Kyle Cornforth, Thai corn

Now in The Faster Times: Kyle Cornforth tells all about her year away from Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard, her forays into Thai farming and cooking, and her deep worries about the future of Thai food. Read the story.

Some of Kyle’s students learn that lemongrass helps deter snakes from gardens.

One set of new chopsticks

Jerry left me in Boulder with a tiny kitchen and dishes for one. He shopped at a local culinary fun house (which I’ve yet to explore) and found a pretty set of new chopsticks, Japanese style, with bright red tops and little yellow squiggle designs. But only one pair.

Only one set of chopsticks, on purpose. Though we’ll both be traveling to and fro in the next 8 months, I am, for all practical purposes, on this particular journey alone. I’m only one week into it, and I’m discovering my comforts and annoyances. Things I’m happy to have, others I miss. I’ve been taking mental notes from a largely ecological perspective. In no particular order, these are

THINGS I LOVE:

- This open-minded, educated, forward-thinking community. Its brain jibes with mine.

- Trails. Everywhere—for feet and wheels. All I do to find the view below is head half a block downhill, turn left past the nature center, and there it is: covered in myriad paths up and into and around the Flatirons. Heading there right now with my coffee….

- Drivers, who more or less are courteous to the cyclists and pedestrians who—almost—dominate Boulder’s roads.

- Fitness. I thought I was in reasonable shape (and I know I am). Yet I sputter in the wake of so many pro and nearly-so runners, bikers, hikers and all-around athletes who scale these mountains with barely a breath. But I’ll get closer—I’m walking or cycling everywhere these days.

- The Boulder Farmers’ Market, a beautiful sprawling tapestry of fresh foods and colors, accessible by bike (it’s right on the Boulder Creek Path, another new commuter’s love).

- The Chautauqua Dining Hall, a first-class restaurant one block out my door. Huge wrap-around porch, the perfect place for a glass of wine and sunset. (Plus, residents get 10 percent off!)

- So many restaurants and pubs with live music and general liveliness all around. Welcome back to college!

- And last but definitely not least, the Scripps program, one of the greatest contributions imaginable to journalism and the environment today.

The Flatirons, from Chautauqua

THINGS I MISS:

- My husband, of course. Family and friends. Remember the song, “Make new friends, but keep the old….”

- My big, open kitchen with room to maneuver and the appropriate dish or utensil for every idea in my cook’s mind.

- New Mexico food, wine and beer prices. Period.

- The ability to buy all of the above at one store.

- Perea Farms, El Mezquite, Valencia Fresh Fruteria, my neighborhood farmers’ market, fresh tortillas made daily, honey and eggs for sale around the corner, the scent of roasting chiles in the air everywhere this time of year. I know the local food scene has a lot to offer Boulder, and I have much to explore. But I do miss the down-to-earth nitty-gritty feel of food plucked straight from the dirt—a benefit of living so close to so many farms.

- My garden. Right now, right this very minute, I am missing loads of grapes, peaches, tomatoes, eggplants, chiles, chard, collards and arugula.

- My herbs. It’s a jungle out there among the dozen basil plants, oregano, onions, chives, parsley, sage, thyme, tarragon, marjoram, rosemary and mint. I’ve bought a few little plants for my Boulder porch (below), but I no longer have the option of chopping down a bundle of onions or a heap of basil and mint for a proper batch of laap.

- Dark and quiet. Previous residents have raved about Chautauqua’s peaceful nature. But I’m spoiled, already having the experience of living and staying in some of the world’s most serene locations. I’m liking my cozy cottage quite well, but this park is a tourist destination and a favorite of anyone in hiking boots. I get foot traffic through my little yard all the time. At home in New Mexico, I almost never need to close the drapes. Here, I feel just a bit as though I’m living in a glass house.

- Patio dining. Cooler nights spell perfect times for BBQs. Miss that.

Small herb garden in the making

AND A FEW RANDOM ECOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS:

- My graduate-level environmental studies class watched a video clip of Rachel Carson this week. The last time I’d seen similar footage was in Burma for an Earth Day celebration last year. Here, 20 percent of the class had never heard of Rachel Carson.

- Laundry. I’m actually less efficient living alone because I brought few clothes. I’m having to wash smaller loads more often. The machines here are not ENERGY STAR, and I can’t adjust for load size. Plus, I have no laundry line, which means I’m using the dryers.

