filed under Get Out of the House
Justice In The Coffeelands
10:11AM ON
02/28/2008
BY
Matthew Lawrence
Tonight at Brown, entrepreneur Dean Cycon’s going to be giving a talk called “Justice in the Coffeelands: The Social, Economic & Environmental Impact of Fair/Unfair Trade in the Coffee Communities of Africa, Asia and Latin America.” I’m predicting it will be interesting, but depressing. Cycon runs his own coffee company, Dean’s Beans, out of Orange, Massachusetts. (You know Orange, it’s right next to Athol.)
Dean’s gotten a lot of press for criticizing Green Mountain, the Vermont-based coffee company who use about 12% fair trade beans and whose coffee you can now get at McDonald’s. Cycon once placed a full-page ad in the Village Voice attacking Green Mountain, Starbucks, and Seattle’s Best for not using enough fair trade product, and the publicity landed him features in Inc. and the Boston Globe. He’ll be around the talk to sign copies of his book, Javatrekker: Dispatches From The World of Fair Trade Coffee.
There’s a fair trade coffee tasting at 6:30 and the lecture starts at 7. It’s at MacMillan 117, which is at 167 Thayer Street–about halfway between Blue State and the Coffee Exchange, for those of you who think in terms of walking distance between coffee shops.
February 28th, 2008 at 3:02PM
Tibet Says:
Crazy, I know Dean from back in the day, he’s a great guy. Suddenly he’s getting cameos in Pirates from the Caribbean and writing books with Susan Sarandon quotes on the back… I feel old. Wait a second, maybe it’s Dean that’s older and wiser, not me.
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