A lesson in civets
My friend Rachel and I are about to sample some coffee. The beans from which this coffee was brewed were purchased by an American lawyer at a street market in Vietnam. They found their way to my home through a circuitous process I choose not to disclose.
The beans are packaged in an airtight container featuring Wicovalve technology, advertised as the world’s best freshness sealant. (The seal looks way more complicated than it has to be, substantially over-engineered for its purpose, like the convoluted mass of veiny flesh under our tongues.) The bag is metallic and as thick as wedding-invitation stationery. Clearly, this packet transports something of value.
The beans inside, and variants of them, are said to sell for as much as $350 a pound in Europe and the United States — and, because of their scarcity, even more on the black market. I ground them and dripped them into coffee. It smells faintly of dark chocolate, molasses and/or mahogany. In short, it definitely smells ... brown. Under the circumstances, this is a little disturbing.
“OK, says Rachel, assessing her still unsampled mug. “This smells like when teenagers are on a camping trip and they don’t like coffee yet but have to drink it to seem mature, so they add Swiss Miss. It’s exactly the sort of ...” I accuse her of stalling for time. She denies it. “I am not at all worried.” She looks at the cup. “I mean, they must wash it, right?” I shrugged. Who knows? “Well, they must rinse it at least, right? The package doesn’t identify exactly what type of coffee it is, but judging from the accompanying photograph, which is of a ratlike animal looking hungrily at some yummy beans on a vine, what we are about to drink is civet coffee. It’s famous. To put it bluntly, the beans are fed to these nocturnal Asian mammals and then re-harvested from their poop. Supposedly the coffee has been chemically altered by the civet’s digestive processes in some salubrious and flavor-enhancing way. I decide to start with a palate cleanser of tap water. “Are you stalling for time?” Rachel asks, archly. We sip. It’s delicious, in a sort of biologically complex way. A few minutes elapse.
Rachel takes a refill. She has decided that these beans must be pristine, so there is nothing to worry about.
“If you are farming these things, you’re not feeding them anything other than beans, so that’s all there is in their system. No bugs or berries, no real poop like material to contaminate it.” “What? Why?” She rolls her eyes. Clearly, I am an idiot. “Because if you are farming civets for their coffee-bean poop, if that is the whole enterprise, you are losing money if you feed them anything but the coffee beans. It’s about a rudimentary principle of business called opportunity loss.”
I accuse her of inventing nonsense terminology to distract attention from a disagreeable truth, like that guy inventing “Vorshtein” on “Seinfeld.” She Googles “opportunity loss” and proves she is right.
Fueled by coffee, we get more philosophical. So what if these were not cleaned beans? Life itself is dirty. We are forever ingesting horrible things. The FDA actually permits a certain amount of beetle eggs in asparagus, maggots in maraschino cherries, and insect heads in figs. It is simply a fact that we inhale, with every breath, molecules that have been expelled as gas from a stranger’s colon.
This is a bracing logic, but we are still feeling a little bit queasy.
Just then, I get an email from the lawyer who had purchased the beans. He said that he’d had an elaborate conversation with the street vendor, and as far as he understood, despite the image on the label, these were not civet poop coffee beans at all. Thank goodness! They were weasel poop coffee beans.