Technically Speaking: GOOD GRIEF SYNTHETIC COFFEE

By Dave Trecker

What’s the one thing we can never do without? If you answered “coffee,” you’d be among the addicts around the world that quaff down 2 billion cups of it every day. Americans are the biggest consumers, with 34% of us having at least one cup of joe on a daily basis. Overall, average consumption is two cups per person per day.

Coffee is essential. It wakes us up in the morning and keeps the wheels of commerce turning.

Almost as bad as banning it would be replacing it with a synthetic – something made in the laboratory. What a terrible idea. Why replace this God-given elixir?

It turns out there are a lot of reasons. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average Arabica tree produces one to two pounds of coffee via roasted beans. That means every two-cup a-day coffee drinker requires continuous production from some 20 coffee trees.

The environmental impact is horrendous. Vast forests of trees are needed to feed the habit of java drinkers. Harvesting and processing pour huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and, even with judicious fertilization, half of the coffee-tree land will become unusable by 2050. In Brazil, the biggest producer of coffee, the unusable land will reach 88%. The land shrinkage has already affected prices, which rose over 25% in the past year.

What’s the answer? One possibility is synthetic coffee made from agricultural waste. The raw materials are cheap, but duplicating the taste is a challenge. Atomo Coffee apparently got it right with a mix of ingredients featuring roasted date seeds – what’s left after mechanically pitting dates. Synthetic caffeine, which is plentiful, can be added as needed.

Another approach is fermentation. That involves genetically engineering cells from coffee plants, a better bet for nailing both taste and caffeine content. But it’s not cheap. A big drawback is separating mycelial waste before recovery, a costly proposition.

Less complex is plant breeding to produce coffee trees that can withstand global warming, an approach that would expand the geography for coffee groves. As a high-value crop, the trees would be a welcome addition to northern farms. Starbucks is looking into it.

Not surprisingly, coffee is but one of many food items being replaced by synthetics. Margarine has been around for 80 years, and fake peanut butter, a la Nutella, is almost a staple.

Meat substitutes have also been pursued in an effort to cut greenhouse emissions from farm animals. FDA approval last year opened the door for fake chicken produced from cultured animal cells. Fake pork is next in line.

If that sounds easy, it’s not. It’s taken years of trial-and-error to find the right combination of cells and nutrients, then scaling up the process in large bioreactors to generate a product with muscle, fat and connective tissue – a slab that looks and tastes like meat from a slaughtered animal.

Earlier versions were comprised of ground-up vegetables –Veggie Burgers – which tasted terrible. Then came a mycoprotein from fermented yeast combined with other plant ingredients, still a poor substitute for the real thing.

The current cultured-cell product must be pretty good, because the Florida legislature, egged on by Gov. DeSantis, recently banned it, apparently to protect the state’s farming industry.

But while fake meat gets a lot of attention, the real cause Celebre is coffee. People are scrambling to boost the value of the real thing.

For example, the Aussies have found that pyrolyzed coffee waste can replace up to 15% of the sand used in concrete, a contributor of 7% of greenhouse emissions. Not Bad. Even better is the discovery that beer-extracted coffee grounds can spur sexual performance. Or so says a report.

Sorry, no clinical trials are planned.

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