For the novel I’m working on now, I’m researching coffee–history, production, and modern growing, cultivation, and distribution practices. Although most of us coffee devotees possess a vague, back-of-the-brain consciousness of the suffering that coffee has caused historically throughout the world, we probably stop short of thinking about what our own coffee habit means to rural farmers and migrant workers. The fact is that more than 25 million acres are used worldwide for coffee production annually, and more than half of the global coffee supply is produced by small farmers (The Coffee Book, by Nina Luttinger and Gregory Dicum). The...
