Special Features

The on-campus events have often coincided with related special events, such as coffee lectures or the famous Fair-Trade Fair, which attracted vendors from throughout New England. This year, we are proud to highlight a few special resources related to coffee and food systems.

First are the textbooks used in this course. Both sections read Javatrekker by Dean Cycon, founder of Deans Beans in Orange, Massachusetts. The Honors section also read I, Rigoberta Menchú -- the Guatemalan indigenous leader with whom Cycon learned about human rights in the coffeelands.

Many of the student presentations make reference to the Global Goals of the United Nations -- 17 ways to think about a better world at any scale. Explore these goals to find new ways of thinking about progress.

See the Coffee Talks section of our 2020 tasting event for videos about coffee and fairness you may have missed. It includes several videos we posted after the event was launched, including my discussion of coffee quality with an Equal Exchange quality expert.

Several related presentations are new since the 2020 tasting. As part of the BSU program on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Dr. Hayes-Bohanan recently presented Qahua to Coffee, about coffee throughout the MENA region. The MENA program is hoping to sponsor a Coffee Journey travel course to Jordan in the near future.

The final exam in this course includes a question about what other product students might want to learn more about, in the way they have been learning about coffee. (Yes, future students: I have just given away part of the final!) Answers include clothing (something we used to address as a sweatshop-free campus), chocolate, tea, and bananas. Fortunately, a BSU graduate who took this class about a decade ago organized a discussion of this very question -- bananas, that is -- just as we were organizing this event. 

Not All Food is Created Equal - April 2021 online event
Link to recording requires simple registration but no cost

Danielle Robidoux is an organizer for Equal Exchange, a global leader in fair-trade coffee that is headquartered five miles from our campus (what are the odds?) Her role there is as a leader of the Equal Exchange Action Forum, in which EE customers throughout the United States are organizing to make our food systems more sustainable and equitable. The lessons that Equal is learning as it applies fair-trade principles in the banana business are an important part of that work. Join her and her colleague Emily Gove of the EE Banana Team to learn about efforts to improve the conditions for the land and people of bananas.