- Garbage. I’m tossing more, more often because Chautauqua does not yet have composting facilities (we’re told they’re coming soon!). At home, we are able to compost or recycle almost all our waste. Some weeks, we have but one little bag in the trash can. Since I’m also tossing food scraps here, I’m having to take out the garbage more frequently because of the smell.

- Attitude. Despite the notes above, it’s a given in Boulder—people consider the environment in their daily actions. Bags aren’t immediately given in stores. Shops everywhere sell organic, biodegradable, compostable items. (Just bought a biodegradable plastic file folder.) Living green is the community norm.

- Cooking for one. Either I must change my habits, or I’ll have to start giving daily dinner parties. After so many years of cooking for at least myself and a hungry husband, it’s hard now to think and shop in terms of one. I can’t believe how long a single dish lasts—through the next breakfast, lunch, dinner and beyond. Must. Think. Small.

Just a photo I’ve always liked. Those are my hands in the upper left corner. I was in southern Thailand, learning about cashew apples. I’d spent the hour before exploring Krabi’s Ban Laempho Gastropod Fossil Beach—an ancient cemetery of mollusks preserved in layered beds—when lunch called my name. A few little stalls selling fried chicken and Muslim curries were clustered at the park entrance above the beach. I climbed the hill, pointed to a bin, and immediately roused a swarm of women.

“Himaphan!” they shouted in unison. “Cashew! Eat! Eat!”

But it wasn’t the nut I found in my salted-fish curry—it was the cashew apple. A vendor ducked into her kitchen and returned with a bowl of freshly cut fruits, pale yellow, some tinged in red. She sprinkled them with sugar. They were juicy, with a guava-like flavor and an endnote that sucked my mouth dry.

The women showed me a specimen recently plucked from a tree. “Here’s the flower. Here’s the fruit,” they explained. A curious thing: the nut, which is technically a fruit, resembles a green lima bean. It dangles beneath the apple, a pseudo-fruit, which swells as it grows—until it’s picked and sliced and curried by the enterprising Muslim cooks of Krabi.

There in the picture above, you can see the bowl of whole fruits beneath the sugared slices and just to the right of the mustard-colored salted fish curry.

Also, you can see my fingers in the process of scribbling. Yes—I do it the old-fashioned way. When I’m out and about and eating in the great, wide world: I write my notes in cheap little notebooks sold at 7-Elevens and local markets all across Southeast Asia. I stuff them with business cards and maps. Sometimes I sketch little diagrams to aid my notes; sometimes my pages get smeared in the curry at hand. Sources often grab my notebooks and jot information in their own language, which I can investigate further as I proceed with my story. This is enormously helpful when working across language and cultural barriers. And in these cases, a digital recorder (which I do have) or other electronic gadgets wouldn’t help. I might go through five or 10 notebooks on an in-depth article; many, many more for projects and books. The result is that my office closet contains giant boxes filled with years and years of little notebooks.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, as I work my way through Nicholas Carr’s account of the Internet’s effects on our brains—the way we think, read, see and process messages. It’s a fascinating read and an enlightening examination of the way our brains change with the technology around them.

And then, of course, we have the issue of all that paper accumulated after years of reporting. What’s the ecological footprint of that? (Then again, what’s the ecological footprint of factories that poison the workers who make our electronic gadgets?)

Much to ponder.

(In other ponderables, today’s GlobalPost contains our story on tools made from bombs in Laos. It’s one in a series of articles we’re doing in conjunction with our forthcoming book on UXO in Laos — a project I noted almost entirely by hand, in little notebooks.)

When I booked my tickets to Costa Rica last summer, I didn’t realize I’d set my departure from Liberia on the morning after an all-day, all-night hoedown. July 25 is Guanacaste Day, the anniversary of this northern province’s annexation from Nicaragua in 1824. Locals celebrate with a horse parade known as a tope.

Party time.

It’s like this: I’m traveling alone (my companions having left me a few days earlier), and I arrive in early afternoon via bus from sleepy Tilaran. I drop my bags at my hotel and head to the Liberia public square, where the streets are blocked to traffic and the entire place is packed with party-goers on horses.

