- Coffee is THE most popular beverage worldwide.

- The average coffee drinker consumes 3.41 cups daily while more than 60% of North Americans are daily coffee drinkers.

- Coffee is the second largest agricultural crop in the world (cotton is number one).

- After cotton and tobacco, coffee is the most heavily sprayed crop in the world.Of the 2.4 billion pounds of coffee that are sold per year in the United States only about one sixth (400,000,000 pounds) is organically grown.

- Three-fourths of coffee growers worldwide spray the plant with some of the most dangerous chemicals in the world- benoyml, chlordane, cabrflurane,DDT, endulfan, paraquat,and zineb. Several of these chemicals are banned in the USA due to toxicity.

- One pound of coffee consists of 4000 hand-picked beans. One hundred coffee beans = one cup of coffee. One coffee tree yields one pound of roasted coffee.

- If you drink two cups a day, you'll consume about 34 gallons this year, which represents the harvest of 18 coffee trees.

- If you drink conventional, non-organic coffee, the 18 trees which supply your morning brew this year will be treated with about 11 pounds of chemical fertilizers and 8 ounces of pesticides. Most of those chemicals will be washed down hillsides in the streams that carry away the 43 pounds of pulp stripped from your beans.

Facts like these make a person think that maybe cutting out coffee altogether would be the best idea. For many of us, this is too much of a sacrifice! Good news though! Studies suggest that the caffeine and antioxidants found in a cup of coffee are a healthy choice.  And, recent studies have concluded that drinking 3-5 cups of coffee per day during one's middle years may reduce Alzheimer's disease by as much as 60-65%.

Decaf anyone? As a decaf coffee drinker myself I'm sorry to say that you have to be extra careful when buying decaffeinated coffee. To remove the caffeine from the bean takes more processing. As you've probably already deduced more processing is not generally a desirable quality in anything we eat (read how coffee beans are decaffeintated). Look for Swiss Water Process as it only involves soaking the beans in a coffee flavored solution of water and does not use any chemicals.Don't feel like you can afford organic?Organic coffee does tend to run $2-4 more per pound (than conventionally grown). However places like Trader Joe's and Costco sell organic coffee which generally runs as little as $1 more per pound.Local coffee roasters are generally a pretty conscientious crowd. If you purchase coffee beans from a local roaster ask where they get their beans from. Some do not label organic because their growers cannot afford the label. However, the growers also cannot afford the pesticides and chemicals either so they really would be considered organic. Here are two of my favorites that offer online purchase and freshly roasted coffee delivered to your door:

Kalani Coffee

Caffe D'arte

Resources:
https://secure.speakeasy.net/kalanicoffee/eco-facts.htm
http://www.realcoffee.co.uk/Article.asp?Cat=Trivia&Page=1
http://www.canmax.com/coffeefacts.html
http://www.talkaboutcoffee.com/10-facts-about-the-coffee-industry.html
http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/question480.htm
http://www.supermarketguru.com/index.cfm/go/sg.viewArticle/articleId/240