Rituals, Memory

There is so much we cannot control in these times that the only sensible choice we have is to continue (or reinstate) the small daily rituals that bring us comfort. One of these for many of us is coffee. I've gone back to grinding whole beans, filtering the grounds, and drinking the coffee black.

As I do so, I remember passing the piles of coffee beans on the side of the road in Central America and Southeast Asia. At the time I traveled there, I was gathering follow-on research for Circle of Poison, the book I wrote with Mark Schapiro.

Part of that research indicated an ugly fact: The pesticides I was researching could work their way systemically within the coffee plant and end up as deposits in the beans -- the two flat sides of each pair nestled like a peanut inside the purplish-reddish shell.

No scientist I interviewed believed the tiny residues that ended up in your cup, after shelling, grinding, filtering and coated with boiling water, represented any health threat whatsoever to human beings.

So, almost counter-intuitively, I found myself arguing in media interviews that there was no danger from drinking coffee. In fact, it had never been my intention to investigate American consumer safety. My motivation was to highlight the dangers to Third World farmworkers who sprayed those pesticides on the coffee plantations.

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and a journalistic world traveler, I'd seen many examples of these dangers, including from overhead  crop dusters. On several occasions I was coated by clouds of pesticides while doing my research; in fact I was hit by malathion so often I knew its smell.

But the occasional chemical shower I received was nothing of consequence when stacked against the daily experience of farmworkers and their children. I was the privileged visitor who could choose to be there and get sprayed or not.

They did not have that choice.

I struggled over the years yo try and break through globally to Western consumers (the same "circle" syndrome as here existed in western Europe and Japan) but in the end I largely failed.

Now I am resuming my coffee ritual, in the midst of this pandemic. As I contemplate my life and compose my memoir, the coffee tastes good; the memories bittersweet.

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