Imagine Milwaukee’s Summerfest let loose (with everyone in a saddle); the walls down, the gates wide open and revelers spilling through the city. No boundaries, just open fun. Put every man on a horse and give him a girlfriend in the saddle, too. Bring out the speakers and blast anything  you like—country, pop, mariachi, reggaeton, Michael Jackson. And beer, everywhere, sold from vendors’ coolers pushed through the streets, and stands with banners screaming Imperial. Shove a can or six into each cowboy’s hands. You’re feeling the vibe of Guanacaste Day.

But that’s early on. As the h0urs pass, the air grows ever intense. More beer gets drunk, more horses do their duty in the streets. Vendors grill their pinchos (kabobs) and the ubiquity of libations spurs straw-hatted youngsters into dance and public embrace.

It goes on all afternoon, and I keep waiting for the parade to begin—until I finally realize this is it. Some riders wear numbers, and occasionally small groups of horses prance and gallop a stretch of the street. But mostly people hang out, as they would on the ground—except half the crowd is mounted while the other half stands by the sidelines, watching, drinking, eating, until a friend on horseback stops to chat.

Those who don’t stand sit on collapsible chairs and benches lining the sidewalks. Every parking space has a pickup truck, their beds hosting small parties in and of themselves. Most everyone wears a cowboy hat; many, also, leather boots.

By dark, the horses have gone, mostly, but the shrill shriek of a lone cowboy echoes through the rain-soaked street. Youngsters gather in dark corners, dancing to music blaring from trucks. The party persists, apparently, all through the night. At 6 a.m., just as the sun warms the air and fog clings to the trees, I catch my taxi to the airport. Young Ticos still drink and cluster in the streets. And a few smitten couples lean their bodies into each other, swaying gently to the tune of a dirty dance.

“This is the end of the fiesta,” my driver tells me in Spanish. He thinks it was a good one.

A flower display at the Santa Fe Farmers Market

Maybe you’re married or maybe you’re not—but you know about Date Night, right? I’m not talking about the movie (which I haven’t yet seen) but the general concept: couples get caught in the routines and responsibilities of everyday life. They need a little time for themselves. They need dinner, a movie, whathaveyou. They need Date Night (remember, the Obamas raised a ruckus last summer when they flew to New York for a night on the town?). Well, lately, we’ve been chatting with a couple of friends about needing more of these “dates” more often. We exchanged recommendations—restaurants, bars, cafés. And we vowed to do better.

So last weekend, Jerry and I did something we’d intended to do for more than a year. We turned Date Night into Date Day, taking the train to Santa Fe (beautiful! relaxing! convenient! and super cheap at $7 roundtrip!), meandering through the sunny hours of a perfect Saturday.

We began just a block from the station (where else?) at the Santa Fe Farmers Market, which reflected a full-on cliché of color (see photo above). I stuffed my tote bag with garlic and onions, and a scent that followed me through the city. I noticed I was not the only customer to browse the nearby Borders in a cloud of Allium perfume!

We lunched at Zia—poky service, mostly mediocre food. But the light! It struck the table at so many angles, and it put Jerry into an artsy photographic mood…

Light on lemon in water, Zia Diner

Light on blue bottle top, Zia Diner

Utensils reflect red awning, Zia Diner

And truth be told, my gazpacho sparked a creative nerve in me—I have plans to tinker with that cold avocado/zucchini/red pepper/corn soup.

From there, we dipped into various galleries, and a thoughtful Bill Eppridge exhibit. We totally lost ourselves, for hours, at Photo-Eye, and the neighboring Garcia Street Books (where I found a great new gem, which I’d known all about but had yet to hold in my hands: Susan Herrmann Loomis’s latest, Nuts in the Kitchen.)

And that took us through to the moment we glanced at a clock, uttered a few naughty words, and began a quick trot back to the station. We made it—with time enough for a beer (he) and a margarita (I) at the Railyard just before sitting to a stellar sunset ride south, back home.

Great Date Day. What about you?

A taxi driver eats noodles at his regular coffee stall hangout in Phnom Penh.

In The Faster Times today, I have a primer on Asian eating. I get a lot of questions about etiquette from people traveling to Asia for the first time, wondering when to use chopsticks, what to do with sticky rice, and (primarily) how to eat without offending. It’s a big continent, and customs vary dramatically from region to region. But this quick little guide should at least help you through the basics.

