Couple searches for java’s story

• By ROBIN MILLER
• arts writer
• Published: Oct 12, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Each cup brings thoughts of the terrain, roads traveled, even the danger.

For there was danger at each turn. Not the Hollywood kind of stuff where the camera closes in on a character, but the real-life, stepping away from roadsides to allow the passing of machine gun-mounted trucks.

It was best to blend with the crowd when those trucks rolled by, because kidnapping Americans in Yemen was the trend at the time. Holding them hostage was another trend.

“And there was one point where I took Linda by the arm and led her back into the crowd,” Daniel Lorenzetti said. “Coffee isn’t grown in the safest of places.”

That’s the focus of Daniel and Linda Rice Lorenzetti’s book Birth of Coffee, along with the photographic exhibit that accompanies it. The exhibit will open Friday, Oct. 17, in the Community Gallery at the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge.

The Lorenzettis will be in town Friday and Saturday, Oct. 24-25, signing books at two local CC’s Community Coffee Houses and, of course, at the Arts Council.

But there’s sure to be plenty of cups of coffee to pass over the Lorenzettis’ kitchen table before that time, which means lots of time for reflection.

“It’s true,” Linda Lorenzetti said. “I see every face of every person we talked to in every cup of coffee. This is an incredibly labor intensive commodity. A lot of people held those beans in their hands before they made it into your coffee cup.”

She also thinks about the countries, Africa, Indonesia and South America. And she thinks about the natural disasters that suddenly aren’t just something in the news.

“There was an earthquake in Columbia the day after we left,” Linda Lorenzetti said. “It wasn’t just an earthquake for us. It was about all the people we had met and talked to along the way.”

The people living in those places where coffee is grown and harvested. Those not-so-safe places.

The Lorenzettis knew what they were getting into when taking on this project. He’s a photographer; she’s a journalist. It was about 10 years ago when they came up with the idea.

It happened in Java. Yes, Java, the Indonesian island where Jakarta serves as its capital. It also was the first place Indonesian coffee was grown. That was in 1699.