Here, at last, is the long-overdue finale to my short series of articles about summer in Costa Rica.
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In San Rafael, Costa Rica, a man named Ken Lander is handing out free shots of espresso and rethinking the way that we purchase coffee beans. I stumbled into his coffee shop unexpectedly, and, within moments, I was elbow-deep in freshly roasted coffee beans. As we roasted a batch of coffee, Ken explained how he has been using social marketing and word-of-mouth to generate buzz about a new type of direct sale in which coffee drinkers purchase their beans from the guy that grew them.

Before I finish that story, let me give you a brief glimpse into the life of a coffee bean. Coffea arabica is the species of plant that produces gourmet coffee beans. Arabica grows in tropical climates and at high altitudes, typically between 3,000 and 5,000 feet above sea level. The beans are encased in a cherry. When ripe, the cherry is picked and processed. Processing involves a series of steps that remove the cherry and dry the bean: the result is known as a green bean. Green coffee beans can be stored for 6 months to a year in a dry place, and coffee is transported around the world in this commoditized form.

Beans are often processed by the coffee farmer, be that an independent farmer or a large corporation. Most green beans pass to a middleman exporter, an importer, a roaster and a distributor before reaching a consumer, and each buyer and seller takes a cut. 

The story of coffee is a story of economies, and the recent history of this tiny bean has affected the lives of millions of workers. Coffee prices plummeted in the late 1990s when Vietnam re-entered the coffee market. Farmers around the world struggled, but many were powerless in a market driven by global economics. Small farmers could not cut down production to bring up prices because they could not count on neighboring countries, or even neighboring farms, to uphold the higher prices. [1] This crisis highlighted the inequality of power in the primary coffee economy, and it helped bring an alternative system into the spotlight.

Fair Trade is that alternative system. It was developed to address the difficulties that individual farmers face when prices fluctuate and farmers do not have the resources to decrease their risk. The Fair Trade model creates co-ops that lend farmers money to sustain them when prices are low, provide resources and capital for improving farmland, and, above all, guarantee a minimum price for a commodity. The co-ops also have a greater presence on a world market and can make deals directly with importers or roasters, thus shortening the supply chain.

Fair Trade products have been quite successful, especially in Europe where one can purchase everything from flowers to biscuits from Fair-Trade-certified co-ops. However, Fair Trade has its detractors as well. Some argue that a free market price would be more successful as an impetus for economical farming and marketing, and others argue that the minimum prices are still too low to provide farmers with a sustainable business. (Fair Trade coffee is currently staked at $1.21/pound [2]. For comparison, Ken Landon works with farmers who have been receiving, on the traditional market, as little as $0.39/pound).

I spent a week in Seattle, WA before my Costa Rica trip. In Seattle, I tasted coffee purchased by the roaster, directly from a small farm in Guatemala. This “direct trade” coffee is the latest craze in the world of premium coffee roasters. And, indeed, those premium, direct-trade coffees were spectacular. But this model will never break into the mainstream. Specialty roasters like Seattle Coffee Works and Victrola Coffee will only purchase the very best beans they can find. No coffee roaster would go to the effort of traveling to Costa Rica to pick out a crop of decent coffee beans—only the best are worth that effort.

Now I will return to my story. I was walking through the streets of Monteverde, Costa Rica, a town known for its high altitude cloud forest, when I saw a sign advertising free coffee. Never one to turn down free coffee, I walked into The Common Cup Community Coffee House and Roastery and met Ken Lander. The shop was nicely appointed, but I was shocked to see a bright-blue Diedrich coffee roaster in the corner of the room. Diedrich supplies roasters to many of the small-batch roasters around the U.S. (that includes Roos Roast).

Ken was quick to tell me that, twelve days earlier, he had founded the San Rafael Sustainable Coffee Initiative. He offered me a free Americano—brewed with beans grown on his very own coffee farm—as he described the Initiative. The San Rafael Initiative is asking for micro-loans:  $110 this year buys you 5 pounds of coffee now and 5 pounds from next year’s crop, shipped straight Ken in Costa Rica to your door in the States. MORE about his marketing Capital from the micro-loans will help bring more local farmers into the Initiative. In return, the Initiative will give those farmers access to a growing Internet marketing system. Farmers in the Initiative will receive one half of the profit from a pound of coffee, or $4/pound, and a net profit of $1.81/pound.

After our coffee, and the surprise arrival of another U of M alumna (!), Ken offered to show us how his roaster worked. “We roast,” he said, “That’s what we do in the afternoons.” We pulled levers and pressed buttons, and, soon, we were watching green beans transform, minute by minute, into an oily dark roast. I took home a bag of that very batch.

