel, or honey (it does actually taste sweet). The run-off water is cloudy and called ‘agua de miel’. On this farm is was just left to drain into the soil- although it’s acidity cannot be good for the earth. Bernabe did not seem bothered about this.

The beans are then dried on a large mesh sheets supported on wooden frames, so the beans are always kept a few inches off the ground. They are turned over every 20 minutes so they dry evenly. Drying at this stage reduces the water content of the beans to about 40-45%. In good weather (not guaranteed in the mountains) drying only takes 2 hours, but they have to be very careful because it can rain very suddenly and unexpectedly, and rained on beans are ruined beans.

Once dry, they are sorted. This can take several hours. Bernabe (and often as not, anyone else who is around) has to go through and meticulously pick out the bad beans that have survived the other processes. Broken beans, those with chipped parchment, those with small holes as a signs of broca bugs. It is boring, time consuming, slightly hypnotic and requires a lot of concentration and good eyesight. However, this is what makes good quality – one bad beans can spoil 30 good ones. And you need about 50 beans to make one espresso. The beneficio will check and if there are too many, he will not be able to sell that sack.

Technically, the bad beans picked out at this stage end up either as worm or chicken food, although Bernabe said occasionally the family keep them, toast them over the fire and use that coffee for family breakfast. I tried it to see if I could tell the difference knowing I was drinking low quality stuff. However, they all insist on heaping so much sugar into it that it was impossible to tell. It smelt amazing as it was roasting though.

The finished coffee is packed into waterproofed sacks of 100lb each (some farms use 60lb bags instead which seems to be more conventional) and the trip is made to the beneficio (processing plant) which for this co-operative is a two hour journey, the otherside of Matagalpa. We hitched a lift clinging on to the back of a neighbour’s truck who was also going to the city. After that we had to get ourselves and 100lb of coffee on a bus for the remainder of the trip. Bernabe’s family do not own a vehicle, and as the beneficio require the coffee to be as fresh as possible, this trip has to be negotiated once a week during harvest season.

Bernabe can get $180 a sack for his coffee (thus, ‘better than fair trade’ price of $126, although the cooperative is fairtrade certified) as it usually achieves 80-85 points on the SCAA’s cupping scale (making it a “speciality” coffee), but the journey to the mill alone, without a lift, will cost him $2.30 a week on top of the ongoing costs of running the farm. The sheer amount of manual work and skill that go into this process is incomparable with the income it commands, particularly with a family of thirteen to feed. Bernabe and Antoña effectively work for $1.80 an hour, for 200 hours a year during the harvest season, and have to make that income last for the other 11 months, feeding their enormous family, maintaining the farm, paying bills and supplemented only by income from their other small crops, and the money their children send from the cities to help support the grandchildren.

On a personal note, it really made me feel terrible for working at Caffe Nero for so long. Sure their coffees are expensive, but for a £2.30 latte, the two espressos in it costs the company 4p. The amount farmers like Bernabe receive from each latte we drink in the UK comes to a fraction of a penny. I gave the family as much as i could for my stay there – the equivalent of what would have paid staying at a hotel and eating in a restaurant for a week. I also gave the kids a present of 30 cordobas each – about a pound. Best fiver i’ve ever spent – that buys them all a notebook for school and chocolate bars for a week.
I hope my reader(s) are dutifully feeling first world/middle class guilt now. And please don’t even contemplate buying Nescafe instant now you’ve read this. Muchas gracias.

Selva Negra

Selva Negra – organic, sustainable coffee farm and nature reserve in Matagalpa

What a tropical rain storm looks like

Unripe beans, and the end product

In the dark and the rain, it all got a bit Blair Witch….

No professional backpacker should attempt jungle hikes without an umbrella

I am (a very wet) BEL OF THE JUNGLE!

The farm wet-processes coffee – but not usually with this much rain!!

