In Finland, Scientists Are Growing Coffee In a Lab (fastcompany.com) 44
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: [R]esearchers in Finland are experimenting with growing coffee from plant cells in bioreactors. There are several reasons why it might make sense to have such an alternative, says Heiko Rischer, a research team leader at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the state-owned organization developing the coffee. "Conventional coffee production is notoriously associated with several problematic issues, such as unsustainable farming methods, exploitation, and land rights," he says. "Growing demand and climate change add to the problems." In Vietnam, for example, coffee production is driving deforestation.
The researchers are using the same techniques to make coffee that others are using to make "lab-grown," or cultivated, meat. Coffee plant cells were cultured in the lab, and then placed in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium to grow. It's a little easier to grow coffee than something like beef. "The nutrient media for plant-cell cultures are much less complex, i.e., cheaper, than those for animal cells," Rischer says. "Scaling up is also easier because plant cells grow freely, suspended in the medium, while animal cells grow attached to surfaces."
The process results in an off-white biomass that's dried into a powder, then roasted to a dark brown color that looks like coffee grounds. The scientists recently brewed their first cups of the lab-grown coffee, which they say tastes and smells like ordinary coffee. It's also possible to make different varieties. "Cell cultures of different coffee cultivars can be established, and the roasting process can be modified, in order to produce coffee with very different character," says Rischer. "The cultivation process can be modified in order to generate more or less of certain compounds, such as caffeine or flavors." The lab plans to work with companies that can commercialize the new process.
The researchers are using the same techniques to make coffee that others are using to make "lab-grown," or cultivated, meat. Coffee plant cells were cultured in the lab, and then placed in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium to grow. It's a little easier to grow coffee than something like beef. "The nutrient media for plant-cell cultures are much less complex, i.e., cheaper, than those for animal cells," Rischer says. "Scaling up is also easier because plant cells grow freely, suspended in the medium, while animal cells grow attached to surfaces."
The process results in an off-white biomass that's dried into a powder, then roasted to a dark brown color that looks like coffee grounds. The scientists recently brewed their first cups of the lab-grown coffee, which they say tastes and smells like ordinary coffee. It's also possible to make different varieties. "Cell cultures of different coffee cultivars can be established, and the roasting process can be modified, in order to produce coffee with very different character," says Rischer. "The cultivation process can be modified in order to generate more or less of certain compounds, such as caffeine or flavors." The lab plans to work with companies that can commercialize the new process.
Did they think what happens next? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Lets say they invent a method to make free coffee without any energy or pollution
2. People in Vietnam stop growing coffee
3. People in Vietnam will do what now? Grow drugs? Drill Oil? Burn forests? What ever they will do, is it better than coffee?
Re: Did they think what happens next? (Score:3)
I've got an idea! (Score:2)
There is no need to either grow coffee or culture it in a bioreactor.
We can keep people sedated and motionless by hooking them up to tubes where they are fed a fentanyl drip, and through electrodes we can deliver a virtual reality (VR) experience so we can give purpose, meaning to their lives and keep them occupied and entertained.
And we can harvest bioelectric power from their bodies to make this whole system self-sustainable.
And we need a name for this, right? How about we call it, "The Bracket"?
Re: (Score:2)
How about we call it, "The Bracket"?
What about "The Linear Mapping"?
Re: (Score:2)
That's so two-dimensional and pre-deep learning. Call it "The Tensor".
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh so analog
The Voxelverse
Re: (Score:2)
We can keep people sedated and motionless by hooking them up to tubes where they are fed a fentanyl drip, and through electrodes we can deliver a virtual reality (VR) experience so we can give purpose, meaning to their lives and keep them occupied and entertained.
We have to. How else can we hope to defeat COVID????
Re: (Score:2)
Well. In the end we will have to grow pretty much everything in a bioreactor
Well not everything. [youtu.be]
Re: (Score:2)
Just look at the US and their overfarmed land that dont really grow anything anymore.
Was the idea that you'd just slip this silly sentence somewhere in the middle so people hopefully wouldn't pay too much attention?
The US produces a ridiculous amount of food. If you want to criticize their farming methodology, do so - but with actual data, not ludicrous hand-waving.
Re: Did they think what happens next? (Score:1)
It is funny how even Star Trek recognizes this - you can get everything in a replicator, yet the rare original thing is placed great value on.
Did you think what happens next ... ? (Score:4, Informative)
https://slashdot.org/~dvice posited:
1. Lets say they invent a method to make free coffee without any energy or pollution
2. People in Vietnam stop growing coffee
3. People in Vietnam will do what now? Grow drugs? Drill Oil? Burn forests? What ever they will do, is it better than coffee?
That's not really the issue this technology demonstration is addressing.
Those Vietnamese coffee farmers - and the ones in Guatemala, Rwanda, Sumatra, and all the other places coffee is grown - are going to lose their livelihoods RSN, because of climate change. That's because the coffee tree is a persnickety organism. It likes its environmental conditions exactly the way they are. If they change, even a little bit, it withers, doesn't set fruit, and dies.
Coffee plants - all varieties and cultivars - require just the right amount of shade, enough moisture to produce regular mists and fogs, and exactly the right kind of volcanic soil to produce their magic fruit (the seeds of which are the coffee "beans" that we roast, grind, and use fluid extraction devices on to brew our delicious, brown caffeine sources). They're all spoiled, little princesses, that react to anything other than perfect conditions for growth by (metaphorically speaking) slitting their own wrists and screaming "fuck you!"
Which is sad, because I love my medium-roast, Columbia-Arabica blend, home-brewed brown elixir way more than the swill-gulping hordes of Starbucks zombies do their burnt-coffee-flavored milk drinks ...
