For a country of tea-drinkers, there sure are a lot of coffee shops in my neighbourhood. This is a far cry from the state of affairs when I last worked in India, in 2006. With the exception of the expat managers at Grand Hyatt Mumbai hardly anybody on the team “needed” a morning cappuccino or an afternoon espresso.
I was no different. Even though I never quite took to instant coffee I didn’t know a cappuccino from a cortado, and I was okay with that. Then I moved to another country. Ten years of working with the British, drinking with the Italians and dating Antipodeans got me looking at my morning cup of Joe slightly differently. I understood how milk is textured for a flat white, why the machine needs recalibrating when an espresso is burnt, and that no true Italian would ever touch a cappuccino after lunch. I now love coffee.
I also learned about the business of selling coffee, and a few facts about how this industry was affecting the environment. Facts such as only one in every 1,000 takeaway cups gets recycled. The “paper cups” are actually lined with plastic which needs to be removed before the paper can be pulped – another fact. The fact that after the long journey from coffee plantation to roastery to café to mouth, the takeaway coffee cup is used only for a few minutes before it lies waste in a landfill for a few thousand years.
Back home in India, even as we are just about learning to take away coffee, the Maharashtra government’s new ban on all single use plastic products is forcing us to reconsider this new habit. India Food Network initiated the #JustOneChange campaign to encourage people to kick one environmentally-unfriendly bad habit.
I gave up takeaway coffee and an amazing contingent of chefs, restauranteurs and influencers joined in too. Visit our Instagram & Facebook pages to see the personal pledges by Gauri Devidayal, Harshavardhan Rane, AD Singh, Shagun Mehra, Chalapathi Rao, Shobu Yarlagadda, Vikram Khatri, Pallavi Nigam, Prateek Sadhu, Sadaf Hussain, Ananya Banerjee, Cyrus Todiwala, Rishim Sachdeva, Michael Swamy, Milind Deora, Kamini Patel, Ranveer Brar, Vicky Ratnani, Pankhil Shah, Mallika Basu and Nikhil Merchant. Do watch (and share) our film about spending World Environment Day with Mumbai's street vendors, distributing free paper straws and bamboo spoons to them. We also teamed up with former MP Milind Deora's #QuitPlasticMovement to help spread the message even wider.
I look forward to keeping you updated on the impact our drive has made. Meanwhile, here is me playing favourites with the week that went by…