Café Chicago: A New Model of Social Action in the City that Caffeinates

The economic, social, and environmental collapse that we swim in may be happening so slowly that we are not able to detect its downward spiral in our day-to-day lives. But it is taking place, and we need to evolve much more quickly than we have been. We need bolder action. We need to spawn viable alternatives while also actively resisting the corporate and state forces out to repress, distress, and brutalize us as they protect wealth and privilege.

That paragraph's perhaps an odd way to start a brief description of the new activities being launched by Resistance Coffee and its umbrella Chicago Coffee Confederation, but it does provide some insight into the motivations behind such projects as Café Chicago.

Café Chicago seeks to address real and growing failures within our warfare-oriented, corporate-dominated, ethically challenged society. Decisions in the work place are made by a class of owners and managers not doing that actual work. Immigrants are exploited by our economic and business models, then targeted for repression and deportation when nativists get restless. Jobs are often meaningless and often put workers into the unfortunate role of constructing their own demise (example, day laborers and other workers in low-income areas building and renovating the buildings that will be condos that will make the area unlivable for those workers all too soon).

Too often we are forced into compromising our values, because we can't afford to maintain our values. If we are lucky, we buy shitty pesticide-laden produce because organic is too expensive; if we live in the vast food deserts of the South and West Sides, pork rinds and synthesized cupcakes are our side dishes. We drive and drive and drive because it is in someone's interest to block construction of affordable and effective public transportation. We buy coffee grown under old-style plantation-like conditions, sold to us by baristas who hate their jobs but need to make a living.

It’s time for a different model, one that values human beings and our longing for freedom and for justice and community. We need alternatives that don’t find us hiding our heads in the sand, but that continue to challenge those forces hell-bent on destroying our city, our planet, and our lives. It's time for a different model of making a living, of funding social change whether radical or revolutionary or alternative-building. It’s time for new models of social interaction that prize each and every voice, and that build community and resistance.

Café Chicago grows out of this search for real alternatives, and out of the experience of a small-batch coffee roaster toiling in a freezing cold garage trying to make a living roasting fair trade, organic, liberation-oriented coffee over the past five years on a backyard barbeque grill while raising much-needed funds for feminist, immigrant, and other radical organizations. Café Chicago grows out of the recently formed Chicago Coffee Confederation, which now has three homemade micro-roasters spinning in three different garages, with several more in the works. We are working together to support ourselves, our communities, our organizations and creative work, and of course to support the very real desire for great tasting, consumer-fetish-free coffee. It grows out of a desire to create meaningful, living wage, socially relevant work in an atmosphere free of ugly power relations.

The idea that is forming is to take the expertise of the garage roasters of the Chicago Coffee Confederation and expand our work horizontally and on a much larger scale via a working relationship with a vital social change organization in Chicago. We will be working with a prominent group working with day laborers and immigrant communities to construct a worker-made, worker-owned, and worker-operated cooperative that will roast coffee in full-sized, energy-efficient machinery.Money generated by Café Chicago will be used to support the workers doing the work, and to support the work of the organization. An attached cafe will serve as a gathering place for people who value such work, people doing that work, and for people who share values of cooperation and mutual aid and want to act in solidarity with those at the bottom. This hub, Café Chicago, will also benefit the work of many other change organizations in Chicago, generating funds for these organizations and also serving to generate funds for projects that get sidelined in the process of seeking restrictive corporate and governmental funding.

Using some features of communal bike shops like Working Bikes and Ciclo Urbano, our hub will open its doors and its expertise to youth seeking out meaningful work and experience and knowledge of the world, to low-income activists and artists needing to augment their incomes, and to others interested in the art and craft of socially-relevant coffee roasting.

Café Chicago’s gonna rock this city that works, but we’re going to work it a different way. If you wanna participate, write and let us know who what when where and how, and probably especially why.

The revolution may not be well-funded (yet); the revolution will be caffeinated.

Dark Roast, With a Whiff of Anarchy (pub. Chicago Reader)

 by Martha Bayne

                            David Meyers with the Bean Boss                            Credit: Jim Newberry

“I do not love roasting coffee,” says David Meyers. “I don’t want to spend my life doing this. I only want to do it one or two days a week.”

