Crop to Cup
Crop to Cup is a great coffee company that buys directly from farmers in Uganda at twenty percent above market price with ten percent of company profits and five percent of every purchase going directly into their communities. Though not certified organic or fair trade yet (the company is still too small to afford those distinctions), they’re still doing something admirable. Full disclosure: I’m friends with Taylor Mork, one of the two main guys behind C2C, but I know how much of a coffee geek he is, and I dig their product and what they stand for.
Since coffee was the original black gold, spurring a lot of global commerce first in the Middle East, and then throughout Europe in the seventeenth century — the Dutch grew it in their colony of Java in Indonesia, probably at the cost of many a life, and it was so popular that the Pope banned it as ‘the Muslim drink’ — it’s rad that small-scale and responsible production of such a finicky crop is possible (it’s pretty much impossible to grow within the continental United States), and that a genuinely good and sustainable cup of joe is available on the market.
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Alberto Rojas Newton creates complex photographs using loads of texture and varied colour. He grew up in Colombia, has lived in Paris, and now is based in London, where he is quickly positioning himself as one of photography’s real emerging talents.
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