| Cathleen Falsani

Baby steps stumble toward righteous coffee

Where can you get a decent cup of coffee around here?

Morally decent, that is.

Such was my most recent spiritual quest: to buy a steaming cup of coffee from a beverage purveyor that gets its beans from farmers who make a living wage.

The quest seemed simple. But lo, I say to thee, it was fraught with peril.

Perhaps peril is a bit strong. Fraught with . . . with . . . impatience, flagrant disregard for parking ordinances, excessive carbon dioxide production — and some minor scalding.

How is a cup of coffee a spiritual quest, you say?

It is according to this Roman Catholic theologian in Boston I know who published a book recently about what he calls “economic spirituality.” The idea is to integrate who we are with how we spend our money.

“You look at how you actually have been buying coffee, buying clothes, buying your car, and you review that with God, and you’re just honest — totally honest — about what those purchases were like and who benefitted and who didn’t from those purchases,” Tom Beaudoin, the Boston College theologian and author of Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are With What We Buy, was telling me the other day.

“Everybody’s got something they can do,” he said.

But don’t start out trying to fix everything all at once, he said, paraphrasing a few lines from that uncelebrated theologian, Dr. Leo Marvin, as played by Richard Dreyfuss in the 1991 film “What About Bob?”

“Baby steps,” Beaudoin told me. “Richard Dreyfuss is Bob’s psychoanalyst, and that’s his solution. Bob’s in this neurosis, and he’s not going to get out of it in one day, but he’s still got to be able to function in the rest of his life . . . so Dreyfuss says, ‘Take baby steps, Bob.’ And there’s wisdom in that.'”

You’ve got to love a theologian who quotes from Bill Murray films to make a spiritual point.

The outfit doth offend

Baby steppin’. Beaudoin started with his belt. His favorite belt. He called the designer and the manufacturer to find out if the workers who made it were paid a fair, living wage. Suffice it to say, he doesn’t wear the belt anymore.

I was going to start with my wardrobe. Apparently I’m a walking human rights violation.

On Thursday alone, my shoes, skirt, T-shirt, and blazer were all made by brands that use or have used sweat-shop labor. God only knows how my drawers and makeup came to be.

I’m fashionably immoral (or is it immorally fashionable?). My closet is an affront to all that is right and holy. And I drive an immoral car. It’s a smallish SUV, but it’s an SUV nonetheless.

Help!

“While I would love for all the abuses of the branding system to be overturned tomorrow, I would rather be realistic with people,” Beaudoin said, trying to talk me down from my existential ledge. “A realistic spiritual discipline says, ‘What is your baby step? And what are you willing to do?’ ”

Coffee. I can do coffee.

I consume an awful lot of coffee. A cup or two at home in the morning, and at least a medium-size take-out-variety regular coffee or espresso drink during the day.

Every day.

It’s easy enough to find fair-trade coffee beans online or at the local Whole Foods from one of several companies such as Equal Exchange or TransFair. But finding a coffee joint to deliver my daily takeout fix was another story.

Fair-trade means the farmers themselves in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean are paid a fair price for their coffee beans. For example, Equal Exchange pays a minimum of $1.26 for a pound of green coffee. The world market going rate is about 72 cents.

After inquiring with Equal Exchange, one of the largest fair-trade coffee companies in the United States, I got a list of a number of Chicago area cafes (and churches) that serve fair-trade coffee and picked the one closest to the Chicago Sun-Times: Cafe Medici on 57th Street in Hyde Park.

I hopped in the old offensive SUV-lette and drove the nine miles to the cafe-bakery. It took about 15 minutes. Then I drove in circles for another 20 minutes looking for a parking space, and finding none, opted to throw on the flashers and leave the car in a tow zone while I procured my morally acceptable coffee.

It was very nice. Full bodied and $1.50 for a large. A steal. But totally inconvenient.

By the time I drove back to the office, I’d used a gallon of gas, which translates, I’m told, to about 28 pounds of carbon dioxide. So I put a few pennies in the pocket of a Third World farmer but in the process gave the ozone another Mussolini head-kick.

Economic spirituality score: Nil.

Baby steppin’ to the counter

Then I learned, happily, that Dunkin’ Donuts recently began selling espresso drinks made exclusively with fair-trade coffee.

A sign from God, I thought, and marched across the State Street bridge to the nearest D&D.

The normal 45-second exchange with the counter clerk — “Next” followed by “medium coffee, light cream, no sugar,” and (a few seconds after that) the desired hot drink — took about 10 times longer.

I wanted what is called elsewhere an “americano,” two shots of espresso and hot water. I explained the mixture, and the clerk, smiling, disappeared out of sight to make it.

Almost five minutes later, she returned with the hot beverage in hand. “There is an extra shot, so there is an extra charge, OK?” she asked.

“Sure,” I replied, happy that my spiritual quest was moving right along. I really didn’t mind when the tab (with tax) was $3.61, which, I believe was an overcharge of about a buck, and $1.36 more than a grande americano at the nearby coffee outlet that rhymes with “car trucks” and doesn’t use fair-trade espresso beans.

Mission accomplished. It even smelled good.

Then I got in the revolving doors with two inexplicably perplexed out-of-towners (I’m gonna guess Wisconsin), one of whom stopped abruptly mid-revolve as if being attacked by an invisible troll, causing my moral java to slosh out of its travel lid and onto my hand, scalding me quite rudely.

After uttering a few profanities, I gave the tourists the evil eye and stomped back to the office, a spiritually bankrupt coffee dilettante.

Baby steppin’, Beaudoin reminded me later.

“Let’s say that becomes your baby step and you get yourself into that practice,” he said. (Minus the swearing and scalding.) “What’s going to happen is other questions are going to start coming to you, about other areas of your life, other issues, and over time there will be another step you will want to take.

“With a critical mass of baby steps, which sounds like a ridiculous phrase,” Beaudoin said, “companies will start branding themselves according to good labor practices. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Old Navy said, ‘Buy our shirts because we pay a living wage and we give our Indonesian women health insurance’? That would be amazing!”

All right, then.

Today, the coffee.

Tomorrow, the closet.

Some day, the world.