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You May Soon Be Drinking Synthetic Coffee
- diegoholiveira 2y agoThank god my hometown produces a lot of coffee, organic coffee. LOL
- pcthrowaway 2y agoby produces do you mean "roasts"?
- simonblack 2y agoLike the Ersatz Coffee made from acorns in the 1940s.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoI feel like I just got a taste of what omnivorous people get when I advocate for synthetic meat.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoYou don't like the idea? I'm fine, long as it's not coming from slave labor or cat dung
- abracadaniel 2y agoI’m excited for both. Milk too. You can grow all the proteins you want and skip the ones you don’t, or alter the ratio as desired and have the same product much more efficiently and ethically. Maybe even a better product. The Brave Robot ice cream is grown without lactose for example.
- vsnf 2y agoI like the idea in the abstract, but I doubt I'll see a synthetic meat/milk/coffee substitute that equals the real deal for many years, if ever. I'm more worried about the synthetic stuff becoming just good enough that, with the power of marketing and appealing to one's morals, people switch over but not good enough to be a real replacement.
- eadmund 2y agoYup, part of what I enjoy about meat is precisely that it is a real food, and part of what I enjoy about coffee is that it is a real food too. Both can be relatively minimally processed, and recognisably the thing that they came from. I don’t particularly mind that synthetic meat-like substance or coffee-like substance be produced, but I 100% do not want it to be the default, I want it clearly named and labelled, and I want there to be no chance that I unknowingly ingest it.
- sneed_chucker 2y ago[flagged]
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoIt's such an eyerolling cliche in sci fi when replicated food invariably triggers some character or another to remark that it will never be as good as the original. Synthetic food that can match or exceed the nutrition, quality, and environmental impact of regular food may or may not ever be achieved. But it's stupid to oppose the attempt at progress.
- ls612 2y agoYou may be soon, I will continue to buy the real thing until they outlaw that too in the name of saving the planet (er, I mean, implementing 21st century sumptuary laws).
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoWhy would it be outlawed?
- ls612 2y agoI don’t think it would be anytime soon but I could definitely see someone making an argument around climate.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoCarbon tax would solve this. No need for bans or subsidies
- deprecative 2y agoYou'd think the coffee signalers would care about climate change as climate change is what is going to extinct the coffee they are defending against efforts to protect the climate (that would save their coffee) that simply do not exist.
- eschaton 2y agoThe original poster is just expressing a knee-jerk assumption that it’ll be assumed to be ecologically bad and outlawed for that, while simultaneously expressing that they don’t believe that reasoning when applied to other things that are already prohibited on those grounds. In other words, they’re not expressing an honest opinion with the statement, they’re signaling their belief in a worldview that assumes environmental regulation has ulterior motives.
- ls612 2y agoIt can be both my belief about ulterior motives and an honest opinion on my preferences for naturally grown coffee. :)
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoAnyone know how to bypass WSJ’s paywall?
- travoc 2y agoThere are popular sideloading chromium plugins that claim they bypass many paywalls. They work.
- dctoedt 2y ago> Anyone know how to bypass WSJ’s paywall? Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/ynthetic-coffee-chocolate-climate-change-bfa9cce3?st=4qvr22wow8uk7vv&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/ynthetic-coffe...
- Dowwie 2y agoIf I do, it had better be a cocktail of good feels without crashing or withdrawal. Theanine plus caffeine plus whatever..
- tschwimmer 2y agoThe article talks about a couple of substitutes. The "lab grown" coffee likely has the same problems as lab grown meat - it's unlikely to ever be cost competitive due to the economics of cell culturing. This is a well researched article[0] about why that's the case. The other stuff, Atomo, is honestly more troubling. It's a hodgepodge of random seeds and plant products processed to look like coffee grounds. You can see the list of ingredients on their site[1] and while there's nothing that's immediately objectionable (except for fructose - what the fuck is that doing in there? roasted coffee has virtually no fructose), it just seems gross and definitely not coffee. The writer claims they couldn't taste the difference in a milk-based drink and I don't doubt them, but it's just not coffee. Coffee is processed fairly heavily (though less so many other common foods like pasta or jarred tomato sauce or something), but this is clearly an engineered product. It shouldn't be able to be called coffee and I am dreading the day when coffee shops swap this out as the default option and there's an upcharge for coffee made from beans. I'm also not excited about the inevitable parade of articles planted in various media outlets snarkily alleging we're all planet killers for drinking environmentally destructive "bean coffee" likely planted by this firm's tradegroup as submarine marketing [2]. Mr. Kleitsch (or any other employees of Atomo, or anyone else in the industry cooking up this crap), your product is not coffee, there is no such thing as "Beanless Coffee" (including chicory or other substandard substitutes) and your attempting at marketing are misdirected. Consider clearly acknowledging that your coffee is a coffee substitute instead of trying to make the one small, cheap thing that makes daily life bearable for billions of people worse. [0] https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/ https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-sca... [1] https://www.atomocoffee.com/pages/beanless-coffee https://www.atomocoffee.com/pages/beanless-coffee [2] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html