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Even I couldn't come to Costa Rica and not drink the coffee particularly as the arabica beans here are high on flavour but low in caffeine. It is certainly not worth asking for decaf of which they produce very little as the beans are sent to Germany for decaffeination (the caffeine is sold to Coca Cola) and the coffee goes back to Costa Rica for roasting and export. So decaf costa rican coffee bought in England will have clocked up a lot of airmiles. Only 3% of the world's coffee is grown here by small farmers who can't compete with the big producers, but 80% of next year's crop has already been bought by Starbucks, where it will presumably lose its identity in a bland blend.
On our drive to Tortuguero on the Caribbean coast we stopped at a banana plantation and packing plant. Unlike coffee they are run by big multinationals, Chiquita and Del Monte and the man from Del Monte decided that bananas should be big, yellow and banana-shaped. Had he decided to grow any of the other varieties, like the tastier small red ones for example, our world might be very different. The bananas grow under blue plastic bags to keep insects out. They are supposed to be biodegradable, but aren't and can blow off in high winds and end up in the sea where they kill turtles who eat them.
I spoke to a lady at the packing plant who had worked there for 40 yrs since she was 14. It seems conditions have improved and the children now go to school but it is still boring, repetitive work, men pulling the large bunches of bananas arranged in circular layers on a long stalk along an overhead wire from the fields to the plant where they are cut into small bunches, washed to remove the chemicals used to delay ripening and loaded on to trucks. Each worker processes 4 large truckloads a day for $25 a truck. Dollars are used as commonly here as the local currency of colones. Only spotless bananas are exported, about 80% are exported, any with brown spots are sold lically.
We passed fields of pineapples and stopped at a fruit market to taste some of the delicious more exotic fruits. I know it is unusual that I have not as yet said much about the food. Surprisingly beef is big here and one restaurant offered a 42 oz steak, surely too much even for an average American tourist, so presumably for a table to share.
A traditional breakfast dish is gallo pinto, fried rice with onions, chili and black beans. It means spotted cockerel and you can see that the white rice is spotted with black beans but not even our guide, a veritable fount of knowledge, can tell us where the cockeral comes into it.
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