I also thought I’d take the opportunity here to share a few shots of eating in Asia. Read the article to understand the significance of what’s going on in the pictures.

Down the hatch and chuc suc khoe!

Cocktails with straws, Vientiane.

Tissues on the floor (1), Cambodia.

Tissues on the floor (2), Cambodia. Note the basket, normally kept beneath the table.

Lao noodle soup with chopsticks and spoon.

Thai coffee brewed with a cloth bag.

Thai noodle soup with chopsticks and spoon.

Bangkok street vendor.

It’s not what you think.

Well—it is but it isn’t.

That is indeed a pretty white glass of milk surrounded by the lovely green leaves of cannabis sativa. Marijuana milk. Pot juice. Call it what you will, but it won’t make you high. Though hemp milk is made from the pulverized seeds of the same family of plants that addle the brain and alter consciousness, the seeds have no psychoactive power.  The milk could, however, make you very healthy (it has the grassy, pasty taste of something that must be horribly good for you). Studies confirm the drink is a reliable source of protein, fatty acids, calcium and various vitamins. Plus, people don’t seem to be allergic to hemp milk in the way that many are to cow, soy or nut milk. It’s actually illegal to grow hemp (and thus the seeds) in the United States, but it’s legal to buy the milk. (Most American sellers import the seeds from Canada.)

This particular glass, however, I sipped in the cool shade of an open-air dining room in northern Vietnam. Remember Shu? She’s started Sapa’s first Hmong-owned homestay and restaurant in Lao Chai village near Sapa. Her little place is ringed by tall, bushy cannabis swaying in the breeze. Its wispy clumps of leaves almost reminded me of the desert willow growing in our New Mexico yard. Shu brought out a glass of the milk, which was earthy and herbal and contained little brown flecks of seed. She said the plant has long served as an important part of the Hmong diet, particularly because of the nutritious oil that emerges when the seeds are heated. “If you cook, you see a lot of oil coming,” Shu said. “In the past, people were very poor, and people used to cook like this for tofu.”

Hemp tofu? That definitely sounds like something my new friends in Boulder might enjoy.

Ya carries her basket of beef along the road between Ban Lung and Ou Chum in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province.

As some of you know, I’m at work finishing a collection of travel essays to be published next year. In the past few months, I’ve wandered aimlessly (and pointedly) for hours through old notebooks and files I’d long forgotten. This is something I love about reporting: it allows me to live at least twice. I have an experience. I write it down. And ever after, I retain access to the details of that event. Years later, I’m sometimes shocked at how much of my life slips from the forefront of memory until prodded with photos and notes.

Ya, pictured above, is a Kreung tribal woman in the far northeastern corner of Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province. She was 40 years old when Jerry and I met her nine years ago. I’d almost forgotten the encounter until I stumbled across her photo hidden in a pile of neglected files on my laptop. Yet as soon as I read the photo slug—Woman with Meat—I knew exactly who she was. And I vividly remembered the day we met on a slick muddy road to Ou Chum. Jerry and I had left the capital, Ban Lung, on foot—an unusual thing for a couple of foreigners to do, especially in a steady rain. But we donned our ponchos and walked the long route in search of an old woman who made copious batches of rice wine. We never found her—but here’s a bit of what I noted that day:

We walk and walk. The son of our hotel manager has told us Ou Chum has a woman, 104 years old, who makes rice wine every day. We walk to find her, and the chunchiet (tribal villagers) along the way think we are very strange. We pass a parade of women with baskets as we all huff up a red-dirt hill. The woman in the lead says her name is Ya, she’s 40, she has seven kids. “I don’t speak much Khmer,” she says. She tells us she has no rice, but her basket is filled with beef and a young boy beside her carries a small water bottle with fish inside—dinner. The girls walking behind Ya say they’re all going to Ou Chum, as they often do. We pass them, they pass us—again and again along the road.

All the chunchiet carry their daily needs in tightly woven baskets with little straps around their shoulders. Oranges, beef, rice, clothing—it all goes into the basket. The older folks, men and women, have drooping earlobes, sliced in two or shaped from giant plugs stuck through skin. Each man stashes over his shoulder a machete with a long wooden handle, a shoulder rest, and a sharp curved blade. The machete is his companion for any long walk.