Meyers bends over the Bean Boss, a squat propane grill tricked out with a rotisserie spit, a motor, and a cylindrical drum. He’s listening for something akin to the sound of charcoal smoldering, which signals that the beans roasting in this garage on the northwest side have entered their second phase. During the first phase they crack and bang around the drum like popcorn; in the second oil rises to the surface of the bean. Leave the heat on too long after this and they’ll start to smoke something furious. In fact, the air around the garage is already thick with ribbons of smoky, carbonized coffee-bean sugars. Meyers turns down the gas and, after another minute, decants two pounds of scorching black beans into a sieve mounted over a fan rigged off to the side of the Boss. Once they’ve cooled, he weighs out a pound at time into brown paper bags emblazoned with the likeness of Russian anarcho-communist Pyotr Kropotkin.

Meyers is the roaster, packer, marketer, and delivery guy behind tiny independent Resistance Coffee. “Pretty much everything I do comes out of anarchist activism,” he says. “Rather than being just an end in itself, [coffee] is a way to build community and further these social goals.”

Meyers splits his time between Chicago and Union Pier, Michigan, where he runs a small organic farm on 23 acres of donated land shared by several others, including God’s Gang, a south-side nonprofit that trains inner-city teens in ecology, urban agriculture, and landscaping. He’s had his hand in various social justice causes over the years, including a 12-year stint as a grant writer for the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. In 2004 Meyers had just rented his first Michigan farm and was trying to make a go of it when his friend Ibrahim Parlak, the Kurdish owner of Cafe Gulistan in nearby Harbert, was arrested and threatened with deportation.

Up till then Meyers, who likes the control home-roasting allows, had been buying green coffee beans online and roasting them for his personal use in a popcorn popper. But coincidentally, the day before Parlak’s arrest he’d taken ownership of the Bean Boss, purchased for just under $900 on eBay. As Harbor County mobilized in Parlak’s defense, Meyers realized he had an opportunity: “I could have good coffee, make a little money, raise funds for cool stuff I believed in, and not have to work for anybody else,” he says. He got busy and in a few weeks he’d raised $2,000 for Parlak’s legal defense by selling pound bags of beans at $20 a pop. Ever since then, he’s pieced together a living between farming and coffee roasting.

These days Meyers roasts as many as 70 pounds of beans a week on the farm and in the northwest-side garage (which belongs to a friend), and sells them to a range of customers drummed up via word of mouth and his Web site, chicorycenter.org, where you can order from him. He’s currently buying beans from a Nicaraguan women’s co-op through friends at Just Coffee in Madison, but hopes to set up his own purchasing network soon. His requirements are pretty simple. “The coffee has to have a good pedigree politically,” he says—it has to be fairly traded and organically grown. “But it also has to taste good, and taste good at different levels of roast.”

Up until the early 20th century most coffee was roasted at home over coals or an open fire. But with the rise of commercial coffee companies like A & P and Maxwell House the practice all but disappeared from the American mainstream. Today most commercial coffees are roasted in hot air, which produces a uniform batch of beans with a slightly acidic flavor. Home roasting, while unpredictable, offers the roaster more control over the level of roast. The darkest roasts—like Meyers’s current blend, Kropotkin’s Kaffe—produce a rich, chocolatey cup of joe.

Kropotkin’s retails at $10 a pound, and Meyers will bring it to your door. He also sells beans to raise money for various causes, among them the Chicago Women’s Health Center, West Town Bikes, and the Latino Union. The “benefit coffee” goes for $12 a pound, and the proceeds are split three ways—$4 toward raw materials, $4 to Meyers, and $4 to the organization. “It’s no work for them and drums up new customers for me,” he says.

Juanita Guerrero found out about Resistance Coffee through a fund-raiser for the Latino Union a couple years ago. “I go to Costa Rica once a year and always bring coffee back,” she says. “I hadn’t found any coffee in Chicago that compares to it until I found David.” She started bringing his roasts into the Evanston law office where she works as an administrative assistant and, she says, “Everyone went crazy for it.” They’re now buying about ten pounds a week.

But while the demand seems to be out there, Meyers isn’t interested in expanding his operations—in fact, he says, “I spent years trying to put the brakes on this.” Instead, he and another roaster, Michael McSherry, created the Chicago Coffee Confederation. Meyers met McSherry, a musician and freelance painting contractor, at a rock show in March and shortly after taught him the ropes. McSherry built his own version of the Bean Boss, and after a few false starts (his third trial batch caught on fire) was soon selling his own beans under the name Grinderman Coffee. He sells to friends and small offices, and occasionally at clubs.

