- So why would a new Chicago roaster base its marketing on implications that its competitors' naturally processed coffee is dirty?
"But it is," says Matt Matros, co-founder and brand director of Limitless Coffee. "I've been to the farms. I saw it."
Matros explains that in 2015, while he was on a yoga retreat in Bali, he took a tour of a coffee farm.
"And I'm thinking, 'Wow that is filthy.' I couldn't believe how dirty the coffee (harvesting) process is," he says.
Specifically, Matros was horrified by the "natural" processing, which allows coffee cherries to dry under the sun for weeks.
"They're fermenting and decomposing and dying and attracting bugs, birds and wild animals," he says. "I saw this with my own eyes. And then it might rain, and then the sun comes out, and you get mold."
Oh boy.
Entitled bullshit origin story: ✓ Utter disregard of science: ✓ Bulletproof Coffee in there somewhere: ✓ Although the next snake oil coffee company is Starbucks. It takes some marketing stones to juice coffee cherries, extract sugar from them, name the results after a laxative tree and then charge extra. “You needed to know what cascara looked like so you didn’t cut a marshmallow roasting stick from it,” Koelling said. “Because you would wind up squatting in the woods instead of enjoying your marshmallow.”Matros explains that in 2015, while he was on a yoga retreat in Bali, he took a tour of a coffee farm.
"With that clean coffee, we have low toxicity, and I think it's that low toxicity that really drives performance and productivity," says Matros. "We want to help people own the day and really win at productivity."
Fear of these mycotoxins — warranted or not — has freaked out some coffee drinkers in recent years and driven sales of the Upgraded coffee brand sold by Bulletproof coffee founder Dave Asprey. And that fear motivated Matros.
Koelling is a plant evolutionary biologist. She grew up in Oregon, where she spent a lot of time learning the ways of the woods.
Pretty certain the coffee roasting process takes care of all of the germs and mold. Either way, if this guy really cared about the conditions his food was in before it reached his table, he'd be limiting his diet significantly. Agriculture is dirty work. Some of it is dirtier than others, especially if we're talking about animals. Case in point, pork. Ever been on a pig farm? Not a farm with pigs, but an actual pig farm? I know a guy who owns one and he tells me those fuckers are dirty, and I don't mean wallowing in mud dirty. I mean if you go into a building with 1000+ pigs, you will be overwhelmed by the smell. If you're there for any length of time, it permeates your clothes and your skin and you won't feel clean until you scrub like crazy. Know what smells delicious though? Sausage. I rest my case.
Had a boss who used to work in Idaho, designing AV systems. He got called onto a chicken farm once because they needed an audible alarm that could be heard 100 yards away. Apparently if the vent fans in a battery barn go out, and you don't have the secondaries switched on within a minute, the chickens all asphyxiate from the ammonia. Which means, effectively, that battery barns output a 100% lethal stream of ammonia 24-7.
There's something subtly magical about the wikipedia article on chicken manure. Edit: Also, Imigongo.
Interesting challenge here, journalistically. Roger Cohen's column in today's Times made the point that "fact-based journalism" is what we used to call "journalism" and that there shouldn't be any other kind. Of course he was referring to more pressing issues than washed coffee, but this article is a good example of the erosion of evidence in favor or unfounded belief. The journalist goes out of her way to say that empirical evidence doesn't support this crackpot's claims, but she's still giving him a platform. And as we've seen, it's the platform that matters and not the message. Not that I'm comparing bogus claims about coffee to the START treaty necessarily, but I think this article points to the bigger issue that controversy is so much sexier than facts. If only the facts mattered here, there wouldn't be an article to speak of.
I think the only reasonable tack for journalists to take is to start writing headlines that say, "Trump lies about X". It lacks the decorum that most respectable publications would prefer, but these are not normal times and normal solutions aren't going to get us anywhere. If CNN, NYT, and NPR all started just routinely beginning stories with, "Today the administration lied about such-and-such," he would implode in a heartbeat. It's not a qualitative judgement if it's true, so call a liar a liar already. The naked truth might just liberate a bunch of other journalists from their need to be "balanced."