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I've always thought that the Vietnamese should do what they do best: allow their children to use their small hands to sew fabric into fine t-shirts, and put the twists on those bamboo skewer things that are put through finger food like pincho and such.
Re: Did they think what happens next? (Score:1)
The best part, though, was your notion of growing it "for free" - perhaps we can use your tech for faster-than-light travel.
KISS (Score:2)
No .. go for the best of both worlds: "faster than light coffee!"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Did they think what happens next? (Score:1)
Totally agree, in fact we should never have made a tractor either, because so many lost their job working on the fields. Heck, let's totally stop researching and doing technological advances and go live in a cave instead.
Yay! (Score:1)
I enjoy the occasional coffee, but it's not like I can't do without. Even for the rest if my life, if I have to. My burger, however... take that from me, and you're signing up for a world of pain.
And now I get to tell every "...but you need to grow your patty in a petri dish for the sake of the planet" vegan schmuck: "yes, as soon as you do the same to your your 100% Organic Guatemala Arabica Frappe with Soy Cream & Caramel. Or bite me."
(For the record, I think messing with everybody's food just so oth
Re: Yay! (Score:2)
Maybe that wasn't clear enough: in the context of my post above, any "grow $STUFFTOEAT in a Petri dish now" tech news story is a pointer to a technocratic scheme.
We literally live on a planet that grows food, for Pete's sake! We need to stop fucking that up, first and foremost.
Re: Yay! (Score:2)
Re: Yay! (Score:2)
overpopulation
I remember having read an estimate that Earth can feed somewhere around 15 bn people, give or take. So we're not quite there yet.
Also, breeding is a political problem more than anything else (higher education among women correlates to reproduction rates almost one order of magnitude smaller than no education). So if we fix the politics first, we may get very pleasantly surprised about a lot of our current problems.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Yay! (Score:2)
The occasional lying and cheating in politics is part of the game, we can weather that.
But you can't fix the world, if politics isn't largely on board. Regardless whether we're talking your elected representantive, the rich families in the background, the parliament or your favourite military dictator - the "politics" people, regardless of what flavour, are, by definition the most powerful people on earth.
What we need in order to survive as a species is a massive-scale change of mentality, away from overcon
Re: (Score:2)
That will work as long as the climate doesn't change so much that the cow growing areas become uncowgrowing areas because schmucks like you will gladly heat up the world until that happens.
Re: Yay! (Score:2)
When that happens, labfood isn't gong to save anyone, either. You're not an island. We're not in Star Trek. When the biosphere dies enough to not feed us anymore, so does everybody else, with or without their Petri dish.
The beef I have with the Petri dish approach is that while it doesn't substantially change the energy ecuation, it lulls many people into believing otherwise. It suggests that we can keep doig business as usual. "Some entrepreneur Mesias will save us, no need to change our habits."
Yep. Right
still better coffee than starbucks (Score:2)
I mean, there isn't any coffee on Earth that isn't better than Starbucks burnt bad drinks.
Re: (Score:2)
If only we could farm substainably... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It seems like it might be easier to just grow coffee sustainably. I wonder if anyone has looked into sustainable, ethical farming.
It's called "shade grown"
Sure, faceless corporations could shade-grow coffee, meaning beneath the natural canopy, but they don't because it's not cost-effective. But shade grown coffee is not only eco-friendly (I've literally seen it done in Panama, it's literally just cultivated in the wild) but it's also better.
I visited a local producer in Santa Fe, Panama, and also looked at a piece of land for sale which had some coffee on it. The coffee was community-sourced, all shade-grown... there's nothing to hate
Re: (Score:2)
There are disadvantages [gardenguides.com] of shade-grown as well.
don't trust the Finns with coffee (Score:2)
Finns are a quantity over quality sort of coffee culture. This will probably be fine for supplying them with their record levels of coffee consumption, but I doubt it's going to taste good getting pulled as espresso in my kitchen. The Finns just got espresso last week. They don't know any better.
Re: (Score:2)
On balance, amount of coffee grown in the lab: approx. 320mg, amount of coffee consumed by scientists in lab: 1716Kg (since June).
Coffee Hunter Project (Score:2)
I buy my coffee from Cafe Kreyol [cafekreyol.com], a small distributor that is focused on building a supply chain from selected coffee farmers and processors direct to retail. The goal is not only to get first dibs on very high quality coffee beans, but to educate (and pay) everyone enough to create a premium product that can compete in the market.
Their prices are probably 10-15% higher than the lower-end competition, but the quality difference is really quite remarkable, it's easily twice as good IMHO. I'm more than happy
Re: (Score:3)
Hardly. I'm a customer of very long standing. There is absolutely nothing deceptive about their prices. Premium coffees aren't "sold by the pound", you're thinking of the Maxwell Houses of the world.
That's Sad -- "Ordinary Coffee" (Score:2)
Is this what the world will totally become? Lab generated food with a mediocre taste and, possibly, mediocre nutritional value.
Will everything is in this world become plastic -- real looking but completely fake?
When will our individual lifes become totally plastic -- just like this plastic coffee?
BTW, they left out the organized crime element to the travails of the coffee industry. Brazil experiences high volume thefts because of the i
Re: That's Sad -- "Ordinary Coffee" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
They've made coffee tea. Kill it with fire, lots and lots of fire.
Overheard at the last meeting of the scientists (Score:2)
"I'm gonna shoot the first guy that says decaf "
Pay no attention to this gentleman; he's just the janitor
tastes and smells like ordinary coffee (Score:2)
And in the corner (Score:2)
Oh thank goodness (Score:1)
If Mars couldnâ(TM)t have a steady source of coffee, that wouldâ(TM)ve been the end of SpaceXâ(TM)s plans to colonize the planet.