“Delivering coffee is fun,” says McSherry. “It’s a social thing. People are curious, and if they like coffee they like talking about it, and they’re usually willing to give this stuff a try.”

“He’s like the tamale guy,” says Meyers. “He just goes to shows and opens up a bag of coffee and waits for people to come to him.”

Now Meyers refers new customers to McSherry; another fledgling coffee entrepreneur, AREA Chicago publisher Daniel Tucker, has set up a Chicago Coffee Confederation Web site and plans to start roasting in October. Through the site they hope to share resources, information, surplus beans, marketing duties, and customers, each referring new buyers to the others when he’s reached his limit. This way, no one’s a slave to the Bean Boss.

On-the-Fly: Spring Rumored to Be "Just Around the Corner."

May 19, 2008

On-the-Fly Farm Update

Greetings! Early April is finally upon us in Union Pier, with cool to cold nights followed by slightly warmish days. The forecast calls for more of the same, so time to start thinking SPRING!

All irony aside, the weather's unusual. I imagine that greenhouses all over the Midwest are backed up with seedlings, as so few are ready to go out into the now late-May cold. Temperatures were in the 30s last night here.

But planting goes on, beds of lettuce and radishes competing with beds of collards and peas, the strawberries we planted in April are already forming berries, and many thousands of onions and scallions are starting to produce bulbs. Bed upon bed of beans and corn start to poke heads out of the ground, and the cabbage patch is alive with purple and green. Potatoes have finally risen from their nightshade slumber party.

First deliveries are tentatively scheduled for the third week in June, and the day of the week has yet to be determined. If you have any questions about where your delivery will be, let me know.

All are welcome to come out to work on the farm and invite friends for the weekend of Saturday and Sunday, June 7 and 8. We'll work in the fields during the day, particularly Sunday, and Saturday night the crazed gypsy-punk gyrations of the Black Bear Combo will welcome in Summer. If anyone is free in the next week or two to work on the farm during the week, let me know, there are about thirty trays of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and the like are waiting to get into the ground.

Hope to see you soon!

David

Chicory Center: wild turkeys in the mist

On-the-Fly Farms Update #6

September 10, 2004

Greetings from Bridgman, Michigan, home to the burgeoning tomato
hornworm population, and the aroma of roasting coffee emanating from
the Bean Boss, a standard American grill retooled to turn a big steel
drum full of five pounds of green coffee beans.

You know the old adage, about when you are starting a radical retreat
center and anarchist-oriented organic farm and you are sending out
periodic updates, you should mix up the tone of those updates from
time to time? Yeah, that old adage. Well, Update #6 exposes
the unseemly side of Chicory Center and On-the-Fly Farms, and
to some degree touches upon issues of class and race. To protect the
innocent (yours truly), let's just say that some of the details below
are 'fictional.'

So it was a late Friday afternoon early in September, the sun was
shimmering through the hundred-year old trees around the house and
barn, and I was out in the garage roasting coffee in the Bean Boss
and the Aerorost roasters. Listening to Springsteen's 1973 album The
Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle blaring from the tinny
broken speakers in my little white car backed up to the garage with
the hatchback open. I lazed around on the couches in the garage
living room setting, brushing the spiders off now and again,
listening for the first crackle of the beans. Drinking Wild Turkey
101, I was relaxing from another week of maybe 80 hours of work, a
pause before the weekend's work of harvesting produce to deliver to
the city and a dozen visitors.

Somehow that early Springsteen, like some of the more recent
Springsteen (Ghost of Tom Joad, title taken from Steinbeck's saga
about the Depression-era Oklahoma dustbowl), is like a salve for
tired muscles. Where The Doors at the time sang of surreal collegiate
angst a la Nietzsche, Springsteen brought a working-class perspective
alongside an equally surreal vision. And
sang of workers' struggles not just as an observer, but as a
participant with a vision that included radical dock workers and
Black Panthers conspiring "to someday own the rodeo" ("Does This Bus
Stop at 82nd Street?" from Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.).
That rodeo reference reminded me of the bonafide cowboys who show up
on Saturday mornings at the nearby Schmaltzes' farm, which is where
we get the steer shit that will become next week's tomato. On a
recent Saturday, the cowboy Johnny walked around with his arms
crossed, bleary-eyed at 8 a.m. We loaded my pickup truck with a
mountain of manure, a pitchfork full thumping against the rear window
now and again, and standing atop that mountain that smelt of fine
Turkish tobacco, it looked like a big mechanical camel, with truck as
body and steer shit for a hump. I jumped down and asked Johnny, who
was not a big talker, how much shit he thought that was. He squinted
his eyes, furrowed his brow, the works, and after a while said "I'd
say about a ton and a half."

