"coffee beans" news and stories

For some reason, I have coffee on the brain today and so decided to search for coffee pictures in the Slashfood pool. I found lots of fantastic pictures of cakes and pastries infused with coffee flavors, but this image by Sarah Gilbert, an occasional Slashfood contributor, captured my attention most of all.

Sarah has been writing for Culinate recently, expressing her passion for food and the experiences she has as she tries to feed herself and her family a more sustainable and local diet. Her most recent piece is about her process making sourdough starter from scratch. If you haven't been following her writing over there, you should definitely check it out, as her enthusiasm for food, eating and cooking is contagious and inspiring.

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Thanks to the huge role the media plays in our daily lives, pregnant women now have way more to worry about than even ten years ago. Getting pregnant means you are suddenly victim to tons of fear-inducing claims and studies, each new one seeming to contract the last. Exercise! Don't over-burden yourself! Eat chocolate! Go easy on the fat!

And now, claims that a little bit of caffeine probably won't hurt you are challenged by a recent study in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that suggests that women who consume more than 200 mg of caffeine (one small cup of coffee) a day are at a greater risk for miscarrying.

In the study, documented in a NY Times article, 1,063 pregnant women were interviewed about their caffeine intake. Out of the total, 172 women had previously miscarried. The rate of miscarriages was higher in those who consumed 200 mg or more per day (24.5% out of 164) compared to those who drank no caffeine during their pregnancy (12.5% out of 264 women).

But of course, miscarriage occurs for reasons other than caffeine, some which can't be explained away through a study. But I'd love to hear from women who were once or are currently pregnant (or their significant others) to get their take on this news. Do reports like this make you nervous? Do you drink caffeine now? If so, would this study make you think twice? Or do you eschew science in place of good ol' common sense?

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While I am typically not particularly picky when it comes to food or drink. However, when coffee is concerned, I am pretty darn selective (my coffee addiction has been well-documented here, here and here). I love coffee, and don't have a whole lot of tolerance for weak, burnt or stale coffee. However, even I sometimes get tangled in the "how to store you coffee bean" debate. For years I fell firmly in the camp that believed that coffee should live in the freezer. But then I read somewhere that it was best to keep it at room temperature and so I begrudgingly switched. These days I keep my coffee out on the counter, in large part because I go through it fast enough that I don't worry about the oils in the beans going bad.

Over at the Unclutterer, Erin has put together a helpful guide with tips on how best to store coffee. According to her research, my storage technique seems to be okay (room temperature is acceptable, as is the freezer for beans that you want to keep for the long term). She does stress that coffee beans should not be stored in the fridge, as it is far too moist in there.

How do you guys store your coffee beans? Fridge, freezer, room temperature or some combination?

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Starbucks, contrary to popular belief, does not pays less for their coffee than other coffee buyers, using their size to bully their suppliers into meeting extremely low prices (like one here-unnamed major retailer does). In the past year, Starbucks paid about 36% more than the average price per pound of coffee beans, shelling out $1.42 for every pound of beans they bought.

Does this definitively prove that Starbucks is making the world a better place for all coffee growers and that there will be no starving farmers working coffee plantations in the world? Of course not. The latter problem can't be helped because that low average price means that there are companies paying far, far less for their products. What this does mean is that Starbucks is making positive policies that will benefit growers in the long run, setting a higher standard that other buyers will, hopefully, meet at some point.

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Pressing on with their intentions to improve the company's image, McDonald's has started to serve 100% Rainforest Alliance certified coffee beans. Rainforest Alliance is a New York-based nonprofit that certifies coffee production farms and facilities to a set of standards that mandate specific environmental protection policies, workers' rights and community involvement and the group says that McDonald's intends to expand the use of their certified coffee from the UK to the rest of their European outlets over the course of the year. For now, the coffee will be available in all 1,200 outlets of McDonald's UK, making the company the first major retailer in the country to use such a certification.

Many McDonald's outlets in the US offer fair-trade certified coffee from Green Mountain Coffee, but there is no nationwide policy mandating the use of one specifically certified coffee.

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