The road twists and turns into gullies and gorges. The rain plows through earth, creating an orange landscape resembling the American Southwest in miniature. If 1,000 feet equaled an inch, this path could be the Grand Canyon.

We walk past huts, bucolic fields, a man with a pig strapped to a board behind his moto. (He has a moto, but most people walk.) We pass cows, ducks, chickens, dogs and boys on bikes. We pass through rubber trees, tapped and collected, shading the way. Past a turquoise butterfly wing, glued in mud. Past screaming babies, men toting corn. Past families draped over the railings of their thatch huts. Past little foot paths leading to thick jungle. Past indigo and ginger and hibiscous and frangipani. Past the stench of manure.

Two little girls run up beside us. One says she went to the Ban Lung market at 5 a.m., and now she returns with pomelo. She doesn’t go every day—but often. For food, for the family.

We pass another clump of girls, and one asks us where we’re going. We tell her Ou Chum, and she asks where we’ve hidden our motorbike. Do we have a moto? No moto? She can’t believe it, as though she expects us to pull one from our pocket.

Later, after Jerry and I give up on finding the old woman and her wine, we see that girl again near her house. She calls us over. She tells us she’s 12 years old, and she introduces us to her sisters — 15, 10 and 4. Their mother died four years earlier, and their father has gone to market to sell something. They have  two thatch rooms—one on stilts for sleeping, another next door for cooking. The girls say they don’t go to school, they work in the fields instead. Young green rice grows around the home. A banana tree, a gourd vine, a pile of corn. No pigs, no cows, no chickens, no other fruits or vegetables. What we see is what they have. We leave them a bag of peanuts and a small wad of riel….

*****

I read my own notes, and I’m back in Ratanakkiri. That’s the magic in keeping track of life’s intricate details (I consider it a job perk). I’ve come across so many little tidbits, many of them dealing with food. And many of which will never see print—in book or article form. Yet I’d like to do something with them.

Starting this week, I’ll be posting little food-related blurbs on the Rambling Spoon Facebook page. Most accounts will be much shorter than this—great dinners, interesting kitchens, market excursions, mealtime conversations. I’ll call them “More Better Food,” taken from the title of my forthcoming book, This Way More Better. These postings are in addition to the nibbles and bites I’m already putting on Facebook. So, if you haven’t already, check it out—and stay tuned for more. You can also follow along on Twitter—just look for @RamblingSpoon, where I’ll tweet these under #morebetterfood.

Let me begin with disclosure: this review comes with attachments. I share entangled endeavors with Kim Fay, author of the newly released Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. Her publisher, ThingsAsian Press, will publish my next two books. And I have contributed essays to Kim’s guidebook series, To Asia With Love. Though Kim and I have never met in person, sticklers for objectivity would argue that I cannot write an unbiased review of her book.

But I can write a fair review.

And in fact I’ve waited months to do just that. Back in October, with days growing shorter and winds colder, Kim sent me a draft of her manuscript—double-spaced type on 8 ½ x 11 paper, no photos except a rough copy of the book’s cover. But now I have the real thing, nearly 300 pages of intertwined essays and full-color photos taken by Kim’s sister, photographer Julie Fay Ashborn. It is one of the heftiest, most beautiful food and travel books I’ve seen from Asia. (The type is a bit tiny—my parents would have trouble reading it—but the photos are big and bold.)

“I thought about how much better food tastes when it fits into a narrative.” With this, Kim captures the nugget of great food writing. Ingredients are important—yes—but context is so much more so. (If you know this blog, you might notice I’ve said this before. Stay tuned for a forthcoming essay on this topic.)

Communion doesn’t simply tell us what Kim thought about the crispy fried eggplant she ate in Hoi An. Instead, it guides us through the life of Miss Vy, the restaurateur and instructor who opened her history to Kim. By the time we reach the recipe for that eggplant, “as delicate and flavorful as Miss Vy,” we know all about the chef’s upbringing, her family’s post-war struggles through Doi Moi, and her thoughts on communism, poverty and sexism. In turn, I am all the hungrier for her food.

I’m reminded of Paul Theroux, who wrote years ago about how Conrad, Hemingway and the other greats “had not done Africa justice.” Their writings “ignored Africans or else made them insubstantial figures in a landscape.” They wrote of Africa with out any Africans.