Unclear on the math because I was pretty bleary too, I did realize
that one and a half tons is more than 3/4 tons, the capacity of the
truck, so I said to Johnny, "Do you think that's too much for the
truck?"

Johnny sauntered round to the side of the truck again, thought for a
minute, looked, squinted, the works, then said, "So long as the wheel
wells ain't touchin' the wheels, you'll be alright."

Another cowboy got there. He and Johnny stood next to each other,
sort of wondering who I was, what I was about, I suppose. Silent for
awhile, expressionless, they began to speak in short sentences, very
oblique, and only minutes after each utterance did I realize, they
were saying these hilarious jokes and puns, just at a real slow pace,
almost undetected.

In a song called "Lost in the Flood," also from Asbury Park, Bruce
Springsteen sings of a very particular madness sweeping through the
streets of the U.S. in the early '70s, at the height of the Vietnam
war and Nixon's domestic War on the Poor. A Black veteran returns to
Jersey, starts racing Sundays in a Chevy stock super eight, "while
everybody's wrecked on Main Street from drinking unholy blood."
Empty, desolate, revered, Jimmy the Saint rides off into the horizon
in a race, crashes into that violent tide sweeping this violent land,
smashing his car, his body, his life.

Faulkner-like, the song jump shifts to the point of view of an
onlooker, whose poverty tells him to look for parts of the wreck,
"but there's nothin' left that you could sell/just junk all across
the horizon, a real highwayman's farewell. And I said 'Hey kid, you
think that's oil? Man, that ain't oil that's blood,'" a
prognostication of the wars the U.S. government has visited now on an
increasing number of countries.

So I am thinking about all that as I listen to the roasters turn
those Zapatista coffee beans, thinking about the drag racing we did
out on the bypass around South Bend, Indiana back in the day,
thinking about this 1977 monster 3/4 ton pickup truck sitting in
front of me, and notice that the temperature has plummeted inside the
Bean Boss; Fuck! gotta get to the gas station two miles away and
exchange the propone tank in a hurry, so those beans don't wreck. I
jump into the little white car, and race downtown, and just as I am
about to turn in to the gas station, the trooper behind me turns on
his flashing lights. I think, man, this is really going to slow
things down; I breathe heavily to try to get some of the Wild Turkey
aroma to dissipate [remember, parts of this are 'fictional'].
The trooper asks for my license and registration, and I'm still
listening to Bruce and directing the flow of my breath downwards, and
now I am also thinking of the song "Mister State Trooper" from the
Nebraska album. I sit there facing the glaring sun, glancing in my
mirror at the cop, wishing he'd pick up the pace. After five minutes,
he brings my license back, says "Do you know your brake light is
out?" I say, "I had no idea, I'll fix that first thing in the
morning, thanks, bye." Off he goes, off I go to get the propane.
Aware that if I'd been Driving While Black, things might not have
gone so smoothly, I feel a combination of anger and relief. What is a
privilege ought to be a right.

I zip back home, and hook up the propane and fire up the Bean Boss
and the beans are saved from destruction, and my mind turns to
Springsteen's late '70s Darkness on the Edge of Town album. My
thought process is so literal sometimes, maybe my mind turned simply
because this farm is on the Edge of Town, and as the sun was setting
there was an increasing Darkness. Who can say.

Backing the car up to the garage, I opened the trunk to hear the
tinny speakers, and the tape flipped to the other side. A fan of
bizarre juxtapositions, the other side of the Springsteen tape is Don
Cherry, the trumpet player who made his name initially in Ornette
Coleman's wild, unprecedented late '50s free jazz experiments, a
music that appears intimately linked with the growing consciousness
of the need for action against racial oppression, and the need for
new voices, new structures of thought and struggle. A prognostication
of the civil and human rights uprisings soon to follow.