The term “shade grown” was beginning to get a little ironic

What we were all looking for! These beans (when ripe) are all picked by hand, by the 600 extra workers they hire during the harvest season

At 1200m up in the mountains, the view of Matagalpa rising out of the mists was spectacular

Some genuine Coffee Kids who live on the farm, and attend the school there

Bananas are grown throughout the coffee crops to shade the plants. Workers can eat the fruit as they work, and the dead leaves are chopped up and used as cattle feed elsewhere on the farm.

Coffee husks/ parchment are burnt for cooking on in the kitchen.

The ashes from the cooking fires are mixed with water and left for a while to decompose, then used as fertilizer on the crops

This is ingenious. The red bottle is filled with coffee and alcohol. The colour and the smell attracted the ´brocas´(coffee-eating bugs that destroy the crops). They get drunk on the alcohol, then fall into the bottle and drown in the water. This protects the crop without using any chemicals etc.

one plant can produce a lot of beans! they also all ripen at different times, meaning that picking the harvest is done over several weeks, so that all the ripe cherries are collected.

Yuk. This is a pile of decomposing coffee fruit. It smells almost alcoholic (apparently you can make coffee wine from it)

The cherry mould is then fed to a Worm Farm who break it down for use as compost for the next crop.

The farm, at 12km out of Matalgalpa town, is pretty remote! The building on the right is part of the hydroelectric plant that provides electricity to the rest of the farm

The water pipe takes water to the turbine, but also provides irrigation to the steeper parts of the farm

My first visit to Selva Negra – a completely organic farm north of Matagalpa, set up and run by a German couple, Eddy and Mausi Kuhl. The farm produces around 5000 sacks of award winning, shade grown arabica coffee every year. There are 150 permenant workers there, all housed on site, paid $100 a month, given three meals a day and there´s even a school for the 64 children on the farm, and three baseball teams!
Eddy and Mausi took over in 1975, and reserved a third of the land to natural forest, a third for coffee, and the rest to farm buildings which house the workers and pasture for cattle, pigs and chickens. Eddy has written book, “Nicaragua y su cafe” – i’ve got to try and find that on Amazon! I met Eddy very briefly (as my guidebook says, they are both happy to give you a tour but only they are not busy, which is not often!). He seemed very enthusiastic when I said I was a student of coffee, and everyone else I’ve met says he never stops talking, so he could prove very handy for this project!

The coffee is processed at a ‘beneficio’ or mill which is attached to the main farm house. However, this roaster is very small, and they only roast a little for domestic sales – you can buy bags of their coffee in the souvenir shop or at the Coffee Museum in Matagalpa for instance. (and yes, i bought some!) 80% of the main crop is exported to the States, and the other 20% to Spain – this is all exported green (unroasted) however.

Unsurprisingly, the farm is certified organic, and also has the Rainforest Alliance stamp. In 1995 it won a “Semper Virens” award (‘always green’) from the International Ecological Summit. The only stamp they don’t carry is FairTrade – but they don’t need it. They are SCAA members, the coffee obviously commands a very steep price, even during the coffee crisis, and the workers are looked after very well indeed. This may be one example where I will agree with the Cup of Excellence people, it is quality coffee which makes money just by being high quality. However, this is also a large, private farm set in near-perfect coffee growing area. What they do here couldn’t necessary be done on tiny farms within community owned cooperatives.

The green credentials are extremely impressive however. The biggest polluter in coffee production, particularly in wet processing like this is waste water which is used to wash the coffee cherries off the beans. The water gets extremely acidic with the fruit juices and on most farms, is pumped into the nearest river. Here, however, it goes through a two-tank pressurised purification system that uses the porous volcanic rocks to filter the water. These tanks allow the juice to ferment until biogas can be collected – this is used for cooking on the farm. The remaining water makes its way round the farm in over 1km of PVC piping, and evertually makes it to their hydroelectric plant, which also uses natural streams and a lake to power the turbine and provide electricity to all the farm buildings.

Biogas and/or methane is also collected from an anaerobic digestor. All other organic waste, including human waste from the compost toilets, cattle manure and chicken waste/bedding is added to these digestors. Once the gases have been collected, the solid waste joins the decomposing coffee cherries as worm food in the delightfully enormous worm farm, and comes out again a few weeks later as perfect compost.

