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Demand for Kopi Luwak May Be Threatening Wildlife
Damien1972 writes "Popularization of the world's strangest coffee may be imperiling a a suite of small mammals in Indonesia, according to a new study in Small Carnivore Conservation. The coffee, known as kopi luwak (kopi for coffee and luwak for the civet), is made from whole coffee beans that have passed through the gut of the animal. The coffee is apparently noted for its distinct taste, though some have argued it is little more than novelty. Now, this burgeoning kopi luwak industry is creating 'civet farms,' whereby civets are captured from the wild and kept in cages to eat and crap out coffee beans."
This is most likely to create an inferior product. Not that I think semi-digested pooped out coffee beans is particularly desirable product, but when you try to take some biological process and move it up to an industrial scale, something in the product is lost. It's like the fact that industrial scale cheese never has the same flavour of a cheese made in small batches on a small farm. The kind of grass that the sheep/cows eat, the water they drink, and a lot of other factors play into how the cheese tastes.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's just another stupid food fad for people with too much money on their hands, like "truffles": horribly-expensive mushrooms that just taste like dirt.
Truffles have been prized for hundreds of years, and so has coffee.
Truffles taste earthy, that's true, but that doesn't mean that it is going to stop being a prized culinary item because you don't see the point. You may not like them, but many people do.
Fugu is horribly expensive and you need a special license to prepare it, but that hasn't slowed demand for it.
If it's food, and it's tasty, people will always want it. And, there's always going to be a certain cache to having something which is so rare and expensive.
I've never had occasion to try kopi luac, but I know that Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is also ridiculously expensive because of the micro climate and soil it grows in -- because you can't just grow the same coffee elsewhere and get the same results. It's entirely dependent on the soil and the climate.
But lobster used to be considered poor people's food until people discovered how tasty it was. So were oysters, so was sushi. Then people discovered how yummy they were.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They didn't discover this coffee by feeding something to the civets they wouldn't eat normally.
The civets already eat the fruit and crap out the seed. The civets clearly already liked eating it.
Now, as to how someone made the leap of taking the seeds which have passed through the civet and decided to make coffee out of it ... I couldn't even begin to guess at.
But they are NOT force feeding them something they wouldn't eat normally.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Most people who know coffee say that in blind tests this "Shit" coffee is indistinguishable from cheap ("Shit") coffee.
People are for the most part incredibly stupid.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?