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09/09/01
By RAY RING Chronicle Staff Writer
Daniel Lorenzetti and Linda Rice Lorenzetti set out to put faces on all the coffee cups in the United States -- the faces of people who grow the crop around the world.
"We wanted to document an everyday thing, like salt or sugar. Most people have no idea where these things come from, how they enter our lives, the trouble (workers in distant lands) go through to get
them here," Daniel Lorenzetti says. "Coffee is just something we take for granted."
To dispel that comfortable ignorance, the Lorenzettis, who live on a ranch near Three Forks, spent parts of five years traveling countries scattered from Indonesia to Brazil to Yemen, for a project they
call, "The Birth of Coffee."
They drove countless back roads through jungles and mountains, taking photos and notes as they met people who nurture coffee trees, pick the coffee cherries and process the seeds into what we call coffee
beans, almost all the work done by hand.
On the steep volcanic slope of a coffee plantation in Costa Rica, they watched machete-wielding crews hacking out competing plants. Nearby, wooden wheels squeaked on an ox-cart hauling compost to coffee
seedlings.
On a Colombian mountainside, they watched a jornalero (day picker) under a Dallas Cowboys cap flitting among the branches, where the climate and soil combine so well, the coffee trees produce year-round
and the picking is nearly continuous. Down a dirt road there, they passed a muleskinner and his mules hauling sacks of seeds to where they could be transferred to an old Jeep.
On the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, they met a local man who smiled proudly over a shallow basket of coffee seeds barely 3 feet across and a few inches deep -- the results of his day's hard labor.
On the island of Java, they watched women pounding wooden mallets and hand-cranking grinders to clean the cherry pulp from thousands of coffee seeds per day. They drove more dirt roads that were lined for
miles with the seeds spread on tarps to dry simply under tropical sun.
In Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, they visited open-air markets where coffee beans have been traded for 800 years and business is still done by men in traditional robes and turbans, who hold out handfuls
of their offerings. It was the Arabs who acquired wild coffee from the plant's birthplace in Ethiopia and began cultivating it on a large scale, that long ago.
Everywhere the Lorenzettis went, they saw people of all ages and sizes moving bulk coffee as it has always been moved, hauling the heavy, bulging sacks of seeds.
"Coffee comes to us via an amazing array of transportation -- horse, bicycle, pack mule, ox, Jeep, tractor, truck, motorbike, bus, wagon, cart, cable, or train," they wrote together about their
experiences. "Still, more often than not, coffee comes to us by human strength -- on the backs of men and women."
• • •
While Americans take it for granted, we lead the world in coffee consumption.
Eight out of 10 adults in the U.S. drink coffee at least occasionally, according to the National Coffee Association.
Fully 170 million of us can be considered hooked -- daily drinkers averaging 3.3 cups per day.
Yet despite all that slurping, we produce almost no coffee. To supply our gigantic habit, we buy the beans from dozens of other countries, helping to make coffee nearly the world's most-traded commodity,
second only to oil.
Among the Lorenzettis' discoveries was that even with all the commerce, coffee is not all that industrial. Though there are some vast plantations worked by machinery, particularly in Brazil, most of the
world's coffee is grown on small farms, often by families using primitive methods.
Mostly, "it's a subsistence crop," says Linda.
Coffee begins as seedlings planted by hand on steep slopes where the soil is volcanic and rich. When the trees mature, they bear fruit -- the bright red or yellow coffee cherries.
The pickers gather the cherries by the handful, then the fruit pulp is removed, the seeds (two in each cherry) are sorted for quality, dried mostly by sunlight and gathered into hand-sewn sacks.
The people whose lives depend on growing coffee and processing it in typically difficult conditions have a "commitment in what they do," the Lorenzettis wrote.
One result of the Birth of Coffee project is a book of the same name, published in November by an imprint of Random House -- a window into the distant fields, featuring more than a hundred photos,
striking black-and-whites done in unusual sepia tones.
Striving for authenticity, Daniel, who took the photos, went so far as to tint the processing chemicals with brewed coffee.
"We wanted to evoke the feelings of coffee in the book," says Linda, who wrote most of the book's text.
Controversies about some aspects of coffee -- child labor, herbicides used in some areas, clearing of rain forest for large plantations -- the Lorenzettis barely touch on.
"We were there to document, not to investigate," Daniel says. "We just give people a snapshot of what that life is like."
They say the children they saw in the coffee fields were with their families and not obviously exploited. "That kind of exploitation takes place in a more organized fashion in a factory than in a
coffee field," Daniel says.
"Coffee is extremely pesticide-free, except in the large plantations," Linda says. "It's grown in a very natural way for the most part."
The book also does not include much background about the people who do the work, their personal stories, their words -- or even their names. The strength of the Lorenzettis' project is indeed the
snapshots and brief explanations of each snapshot.
"They get into the human dimension," says Ted Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association, which is headquartered in California and counts a membership of more than 2,500
specialty coffee shops nationwide. "Most people think coffee farming is like harvesting peanuts, done by machines without a lot of human sweat and toil. But to be good, the cherries have to be
picked by hand. It's a lot of hard work."
To spread the message, the Birth of Coffee project has branched out as the Lorenzettis do photo and text exhibits for National Coffee Association events and other coffee and food groups. Next week they go
to Washington, D.C., to exhibit at a gathering of coffee company executives and members of Congress.
They plan to put together a traveling exhibit that will be available for museums.
"To the coffee people" in all countries, including the U.S., this project "is very valuable," says Hal Berg, owner of Rocky Mountain Roasters in Bozeman, a company that roasts coffee
and sells in bulk and cups. "A lot of books out there tell people how to taste a cup of coffee, but this book goes into the origins."
The project also includes a Web site, www.birthofcoffee.com, and an appearance by the Lorenzettis this weekend at the Montana Festival of Books in Missoula.
The Lorenzettis, who also live part-time in West Palm Beach, Fla., and Austin, Texas, say the documentary tradition is important.
"I'd be horrified if we ever figured out how much money we invested in this project. We don't do it for the money," Daniel says.
When they're not hiking on coffee slopes, he has a business developing Web sites for clients, and a resume that includes stints with Public Television news and as a White House intern under President
Jimmy Carter, and she does magazine writing.
They love to travel, and the project helped give it meaning.
"There is something indefatigable about people who work with coffee," they wrote in the book's preface. "Coffee lovers the world over owe all of these people respect and gratitude. They
work long and hard for a small amount of money. ... In the end, we knew that no cup of coffee would ever taste the same. ... Their faces will always be reflected on the dark surface of every cup of
coffee we drink."
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