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Have you ever wondered how “green” and sustainable your cup of coffee is? If yes, which type of coffee beans do you choose – organic, shade-grown or fair trade? Read on to learn all that true eco-enthusiastic coffee fans should know about the different certifications…

Organic coffee

When buying organic, you decide on coffee that is grown without pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers. This is beneficial not only to your health (as the coffee beans do not contain any chemicals), but also to the environment since the soil and water are not contaminated with artificial substances. In order to be sold as organic, the coffee has to be processed under special conditions without chemicals in an organic mill.

Shade-grown coffee

Shade-grown coffee is grown in a traditional, environmentally friendly way from farms with thick layers of trees and bushes. Unfortunately, as demand for coffee grew, a new, higher-productivity approach was introduced to coffee farming. The system, introduced in 1970s, is called sun cultivation since coffee is grown in rows under the sun with little or no forest canopy.  It has become popular because the growing process is more rapid and gives higher yields, however it has several disadvantages:

-          it requires the increased use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which can contaminate land and water; however, when growing under the shade, there is less risk of pathogen infection and the leaves that drop from the shade are a natural fertilizer;

-          it has led to deforestation of many areas of coffee cultivation, which is disastrous for some animal species like songbirds, howler monkeys, iguanas, ocelots, and pumas;

-          the taste of coffee is worse; although the yields are higher, shade-grown beans are of a lower quality since a longer ripening time contributes to complex flavor.

This is why many eco-conscious consumers prefer the traditionally grown coffee. As shade coffee farms in general use little or no chemical fertilizers, the shade grown coffee is often also certified as organic.

Fair Trade coffee

Even though the price for a cup of coffee seems high, many farmers that grow the beans live in extreme poverty. It is due to the fact that most of the costs that add up to the price of coffee are generated by the middlemen. Fair Trade organizations help producers in developing countries cut out middlemen, and obtain better trading conditions, so that they are not forced to compromise the quality of their products and work hygiene or turn to child labor to earn for living.

Written by PennySaverUSA. If you would like to have a cup of organic, shade-grown or fair trade coffee and looking for an interesting place in your area, visit us online to find a comprehensive list of cafes in the USA.

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Unless you have been living on another planet recently, you will know that environmental and sustainability issues have been a hot topic. Going back a couple of decades, not many people worried about where their grub tableware or other products were sourced from. It was a case of what do I want and where do I get it. Nowadays however, we cannot afford to live in the same manner, especially if we want to secure a future for the next generation and beyond. Taking some time to think about where you get and how you consume your food can have a surprisingly big impact.

Local Producers. We take it for granted these days that we can pop down the local shop and buy some fruits from exotic shores and wines from the other side of the world for example. However, a huge amount of these products are flown thousands of miles from other countries and this causes problems. Not only does the transport release vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, due to burning fuel and having to use a food and wine cooler to keep the produce chilled all the way, but also local food suppliers struggle to compete with low foreign costs. If you want to see the important businesses in your local area survive for years to come then make sure you use them whenever you can.

Fight Packaging. You only have to take a walk down one of the isles to see how much food packaging is wasted making products look pretty. A single cake might be singly wrapped, inside a little box with a plastic place-holder, which is cloaked in cellophane and transported within a cardboard box, with the other cake boxes. It is often the case that such packaging is completely redundant, so do your bit and try to buy loose or sensibly wrapped goods.

Green Accessories. Ensuring your meal times do not cost the planet means thinking about more than just your food. Everything from the cutlery you use to the little wine gifts bought for yourself or other can have just as much influence and the consumables themselves. Ask yourself where this product has come from, is it something that could be made from a more sustainable material, and is this a disposable product when I could be buying a reusable one? Disposable chopsticks for example cause thousands of trees to be cut down every day, when a good reusable pair can last a lifetime.

Albert Einstein once said, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution of a vegetarian diet.”

How amazingly right that genius was. A 2006 United Nations report summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry by calling it “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global” The report recommended that animal agriculture “be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Today many people have started recognizing the importance of reducing their own ‘eco-footprint’ which is a measure of human’s demand on the Earth’s ecosystems.  They have begun to switch to water saving and power saving devices, hybrid cars and renewable energy sources. However, one of the simplest and yet most significant choices we can make to reduce our environmental impact has been overlooked. Switching to a vegetarian diet is arguably the most ‘effective’ way to go green!

