Ah yes…the Green Festival, put on by those lovely people at Global Exchange & Co-op America (in both DC and San Fran)---beware the awesome power of the hyperlink.
For a nominal fee, Joe and I spent the whole day yesterday sampling socially and environmentally friendly goods (either being: organic, fairly traded or, packaged in bio-degradable ware) including coffee (an odd coffee substitute/herbal coffee made of herbs and nuts), tea, chocolate, honey, soy jerky, wild caught salmon and more…
The festival is also host to a plethora of other things “green” (and political) and while we sipped our fair trade, organic, shade grown coffee we wandered through the booths learning about new green technology (the highlight of this row was the newly designed solar back-packs), green media, green home building (where I again I fawned over bamboo and cork flooring), green clothing (mmm…alpaca sweaters, hemp shirts, sweat free shoes & tees, natural plant dyes), green energy, green investing, handcrafted and fairly traded goods (our pick of this aisle being the used wine bottles turned into tumblers and wine glasses and the beautiful bamboo floor mats).
We also attended a fair trade coffee “blind tasting” and lecture where we sampled three different coffees each from a different co-op in Ethiopia, Indonesia and Mexico; followed by a fair trade chocolate tasting where I learned that in the U.S. annual chocolate consumption has fallen from an average of 27 pounds per person in 1995 to roughly 11.5 pounds per person in 2005..yikes and yikes… Of course one of the main messages here is that if you buy coffee or chocolate (or many other goods) you can either prop up a bad system where farmers get paid less per pound of coffee than it costs them to grow it or you can buy fair trade certified coffee, and know that the farmer is getting paid a decent and living wage for their hard work.
We lunched on tofu curry and falafel provided by the organic food court and then sampled Wolaver’s (Otter Creek’s brand) organic beer with Joe openly declaring his love for the oatmeal stout which was an excellent dry stout. They also had the Wit and Brown ales on tap which were lovely to behold as well. We were lucky enough to share a sampling table with the funny and smart guys from Green Mountain coffee and had an excellent discussion on commodities, farming, fair trade, free trade and Chiapas.
Another fabulous benefit of the Green Festival is the line-up of speakers that they host, among them we were able to see beer activist Chris O’Brien who talked about zero-waste breweries, green architecture, and discussed the many ways you can save the world through drinking beer. He’s one of the founders of the Seven Bridges Company where Joe gets his organic home brewing supplies. One of my favorite things from the lecture was the slideshow featuring green brewery designs, hop gardens and the “loggerhead.”
Mostly it was just a good day of getting out and seeing that other people are trying to make a difference, a lot of them!
2 comments:
Wow, that was the most hippy thing I have ever read. Seriously though, sounds like it was interesting. I would do more of that fair trade stuff, but it is just too darned spendy.
gas prices may help that.
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