Recently CTTP received a communication from another person concerned about the meat on our menu. The letter read in part:

I came across your website and reviews on Yelp -- it sounds like a lovely place and I would love to patronize your business. I do have a couple of concerns, however. I know that you are committed to human rights and environmental issues, but what about animal rights? I noticed that there is a fair amount of meat on your menu. Is this meat organic? Certified humane? As you probably know, in addition to being cruel, factory farming of animals is extremely detrimental to the environment.I am interested in learning more about how, as a business which is concerned with ethical issues surrounding production of your goods, you address these important issues.

I sent an email back outlining our stand on this issue and reiterating our commitment to a long-term transition to organic sandwiches. We received the following email in response:

Dear Ms. Tamerius,

Thank you for your response. I appreciate your candor with regards to this issue. I also find it admirable that you posted an article about this matter on your public blog.

Although I understand your reasoning for not serving organic meat, I believe there are few acceptable justifications for supporting factory farmed meat -- perhaps starvation is the only one. The damage this industry does to the environment and disrespect and cruelty it shows to other life-forms should make anyone remotely concerned about these issues steer clear of the industry. Perhaps you have not explored the variety of vegetarian sandwiches that are available. By switching to a vegetarian menu, you would also gain the loyalty of the thousands of vegetarians who live in this city. Vegetarian restaurants like Herbivore and Cafe Gratitude are widely popular, often packed way beyond their capacity.

I urge you to take the lead in becoming a slightly-more-perfect ethical business. Although fair-trade coffee is an important issue, it is also currently a trendy issue, one that guarantees a casually concerned San Francisco audience. However, these same "environmentalists" may eat sandwiches whose production caused just as much, if not more, damage to humans, animals, and the environment.  But since the issue is not trendy, local cafes do not capitalize on its power. By making this part of your mission statement, you could help spread awareness about a little-discussed yet incredibly important cause. I have faith in your ability to reconcile these business and ethical concerns.

At first I was a bit irked by the letter because it seemed to question the importance of the fair trade movement and implied that we and our customers don't really care about issues of social and environmental justice.  But once I thought about it some more, I realized that she was touching on another important issue, one that a values-led business must struggle with everyday: which values matter more?

CTTP does a lot of great things for our community: we serve only fair trade and organic coffee, we donate our left over foodstuffs to the homeless, our baristas donate 3% of their tips to CoffeeKids, we have a plan to donate 10% of our profits to environmental and social justice organizations (assuming we ever make a profit), we pay for our employees to have health insurance, and we pay our employees higher than minimum wage.

But let's face it: we have a long way to go before we become the type of business we want to be. Putting aside the meat issue for a moment, what about the fact that we're still using plastic lids on our to go cups? And why are our paper cups and toilet paper bleached white? And why aren't we using non-polluting wind power to run our electrical appliances? And what about our cleaning products? And our water usage?

The fact is, we can't do all of the socially and environmentally responsible things we want to do (at least not yet), so we have to make decisions between them. For us, fair trade is a more important issue than animal rights, and so we have made that our priority.

As always, we are open to persuasion on this issue, but it seems to me that rather than get into an internecine war between environmentalists about whose cause is more important, it would be far better to work together to make sure all of our causes are achieved as rapidly as possible.

Toward this goal, I repeat my call for help in making the transition to more socially and environmentally responsible sandwiches: where can we find distributors of organic, family farmed goods at an affordable price?