For all my meat eating friends, should know that just for the satisfaction of their ‘tongue’ they are contributing immensely to Global Warming. People eating non-vegetarian food and the meat industry contribute to 27% of global warming. (That’s more pollution than all the vehicular traffic of the world put together) Now after knowing this fact if one still continues to eat meat than either they simply don’t care for the Environment or they have other justifications to eat them.

People have been found to give justifications saying, “The chicken are made to be eaten, otherwise their number will grow in a proportion that it will destroy the balance of earth. If you don’t destroy them, they will eat up everything anyways” and also “if you tell egg is a non-vegetarian thing then why do you take milk then? That is also another animal product and most of the eggs that you take do not have fertilizing power. Hence, actually you don’t kill any chicken also.” These are only few of the common reasons for eating non-vegetarian food.

Chicken are grown on factory farms, and no chicken that we eat is wild! I checked up www.goveg.com and was simply shocked to see the atrocities being done on these poor birds. According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institute, the equivalent of seven football fields of land is bulldozed every minute, much of it to create more room for farmed animals. Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., nearly 80 percent is used in some way to raise animals—that’s roughly half of the total land mass of the U.S. More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals. My argument is that, if people stop eating chicken or for that matter meat, million upon millions acres of land that is used to feed these animals, could be used for humans or could be returned to their original forest state. This would atleast help in giving fresh air for lungs to breathe in. Conservative estimates predict that a 50% reduction in meat consumption in developed countries could save 3.6 million children from malnutrition. When these estimates are projected to all people in extreme poverty it is estimated that 33.6 million people could be saved from malnutrition.

8/10th to 9/10th of the land in USA is used to grow feed for animals. Isn’t this baffling? They actually have to import food grains for human consumption. We are losing about 1 acre of rain forest almost every few minutes to create grazing land for animal that other people eat. So many species of animals, birds and trees have gone extinct! We don’t even know how to get them back. The veggies have been time and again said to be hypocrites as they themselves intake milk, which is also an animal product. Our ancient Ayurveda says that milk is okay, provided it is coming from free range of cows and not from factory cows.

How about fish? Mass fishing has destroyed the ocean ecology, only 20% of the fish caught are fit for human consumption, rest are just dumped back in the ocean after they are dead. These fish are caught by trawlers the size of a football field, and they scour the deep seas to get to the fish. Other fish are grown on factory farms, where they are fed a dangerous cocktail of chemicals to give them colour, or make them grow faster, or resistant to disease because of over crowding and they are also fed fish which are farmed from the ocean. The ocean ecology is very fragile and through this mass fishing and factory fish farms, humans have managed to make many oceanic flora and fauna already extinct.

Between watering the crops that farmed animals eat, providing drinking water for billions of animals each year, and clean away the filth in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses, the farmed animal industry places a serious strain on our water supply as well. It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 23 gallons. In US over half of the water is used to grow feed for livestock.

Al Gore in his movie about Global warming dint mention even once the effect that eating non-vegetarian food has on the environment. The movie or rather the documentary was successful in creating awareness amongst the people. It offered few solutions, but does provide some hope. Mr. Gore himself is a meat eater and so this major contributor to global warming was not addressed at all!

Seeing all this from a humane angle, one tends to ponder that is all this eating of animals justified? Don’t they have lives in them? The other day I was having a chat with my Bengali friend who is a staunch fish lover. She said that she was compelled to eat fish because it’s the staple diet of people staying in Bengal. I only have one question to her and all the Bengalis, just because fish has some nutritional value, just because it is their staple diet, will they continue to gulp them even after knowing all these facts? They should probably get a DVD of Finding Nemo! There’s also a very logical reason associated with stopping the intake of non-vegetarian food. Right before an animal is going to be slaughtered, innumerable harmful toxins are released in their body (as a result of fear of being killed).  And lo! What do we do? We end up taking in the same toxins after eating them up.

The evidence is clear: the production of livestock for human consumption is having a devastating impact on the planet and its people. Switching to a healthy vegetarian diet not only saves the lives of animals, it may even save us and the planet.
Whoever is reading this, please know that when you eat non vegetarian food or watch others eat that and don’t educate them; even you are contributing to global warming and the rape of our planet!