No part of the coffee plant is wasted, as even the husks (parchment) are burnt under the huge grills in the kitchen – apparently coffee-smoked meat tastes fantastic, and I can well believe it! (the restaurant on site serves authentic German smoked sausage from the farms pigs – i wonder if they were coffee smoked too? They were exceptionally good!) The ashes from these grills are then mixed with water, until they can be used as liquid fertiliser on the crops again.

Other plants are also used throughout the farm as natural, sustainable ways of crop protection. Banana trees shade the coffee and feed both the workers and the cows, tall, strong yucca plants provide windbreaks and protect against landslides, a special type of moss is grown specifically on slopes to avoid soil erosion in heavy rains (and trust me, there is a lot of heavy rain in those mountains!!) They even grow eucalyptus trees, then shred the leaves, mix them with water and spray it on the coffee plants as a natural insect repellant. Finally, the very clever red bottles trap the ‘brocas’ (coffee weevils) – but even they die drunk and happy.

I came away from this first trip mightily, mightily impressed (and soaking wet). I think my two companions for the day, Dean and Julie, were a little taken aback with quite how geeky and excited i got by it all, but they both said the found it interesting too so I am not quite mad. However, I now have a million questions for Eddy and Mausi, the main ones being, how on earth did they design all these green processes?? And more importantly, does any of this ecological wonderfulness actually affect the flavour and quality of the coffee? I did ask, and was told by our guide for the day, Manuel, that it would be possible for me to come pick coffee there when the harvest begins properly in a week or so. I’m not entirely sure if he was taking me seriously, however. I have every intention of going back up there on Monday though, so we shall see!

I Like Mess. And Fishnets.

Science is not pure.

I am reading more from John Law, specifically, “Making a Mess with Method” – available online HERE

This bloke is a good bloke, in my humble opinion. He writes well – what he says is interesting and useful to my work, it is comprehensible to the theoryaphobic like me, but his writing is also entertaining and engaging, which is a very rare indeed. There are a lot of academics with brilliant ideas, but who are seemingly incapable of expressing those ideas to the layman, leaving us with pages and pages of impenetrable psychobabble to wade through. Not so John Law. Praise be! I wrote to him to tell him this…..

and he actually wrote back!!

Dear Annabel,

Thank you so much for your email. I’m very happy that some of the things
I’ve written have been useful to you! I do care about trying to write things
well, and I’m really pleased that you think I have managed. The topic of
your PhD is really interesting … please do keep me in touch.

With best wishes,

John L

But back to the point.

Making A Mess With Method, to my mind, champions the right to disorder. Or not even that, actually. There isn’t really a word meaning ‘devoid of order’ – I don’t mean “chaos.” Law uses the example of trying to map the ‘typical’ movements of patients with alcoholic liver disease throughout a health care system – and finds it impossible. There is no such thing as ‘typical’ in this situation. It is not meaningful to generalise too much either. There is a huge emphasis in research – even in social science research – to come up with clear, coherent, demonstrable and repeatable results from whatever it is you are studying, but this is not always as straight-forward as it sounds, and more significantly, these results are not always the most useful. Sometimes, it is not possible to impose order on things. Doing so, forcing your data into definite, quantifiable results, changes the nature of the research and does not produce an accurate representation of the subject being studied. Results cannot be ordered, definite and straight-forward if the subject of the study was not this way in the first place.

I have had this argument over and over again with Carl, my husband and a hardcore scientist. He describes what I do as ‘waffly nonsense’, can’t see the point of it, keeps offering to help me make maps or run statistical calculations for me, and claims ’social science’ is a contradiction in terms. (-It is, scientists are never sociable!!). He will always choose the quantitative over the qualitative, as if ‘pure’ science has the monopoly on research methodology. But this does illustrate my point: I am concerned with the ’social’ – “human” geography. And humans do not fit tidily into boxes. Sometimes, there is no ‘typical’ pattern to human behaviour. We are not always logical, sometimes the meanings behind our thoughts and actions are not straight-forward, nor definite nor obvious. Sometimes you cannot make generalisations, even based on huge amounts of data and doing so could dehumanise the research. We are messy because we are human, and being messy is part of what makes us human in the first place.