Ken was a jubilant, energetic guy who seemed completely unfazed by any mention of traditional economic models. When I asked him how he planned to sell the beans that did not meet his quality standards, he told me that by carefully monitoring the crops and using sustainable farming practices he could produce a far greater percentage of high quality beans than most farms. And that made sense; a greater cash investment by the farmer could mean more high quality beans, fit for a higher-priced pound of coffee.

I left the Common Cup in Monteverde with a bag of coffee in my hand. I cannot be sure if Ken’s model will work. He is investing this project into an economic model that is based on the whims of social marketing. If Ken’s customers stop visiting his website or stop following him on Facebook, can he sustain this business model? And if the Initiative expands, won’t Ken need exporters and importers, distributors and marketers (i.e. middlemen) to match the demand for his coffee?
On the other hand, the San Rafael Coffee Initiative offers the shortest coffee-supply chain available. Only Ken Landon and the Postal System separate customer from farmer. More importantly, farmers in Ken’s initiative have more power than ever over their economic fate. And, on those grounds, I am exceptionally hopeful for the success of his coffee.

[1] Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Daniel Jaffee. U of California Press. 2007. Berkeley, CA
[2] Fair Trade USA http://www.transfairusa.org/content/certification/coffee_program.php


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Or course, this being Costa Rica, the power died as we left the Common Cup. Here you can see the kind Tico who came to Ken's rescue...

...on a dirtbike.

Last month, I was dutifully sawing through a hunk of old wheat bread with a dull steak knife. Much to my surprise, the steak knife buckled, and the blunt steel end of the blade broke through the skin of my right palm (for the masochist: this particular knife is still available at Meijer).

That was an unquestionable you-know-you-have-a-problem-when… moment. I nursed my wound and rushed to Downtown Home and Garden to pick out a more reliable knife for cutting bread.

I chose this Dexter-Russel knife because it looked brutish enough to handle week-old bread, and I liked the offset design. I brought it home and cut through a loaf of ciabatta with ease. My dad had always told me that bread knives are ideal for slicing through soft tomatoes. A sharp chef’s knife will do the trick, but my new bread knife was equally smooth. And the feedback of a serrated knife is very fulfilling. That slight vibration makes me feel like I’m operating a miniature chain saw.

No bread has yet put up a fight against my bread knife. I started buying more durable loaves and keeping them in the pantry for longer, but I reached the limit of my ability to bite into the bread long before my new knife met any resistance.

I have only one concern with this knife:  This is a long, serrated instrument that can cut through anything, makes me feel like I’m holding a chainsaw, and has the name Dexter inscribed in its handle. How long do I have before I decide to cut into some more…alive?

This is the second in a short series of articles based on my experiences abroad in Costa Rica.

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If you were to walk along the streets of San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, you would find that on every corner, next to every house, down every God-forsaken alley and in many-a-home's front room, there is a miniature restaurant called a soda, often having just a few tables and a single server. Sodas are everywhere in San Jose, but they are just as whimsically common in touristy beach towns, and they pepper the countryside like Irish freckles. A road trip through Costa Rica is incomplete without regular stops at the de facto flag-bearers of Costa Rican cuisine. This can be a blessing; for the accustomed stomach, a restaurant is never more than a few yards away.

However, I say accustomed because the food at Costa Rican sodas is remarkably standardized and generally greasy in the way that American spoons and soiled napkins at New-York-style-pizza restaurants are — that is, gratuitously. The menus are all very similar. They invariably include the typical casado, a few fried or baked chicken and beef dishes, french fries, a hamburger, occasionally a chewy ceviche, and rice with chicken, beef, or shrimp.

If the concept of a soda seems oddly familiar, take a look out the front window of your apartment, the side door of your office building, or off the porch at your house. Chances are good that there’s a McDonald's out there, or a Wendy’s. We live in the fast food nation. Costa Rican sodas reminded me of a classic fast food restaurant. The clearest difference is that sodas are by nature family-owned and profits go straight back into the community. But I have to be honest:  the food can be vile!  The grease, the bland flavors, and the mystery meats made me think of fast-food hamburgers.  And I say this with a mixed heart.  I had a number of delightful meals in Costa Rica's hole-in-the-wall sodas, but, for my enjoyment, I could thank good company and the feeling of being full; I left my taste buds out of it.

The meal of choice at a soda is known as casado. A casado consists of black beans, rice, a simple salad of greens with a few vegetables, some protein dish — chicken, beef or fish — and a couple slices of fried plantain. It is often served with a natural fruit juice, and it is always the cheapest meal on the menu. Casado is a Spanish adjective meaning married, a reference to the full-blooded meal that a new wife would classically serve to her husband on wedding day. By far, my favorite part of the casado is the fried plantains. When cooked just right, they are caramelized to a sugary pulp the color of brown sugar, and they taste like heaven. Sodas also serve fruit juices, called frescas, that are delightful. In fact, Costa Rica's variety of strange and surprising tropical fruits is one of its greatest treats.