I see the same today in writings on Asia. I see it in the travelers themselves, and I find it in the ever-burgeoning world of food lit. “The tourists I met when I was young were better,” a Hmong woman recently told me. “Before, they come because they love Vietnam. Now, they come because they are just traveling.” Just traveling—with iPods in the ears and eyes cast inward (or hidden behind tiny digital cameras). I don’t want to know about their fave banana pancakes or their perception of Saigon’s best noodles—not unless their opinions reflect something more than themselves.

Tell me, instead, about the woman serving those awesome noodles and how she came to be behind a steaming wok on the street. Tell me her history and ideas. Tell me how her noodles fit—or don’t—into the texture of modern-day Asia.

Of course, no writer succeeds at this all the time—but it is what I strive to do. And it is what Kim Fay has done in Communion.

I particularly love an exchange she had with a “stylish” Vietnamese friend on the subject of a trendy restaurant resembling a series of street-food stalls, minus the grime. It’s popular with locals. “I don’t have to sit near sewage while I’m eating,” the friend said. “I can get fruit juice or coffee, or even both if I want, and I can eat all sorts of different foods. My kids can have one thing, and I can have another. Maybe it’s not the best, but we can each have whatever we like. And when we leave… my hair doesn’t smell like cuttlefish.”

There. That right there is what I want to read in a story on Vietnamese—or Thai, Lao, Khmer, Malaysian, Indian or Burmese—eating. Kim questions whether sitting at a stall, sucking on exhaust is an essential part of the street-food experience. And it very well might be for many of the glossy-eyed foreigners who write glowingly about such settings. But the vast majority of my Asian friends choose cleanliness when given the chance. They like indoor restaurants with tables and chairs, too. Imagine that.

Kim does express worry over the incremental sanitization of Asia leading to the sanitization of Asian flavor—a legitimate concern, considering the popular restaurant in question served a mediocre bowl of bun bo Hue that needed more shrimp paste. But thank you, Kim, for including your friend’s perspective. So many culinary missives fall flat on scope and view. We get street food, 24/7. But Communion covers the spectrum—from fish sauce aficionados to the “master grafter” of Dalat’s famous fruits; from humble bowls of clam rice to the haute creations of Didier Corlou. It portrays the breadth of a Vietnamese palate as varied as the people themselves.

I open books, blogs and magazines with cravings for Asian food and the people who deliver it. Too often I find, instead, another foreigner in a vacuum. I read Kim Fay and I feel I’m meeting Vietnam all over again.

This week, we’re drinking the last of the coffee I brought back from Costa Rica. I returned last summer with bags and boxes and tins of dark roast, light roast, decaf (for my mother-in-law), eco-friendly organic, shade-grown, ground and whole bean. For months, we’d simply head to the freezer after finishing a package. But it’s gone now.

I’m remembering the day I visited Coopeldos, a little coffee cooperative in a green valley far from the noise of any town. I almost missed it. I was on my own, lingering in Costa Rica a few days beyond my companions. I was all set to board a bus and head north until a little pamphlet changed my day….

*Please note: the photos in this story are taken by yours truly. Professional photo hubby was not along for this journey.

*****

Some days happen, just like magic. I’m packed and ready for a bus to Cañas when I find the pamphlet for Coopeldos. The coop sits halfway to Monteverde, less than 30 kilometers from my guesthouse in Tilaran, but an hour by bus—so bad and bumpy is the road. I’ve wanted to see a coffee plantation. I must go.

The bus drops me at an L in the road in a tiny village with a church, a minimart, a restaurant and a cluster of homes set among emerald Kentucky-like hills. Everywhere, green. And today: mist and clouds, alternating breezes and cruel humidity. But the walk is nothing short of splendid.

It’s a steep, rocky 3-kilometer path downhill from the bus stop. I follow the signs and trace the edge of a hill with gifted views. The pastures are mostly shorn, grazed, planted. Small patches of jungle trees sprout from fields of pineapple and grasses that feed goats and cattle. The air is thick, sweet, dense. Birds perch in the trees around me.

I reach the coffee when I reach the oranges. Shade-grown organic beans grow on small plants beneath towering citrus, bananas, laurel, cedar, corn, beans—anything. My guide, Hairo, later tells me the trees are good in every conceivable way. They prevent erosion, protect the coffee and welcome the animals—all of which help Costa Rica’s ecosystems to thrive.

