You May Soon Be Drinking Synthetic Coffee | Hacker News Reader

You May Soon Be Drinking Synthetic Coffee

wsj.com

15 pointsjseliger24 comments

I feel like I just got a taste of what omnivorous people get when I advocate for synthetic meat.

Yup, 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.

You don't like the idea? I'm fine, long as it's not coming from slave labor or cat dung

I 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.

I’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.

If I do, it had better be a cocktail of good feels without crashing or withdrawal. Theanine plus caffeine plus whatever..

The 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-sca... [1] https://www.atomocoffee.com/pages/beanless-coffee [2] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Like the Ersatz Coffee made from acorns in the 1940s.

Thank god my hometown produces a lot of coffee, organic coffee. LOL

by produces do you mean "roasts"?

Anyone know how to bypass WSJ’s paywall?

> Anyone know how to bypass WSJ’s paywall?

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/ynthetic-coffe...

There are popular sideloading chromium plugins that claim they bypass many paywalls. They work.

It'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.

They'll always put sugar or fructose in it, so I'll stick to regular food.

You 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).

Coffee is often regarded as one of the more environmentally friendly forms of agriculture, since the plants benefit from growing in woodland conditions and are therefore often grown in mixed-species plantings (often marketed as shade-grown coffee), and they don't typically require much intensive or invasive management (such as repeatedly tilling the soil).

I was lucky enough to see a number of these coffee farms firsthand when I did study abroad in Costa Rica as an undergrad ecology student. I was very impressed with them and the amount of biodiversity they hosted. They were certainly much, much better than nearly all of the agricultural alternatives I saw (especially banana farms, which exhibited by far the worst agricultural practices I have ever witnessed — and most of my career experience is in agricultural research, so I've seen a fair few).

Why would it be outlawed?

The 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.

It can be both my belief about ulterior motives and an honest opinion on my preferences for naturally grown coffee. :)

It won't be naturally grown if its habitat's climate is no longer viable.

I don’t think it would be anytime soon but I could definitely see someone making an argument around climate.

You'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.

Carbon tax would solve this. No need for bans or subsidies

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