Sodas have lost some market share in recent years. San Jose has been acutely affected by the seductive cultural and corporate imperialism of U.S. restaurants. At the same time Costa Ricans are feeling the crunch of our economic downturn. Consequently, I was not surprised to find that the number of ticos eating traditional Costa Rican soda fare is easily equaled by the number who flock to McDonalds and Taco Bell in search of a cheap meals and a neon-colored variety of french-fry cooking oil. North American fast food was ever-present in medium and large Costa Rican cities. As cheap as a $4 casado might seem, fast food meals at restaurants from the U.S. are cheaper, and they certainly offer more variety. More than any other city I've visited, San Jose demonstrated, through it's food, the competing economies of local and imported production. This tension between tico culture and U.S. influence was visible on every street corner and in every clothing store, but eating in San Jose made it so obvious that I spent six full weeks ruminating, with brain and teeth, on that topic. 

I have come to the conclusion that gastronomy is simply not a priority in Costa Rica (The same could be said for much of the Americas, shadowed as we are by the gourmet food idolatry Western Europe). Now, Costa Rica is not backward or uncultured, and ticos are often connoisseurs — in my experience they treasure literature and mountain-biking, travel and coffee, family and their breathtaking natural biodiversity. Costa Ricans eat plain food. While my favorite meal of the trip was a lunch of imported cheeses and meats, I have to respect the cultural cohesion and national passion evident in the simple casado.

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Lest you think that Costa Rican cuisine is relegated to its sodas I offer the examples of my mama tica, my host for three weeks in San Jose, who served me a lasagna so offensive it could have given an angel halitosis, and a friend's host who was kind enough to share with me a heavenly slow-roasted beef and vegetable stew known as Olla de Carne — a dish that takes two days to cook and whose recipe is guardedly passed down from generation to generation in tico households.

This is the first in a short series of articles based on my experiences abroad in Costa Rica.

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Costa Rica is a truly tropical country. The seasons are characteristically tropical in that there are only two:  the rainy season, from May to November, and the dry season, from December to April — or as the locals like to say, the less-rainy season. The tropical Costa Rican rainforest is perhaps the country's most prized possession, and the tropical heat helps corral a healthy drove of tourists into the small country.
 
When it comes to food, Costa Rica's treasure is its tropical fruits.  I was surprised to discover a whole host of fruits that I had never seen before, and I was more surprised to find that the fruits I had grown up eating tasted sweeter, richer, and more complex when eaten fresh and geographically close to the vine. I brought home some new fruit knowledge, so here are the most common tropical fruits in Costa Rica (by my broad and erroneous estimation):

Mamón Chino (Rambutan)

I fell in love with this fruit, at least in concept.  The mamón chino resembled a small, elliptical sea urchin.  Its red and green spikes are not poky enough to hurt you, but they are stiff enough that handling the fruit is awkward—and hilarious in the hands of someone who has never seen one ("I'm supposed to eat this thing?!").  The proper method for disassembling the fruit is to insert both thumbs close together near the center of the fruit and pull apart the tough outside shell.  Inside one finds a translucent white fruit, gelatinous and occasionally juicy.  Pop the whole thing in your mouth, being careful not to swallow the large seed inside. The inside is so slippery and the danger of choking so serious that mamón chino is not allowed in Costa Rican schools.  The fruit is extremely sweet and has a hint of a cherry flavor.

Manzana de agua 

Translated as water apple, the manzana de agua looks like a small, wrinkled apple. It has a large pit in the center and a waxy skin. The fruit tastes almost like a very mild tangerine, but occasionally takes on a medicinal flavor when overripe. Manzana de agua was in season during my trip so reams of the fruit were available on street-corners throughout San Jose.

Banana

I had the opportunity to visit a banana plantation during my visit.  Bananas are produced on vast tracts of land and they grow in blue plastic bags that simulate warmer, more humid conditions.  The bananas are sorted and only the cleanest, largest, most beautiful bananas are shipped to Europe and the United States.  Selection is extremely careful; for instance, Europeans dislike straight bananas so only properly curved specimens are sent across the Atlantic.  The ripest bananas and any that are sellable but not fit for export are sold to local markets. The bananas that are broken, overripe, or very stained are sold to Gerber where they are repurposed as baby food.  Bananas are generally eaten in Costa Rica when they are very ripe and slightly brown.

Pineapple

As common as it is in the State's, you have not tasted pineapple until you've tried it fresh.  The overwhelming acidity of imported pineapple, especially the canned variety, does not exist in the tropics. The fruit is everywhere and its sweetness is akin to candied fruit.  Pineapple production, however, is one of Costa Rica's bitterest ecological challenges.  The pesticides and treatments used on large pineapple plantations have leaked into and poisoned many local water supplies, devastating entire villages.  It is a polarizing fruit.