Coffee and the Environment: How Farmers and Marketers Construct Relationships Between Coffee Cultivation, Environmentalism, and Nature

• In Event: Food, Culture, and the Environment: New Directions in Critical Food Studies

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the environmental impacts of coffee production have been used to promote the consumption of more sustainable beans (e.g., bird-friendly, shade-grown, organic, fair trade coffee), resulting in changes to how coffee is marketed, certified, and farmed. In this paper, I examine the linguistic construction of the relationship between coffee and the environment at two ends of market: promotional materials from U.S. coffee companies and talk in Nicaraguan Fair Trade coffee cooperatives.  Ethnographic and rhetorical analyses from the US and Nicaragua offer overlapping and divergent constructions of how coffee production and consumption fit into an environmental ethic.

Author

• Leah Sprain, University of Washington