And now I am distracted by the desire for a cheese sandwich. I shall indulge this urge, and leave this thought train in this blog so as not to impose order on my writing. Inner editor begone!!

During construction of aforementioned sandwich, I ponder potential uses for the green beans left in the fridge, remove a ferret from the laundry basket, and scan in a picture of a duck that was sent to me for the RASC website. I have also now got the song “My God is drowning in the bath” by Amy X Neuburg stuck in my head, as if from nowhere. Are these the typical actions and reactions of a postgrad student? Very probably, thinking about it. But this behaviour is hardly definite, logical or easily understood from a detached viewpoint.

I am studying the coffee industry. Again this is not as simple as it sounds. The ‘industry’ is not a definite, singular, entity. It is a network, a production process – a huge array of different actors and agencies, both human and nonhuman, all linked with complex but mainly co-operative, economic, reciprocal and sometimes semiotic relationships. If these relationships, or the agents break down or disappear for whatever reason, then the ‘industry’ does not function. And as it is a production process, I would argue that without functionality, the process ceases to exist. It disbands into separate agents with no connections between them, and the industry-network is no longer there.

This view is obviously the result of being force-fed Actor-Network “Theory” for the last few months solid. (To my mind, it is not a theory, but that is a different story/narrative/impassioned rant). What feels like a lifetime ago, I started digging into the idea of commodity chains – which can be a much simpler way of looking at production networks. Commodities simply progress along this chain from production to consumption. I would love to be able to impose this sort of logical order on to the coffee industry, but I know now that it would never work. There are too many humans involved.

Instead, I am dealing with Commodity Fishnets. The production of “coffee” – and indeed, waste and quality if I am ever to get to the point of my project, – the leg, in fact, are bound up in an immense, complex and global network of independent actors, agents and relationships (the fishnets). There is some hierarchies within this network, power is not balanced or equally distributed – the waistband and toes are stronger than, say the knees. Sometimes, the whole pair of tights appears so tangled that from the researchers point of view, it seems impossible that they could ever fulfill their purpose and cover the leg or produce coffee. FairTrade, sustainable development initiatives and such like reinforce the relationships in this network, and can make the holes in the net appear smaller. Events like the coffee market crash and the dissolution of the International Coffee Organisaton in 1989 ladder the tights, perhaps irreparably.
And also like my fishnets (which are from Primark), construction of this industry is based on exploitation and child-labour.

In some respects, even this is imposing order on to what I’m studying, but for the simple reason of needing to talk about this meaningfully – expressing my ideas in a manner comprehensible to others – I think fishnets is suitably complex, non-straightforward and indefinite representation. At the moment, my fishnets are still very tangled and have plenty of holes and ladders in them. But even if they never become clear and detangled, at least I know exactly what I am looking at.

Everything I’ve learnt, I learnt from Foamy

These aren’t new but they need to be shared. This squirrel could write my thesis for me…. It is uncomfortably accurate at times, and sharing your neuroses with a falsetto cartoon squirrel doesn’t do much for your self-esteem!! Enjoy!!

(it does say “cookie crumb: $5.00″ behind his head, in case you were wondering)

I just, like, love the guy’s voice? Like with that awful questioning intonation? Would you like a muffin with that?

And finally…. no more rants, just over-caffeinated streams of consciousness:

And yes… before I get floods of comments… I admit it. I am Germaine. This has already been pointed out on several occasions (particularly when my hair was purple!). I’m not sure I’m quite comfy with this alter ego, so please don’t reinterate it for now!

Disclaimer: Foamy and the content of these pieces are displayed for entertainment value only and the views expressed by Foamy, Germaine and any other characters do not necessary reflect the views of this research. Any similarities between these characters and other persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Copyright www.Illwillpress.com These cartoons are classed as adult in nature and could be considered offence and should therefore never be viewed by anyone, ever.