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Archives for July 2010

Streets Paved in Gold

Jul 26, 2010 by Ted Botha Leave a Comment

Ever since I moved to New York fourteen years ago, I’ve collected things off the street. This is the city of plenty – plenty to throw away. You can find furniture, paintings, lamps, computers, printers, strollers, food, you name it. So impressed was I by the largesse/wastage that I wrote a book, Mongo, Adventures in Trash, about it. (Mongo is New York slang for anything someone has thrown away that you find some use for.)

I’ve since stopped collecting bigger items. I go for the occasional painting that takes my fancy or a lamp. If it’s something I’m looking for – though it’s rare you actually find something you’re looking for when you’re looking for it – then I take it. One thing I have always collected and continue to look for is money. New York is a city paved not so much in gold but brass and nickel. Mostly I find pennies. Pennies are plentiful and most people don’t seem to have the energy to pick them up once they’ve fallen. Pennies are the insignificant coin. So much so that many shops don’t even bother to give you your change of one or two cents. They regard it as so small as to be meaningless. How far away, you might ask then, is five cents and a dime?

But those pennies add up. I’ve collected more than $400 off the streets since I bent to pick up my first coin. Of course that’s not all made up of pennies – there was one very welcome $50 bill drifting around a gas station on York Avenue and 58th Street – but most of it was. I have always put the coins I collect to one side, just to figure out how much I’ve made, how much falls out of people’s pockets, how much people overlook what is right at their feet.

Whenever I see someone who picks up a coin, I make sure to say something, like, “You a collector?” They are always happy to meet a fellow collector/picker/gatherer (that is, unless the collector happens to be a psychotic schizophrenic, many of whom rummage through the city’s trash too). In all my years in New York, though, I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen picking up coins. Sometimes it is the kind of person you’d expect (an old lady who, wearing a torn dress and with a Medusa hairstyle, looks like a trash picker) and sometimes it isn’t (a twentysomething on his cell phone). I still feel embarrassed every time I stop the sidewalk traffic to pick up a coin – yes, even $400 later! – but that doesn’t stop me from doing it.

Coins won’t feature in the documentary about mongo that Italian/Australian filmmaker Marco Mona and I are making at the moment, but plenty of other amazing throwaways in New York will. For a taste of what the movie will look like, check out Mongo, Trash Treasure Hunters – and stay tuned for more!

Filed Under: New York Blog Tagged With: book, coins, mongo, movie, trash

The illy Factor

Jul 23, 2010 by Ted Botha 1 Comment

This week I spent two days at the University of Coffee. Yes, believe it or not, there is such a thing. Actually it’s called Universitá del Caffé, which, you might have guessed, is Italian. And if it’s Italian and it’s about coffee, chances are illy will be in the picture. Yes, that’s illy with a small i. And it’s illy that runs the UDC.

For $125, Coffee (by Capsule) at Home

For $125, Coffee (by Capsule) at Home

In brief, we learned some coffee history, what elements an espresso should consist of, how to single out the tastes in a good espresso (a bit bitter, sweet, salty, sour), some of the world’s major bean-growing regions (who knew that India is becoming a major coffee producer?), the myths (coffee doesn’t make your heart go faster, coffee is not bad for you – talk to the scientists!), the politics of coffee (direct trade vs. fair trade), the inner workings of an espresso machine (Question: What is that silver screwtop coffee maker we put on the stove called? Answer at the end), and we got to drink various types of espresso to gauge whether we could tell the difference between caf and decaf (no, we couldn’t) or over- and underextracted espressos (yes, we could). And if you don’t know what it means to ‘extract’ coffee, get thee to your nearest Universitá (or just Google it) to find out more. And of course, we got to pull espressos and try to make as good a cappuccino as you can in two days.

I used to be a cynic about illy. For me the distinctive red label was a bit like Coca-Cola. You saw the sign everywhere, which was both good and bad. Good because it meant that If you were in a place where there weren’t many coffeeshops, an illy sign promised at least a decent enough brew and perhaps someone who knew what an espresso was. But if there were other options – which there are increasingly today, as specialty coffeeshops proliferate – you would pass illy by.

The X7 iperespresso - a New Generation

The X7 iperEspresso - a New Generation

But turns out that illy not only makes serious coffee – and has been plugging away at it since 1933, when Francesco Illy started the company in Trieste – but has also been doing some pretty darn innovative things.

Take direct trade (forget fair trade, that’s passé), where roasters deal directly with the farmers, often also teaching them how to grow better beans and get more bang for their beans. Today lots of roasters, especially in America, wear it as a badge of distinction that they work in tandem with farmers in Colombia or Rwanda, but illy has quietly been doing this for a long time without blowing its own horn.

At the company’s Universitás in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Bangalore, India – there are 10 UDCs around the world, with courses for professionals and consumers – illy schools local farmers in new techniques and technology. Agronomists pay visits to farms to see where they can offer help and suggest ways to improve crops.  Because illy buys its coffee from 9 countries – and from that intake it concocts a signature blend that it tries to keep as constant as possible every year – it pays the company to make sure that the beans it gets are of the best quality.

A Moka

A Moka

Then there’s the coffee-making equipment, an area where illy has been no slouch either. Check out the X7 iperEspresso, part of what illy calls ‘the next generation of espresso’, which uses a nifty-looking, specially designed and crafted capsule to give you an espresso or a lungo or a cappuccino. It might be a bit too Jetsons and space-agey for some, but if illy’s doing it, it’s the future. And you can bet it tastes good.

(Answer: It’s called  a moka.)


Filed Under: New York Blog Tagged With: brazil, coffee, espresso, illy, india, iperespresso, moka, udc, x7

About Ted

Ted was born in New York and grew up in Japan, South Africa, and Washington, D.C. He has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, and Outside. His books include Apartheid in my Rucksack, a personal account of discovering Africa as a white African; Mongo, Adventures in Trash, where he follows the people in New York City who collect what others consider garbage; and, with Jenni Baxter, The Expat Confessions, about South Africans abroad. His latest book, a nonfiction thriller about a forensic sculptor titled The Girl with the Crooked Nose, comes out in January 2012. His novel, The Animal Lover, is on Kindle. He is a swimmer and a runner, and has done his share of triathlons as well as long-distance swims in South Africa and New York’s Hudson River.

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