The Wild Turkey flew a bit more into my mouth and down through my
veins. I'd spent some time that morning communing with this family of
wild turkeys, real birds, out in the next field over. For some reason
the turkeys didn't realize I was a real person (meaning, A REAL
THREAT; there's A LOT of guns out here, including assault weapons [or
'menacing-looking weapons,' as the gun shop owners prefer to call
them]), and I crouched low to the ground. The baby turkeys
now-turning-adolescent continued to peck at the ground around me,
ever closer. They have different personalities. Their bland dishwater
gray-brown colorings are changing into the brilliant colors of the
mature turkey, with fire-engine red cheeks and ten shades of purple
spreading across their rumps and backs. Maybe they thought I was a
scarecrow or something, I don't know why. I decided to scare them
off, for if they get too used to being around us who hold menacing
weapons, they will likely get shot down this fall.

The coffee roasting continued into the night, and the Wild Turkey
continued to crack off the intensity of the week's work like chaff
from a roasting coffee bean, and friends from Stone Soup South pulled
up sometime, and we roasted beans and played guitars and trumpets and
a melodica named 'pianica,' and a bat came and flew around the garage
living room and I didn't even scream. And I think that if I had a
religion it would be to gather people together for food, song, and
dance.

If I had to tie things up in a conclusion to this Update #6, I would
say something about innocence, hunger, wildness, and violence.
Something about the innocence of youth and the hunger for experience
and for life and freedom, the hunger for a world free of torture and
abuse, innocence and hunger which if we keep them alive and healthy
keep us young even though chronologically aging. Wildness is
something I see in nature all round, including human nature if we let
it, and that wildness does not have to continue to devolve into the
violence that is so much a part of the history of this continent for
a bit over 500 years now. Clearly we live in a time where our choices
about how to live and what to do and how to abolish the shackles of
race, class, and gender, the works, are vitally important.
Well I'll fire this off before I turn editor. So long from Bridgman,
Michigan, 15 miles from Benton Harbor.

Food, song, dance; and action.
-David

Chicory Center, 2004: To attack food injustice, open doors to constructive, radical social action.

 

The anarchist Chicory Center was founded on April 30, 2004 to attack food injustice while opening doors to constructive, radical social action, growing out of a do-it-yourself ethic. The project serves as a nucleus for acting upon local and regional food and social justice issues from an anarchist perspective, while fostering self-sufficiency and community well-being. In practice, the project's On-the-Fly Farm serves to model a kind of solidarity that works closely with individuals, poor people, activists, organizations, and communities of color overcoming economic, social, and political oppressions. We believe in sustainable, democratically run food systems not controlled by the state, food systems that function independent of wealth and privilege.

Recognizing that capitalism and corporations like Whole Foods exist to profit the few and have no interest in making quality healthy food available and affordable to all, we work to support a grassroots, class-conscious, people-powered food justice movement. The role of the United States government in generating and maintaining non-democratic, non-participatory, and corporate-controlled food supplies and agricultural policies puts us all at risk of radical food insecurity. The USDA's corporatism makes even the minute trickle of research and funding directed towards supporting sustainable, community-powered agriculture appear as little more than a sugar-coating to keep non-profit, progressive, radical, and revolutionary critics silent or at bay. The Chicory Center and On-the-Fly Farm support flying in the face of conventional wisdom in an effort to show that people acting creatively, on their own initiative, can not only feed themselves but in that effort further the struggle for a just and liberated society.

At present, the Chicory Center runs On-the-Fly Farm, a 15-member Community Powered Agriculture project delivering fresh organic produce to weekly paying subscribers, while donating around 20% of our crop to support community organizations working for systemic change in Chicago. Our Resistance Coffee roasting project raises funds for groups ranging from Chicago's Latino Union, West Town Bikes, Radios Populares, and the Chicago Women's Health Center. We are also in the slow but steady process of forming a small farmers confederation in Southwest Michigan called Just Farming to promote small-scale organics with a focus on justice in the production, distribution, and consumption of healthy organic food. 

The Chicory Center also serves as a retreat available to poor people, activists, and artists. We are engaged in a unique process of experimenting with what a vital, coherent, healthy village might look like in these times - one that is inclusive, not exclusive.