Here are my options of a morning: I have a tea mixed of rose hips, clover and hibiscus from the health food bulk isle, and mint from last summer's farm, and I have coffee. This is the first moral dilemma of the day: I know what goes into coffee. I just spent a month learning it again, this time in Bolivia, where the coffee "collective" we visited did not distribute profits, and the hotel had instant Nescafe from Brasil. Looking at a cup of joe, fullsweetened the way I like it, I know what a coffee plantation looks like, what the workers are (or, more accurately, aren't) paid, the infrastructure, the glut. Then there's sugarcane. It's enough to make a person weep, all before seven AM. My tea? The innocence is almost laughable, and the conscience is soothed. But it just doesn't do the trick.


Oh, the choices we make.