This time of year, Coopeldos slumbers quietly through the off-season. Hairo, the only front-room employee on duty, seems a bit perplexed by my solitary presence—but no problem. He’ll give me a solo guided tour, which begins with an informative video on the coop’s history and the steps to processing coffee beans. I learn that Coopeldos, established in 1971, has more than 500 members who give a percentage of their profits to various social projects in education, forestation and health care.

Hairo leads me through rows of coffee, showing me the tiny berries that will be ripe and ready for harvest in fall. Each plant produces more than 6 kilograms of fruit in season. The ripened fruits should carry rich flavors and an aroma like chocolate, he says. Then he points to a leaf with tiny yellow spots, which he calls golden dust. It’s evidence of coffee leaf rust, one of the industry’s most menacing enemies.

I follow Hairo to the factory, where giant vats collect bushels and bushels and bushels of berries until the vats fill, the floors open and the tonnage drops into massive white-tiled bins below. At least, that’s the way he describes the process. Everything is quiet now. A catwalk gives us an overhead view to the empty bins below.

Hairo guides me through a series of machines that sort, rinse and dry. All we want in our coffee is the bean—the seed—from within the berry. The unused pulp is removed from the beans and shot through pipes into a giant compost bin. This all-natural fertilizer is spread around the plants from which it came. Not only is this good for the environment, Hairo says, compost is cheaper than nitrogen fertilizer.

The beans are fermented for 10 hours, then washed and dried by machines fueled by firewood and other organic matter. Anything else, Hairo says, and “the coffee just tastes like highway, pavement, smog.”

He shows me the “inferior” patio, to which reject beans are brought. These beans, he says, are sold locally, roasted and mixed with palatable additions such as vanilla, which makes for a spicier drink.

He takes me to a sheltered area, where the coop’s organic beans are dried naturally in the country’s intense sunlight. Workers rake the beans every few hours. Only 1 percent of this coffee stays within Costa Rica, Hairo says. The majority is exported to countries with higher demand (and, presumably, deeper pockets).

The only other workers on duty today are packers. One man packages individual bags of coffee and places them into a giant box, to be shipped to Alberta. Two women patiently clip dozens of distribution labels. Each bag is given an expiration date one year after packaging. All of this is done by hand.

The beans, of course, are roasted before shipment. But Hairo takes me upstairs to the tasting room, where I can watch a tiny black roaster (it looks like an air popper) turning green beans into varying shades of chocolate brown within four minutes. The beans pop and crack as they roast. Hairo says it’s critical to stop the process before the beans burn.

Tasting requires more nose than throat. We begin by breathing in the aromas of five little cups filled with different types of dry, ground coffee. What do I smell? Chocolate, toast, citrus, vinegar and nothing at all.

Next, Hairo pours boiled water into each cup. The coffees steep, then we stir and smell again. We “feel the aroma,” which differs from the first round. Before tasting, we “clean the top,” skimming foam from each sample. When we finally taste, we do not swallow. We dunk a spoon into each variety, noisily slurp the coffee, then spit it out. Three or four times, and we can really feel the acid and understand the flavor, Hairo says.

What do I taste? The first es perfecto. The second has a deeper roast. The third reminds me of an awful truck-stop coffee in the middle of Nowhere, USA. The fourth is burnt and acidic. The fifth tastes like a pot of coffee heated all day, with water added as the hours grow long. “Old-age coffee,” Hairo calls it.

He confirms my nose. The first two coffees are fresh; the remaining three are old, bad roasts. “Some people love it,” he says. “Not for me.” Those old roasts remind me of grandma’s percolator gone bad.

At the end of all that tasting, I get to choose a good cup to drink in the lounge, with wide windows overlooking a verdant garden. I ask for a light roast of the freshest variety, a little milk, no sugar. “You are a good coffee drinker,” Hairo says.

Several days later, I’m on my way home. I’m stuck for a few hours in the Atlanta airport, where a perky, polite waitress repeatedly calls me “Miss Pretty.” She serves a terrible cup of an abhorrent roast. I know what’s wrong with it—or at least the possibilities: old grounds, perhaps a fungus on the beans. It’s a dark roast, probably beyond the point of no return—the point at which Hairo says nothing is left but “charcoal.”