
Coffee Rust - _Microft
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/09/coffee-rust/616358/
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Animats
Coming soon, good synthetic coffee.[1] Made from agricultural waste, to be
sold at premium prices at first. The process is not inherently expensive, so,
like the Impossible Burger, it will move down from the high end to Burger
King.

[1] [https://atomocoffee.com/](https://atomocoffee.com/)

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IncRnd
The picture of the coffee they are pouring on that page appears quite watery.

~~~
animationwill
>> appears quite watery.

Particularly watery looking for a cold brew

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cibritzio
'But now the fungicides were no longer working as they had. “La roya does not
respect them,” Gabriel told me through a translator. One day, with no warning,
the golden dots bloomed on a few leaves on a single plant. Gabriel sprayed
them, and sprayed again, but the spots widened, then turned dark and dry and
cracked through the middle. The leaves crisped, curling at the edges, and fell
from the plant when breezes jostled them. The dust, the fungal spores, drifted
across the field and infected another bush, or fell to the ground and splashed
onto the next plant when rain fell. The cycle of slow plant death began
again.'

I did not know that I would see the vision of Miyazaki expressed in Nausicaä
of the Valley of the Wind realized in my lifetime.

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sp332
"From 2012 to 2017, rust caused more than $3 billion in damage and lost
profits and forced almost 2 million farmers off their land."

I can't jibe these numbers. That's only $1,500 per farmer.

~~~
thenewwazoo
“ The World Bank 2010 data for Guatemala indicates that the Gross National
Income (GNI) Per Capita for Guatemala is $2,740 and for the Lower Middle class
the average annual income is $1,619 in US dollars.” -
[http://www.terraexperience.com/guatemala_minimum_wage.htm](http://www.terraexperience.com/guatemala_minimum_wage.htm)
(primary source 404)

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baq
The most interesting part to me was that the British didn’t always drink that
much tea.

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sesuximo
Is it possible to add more genetic diversity to coffee? Might taste better too

~~~
sli
There's quite a lot of diversity in coffee already. Coffees from different
regions taste wildly different. Climate change is just ravaging the coffee
band. Ethiopian coffee will likely be gone in a couple decades as the growing
region is pushed north into the Ethiopian highlands where it can't be grown
since the highlands are actually huge pillars of rock rather than highlands as
people typically understand them.

It's a shame, really, because Ethiopian coffee is absolutely wonderful.

~~~
adrianN
How much of the Ethiopian economy is made up of coffee exports?

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UweSchmidt
34%

(Google has become worse for long tail search queries, but interestingly now
has an 'answer box' for wide ranging questions like this one.)

~~~
kevinmchugh
Be careful with those answer boxes, they don't always answer the question you
want to know. It seems that coffee is 34% of Ethiopian exports, not their
economy

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hstaab
I swore this was going to be about some CoffeeScript + Rust monstrosity

~~~
chrismorgan
Consolation prize: the Rust programming language was named after the rust
fungi.
[https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/27jvdt/internet_archa...](https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/27jvdt/internet_archaeology_the_definitive_endall_source/)

~~~
yesbabyyes
Because it destroys Java?

~~~
shock
Nice pun. But I think Java will have a bright future with Project Loom coming.

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MichaelZuo
Luckily we have technology such as greenhouses that means this is ultimately a
cost issue and not an extinction level issue.

~~~
simtel20
Coffee grows best in outdoor elevated tropical climates. Similar to cacao,
putting a roof over an entire hillside is simply not feasible for even the
wealthiest farmers.

One of the foundations of most farming is that given a large are, you can just
place the plants and care for the ground they're on, and handle pests that can
be seen. That's manageable with lots of farm labor and with available building
material. Building a glass louvre around every rural farm between the tropics
of cancer and capricorn, replacing the wind and rain, etc is just not how
rural third world farming works.

~~~
MichaelZuo
Well that still sounds like a cost issue to be honest, worst case is that
coffee becomes a luxury item again. Though practically as third world
companies develop and greenhouses become cheaper it probably wouldn’t climb so
high as to stop being sold by the major retailers, Costco, etc. Double or
triple in price maybe.

~~~
simtel20
Unfortunately "luxury" doesn't seem like the likely outcome here. Luxury items
are created via artificial scarcity (e.g. diamonds) or just by high cost of
expertise and goods (e.g. a luxury car). In order for food to become a luxury
item, it needs to be a more costly variation on something which is more
readily available. This allows for a constant demand, with a side business in
exotic expensive extras.

If coffee, globally, needed to be grown in greenhouses it would just become a
novelty tree that school trips visited until the climate turned around and it
became an economically viable crop again.

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howlgarnish
Maybe it's time for hipsters to make WW2-era coffee substitutes like chicory
and acorns fashionable again:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_substitute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_substitute)

~~~
082349872349872
[https://www.victorycoffees.com](https://www.victorycoffees.com)

Not sure if duckspeak =.= or duckspeak.

Edit for sauce: [http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html](http://www.george-
orwell.org/1984/4.html)

~~~
howlgarnish
Those appear to be actual coffee?

Chicory coffee remains popular in New Orleans, but they usually blend in
actual coffee for the caffeine kick:
[https://www.neworleansroast.com/chicory/](https://www.neworleansroast.com/chicory/)

~~~
wwwwewwww
I think in practice it's the opposite - they brew actual coffee and blend in
chicory for the authentic New Orleans taste kick.

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lightgreen
I upvoted mechanically without opening the link because that's what I do when
I see an entry about Rust.

I'm joking, I did not do that, but it's possible explanation how this link got
to the first page of HN.

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Fnoord
Or, perhaps, because the content is interesting?

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lightgreen
Perhaps. But if title didn’t have the word a Rust, fewer people would clicked.

