Breaking Coffee’s Genetic Monocultures or: Pay No Attention to the WSJ Copy-Editors Behind the Curtain
Posted by TheShot on 19 Jul 2012 | Tagged as: Beans, Robusta
Copy-editors are strange beasts. They can take a perfectly valid story, dress it up with titles and subheds, and transform it into something that sounds completely irrelevant to the contents within. Take yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece on efforts seeking the genetic diversification of consumable coffee: The Indiana Jones of Coffee – WSJ.com (subhed: “Companies Go Deep Into Africa in Search of Perfect Bean”).
No, it’s not a bio piece about some swashbuckling snake-charmer in search of lost coffee gold. The Orchid Thief would be a more appropriate movie reference for just one of the characters in the article. It’s also not about Africa, as the genetic diversification effort is global. It’s not even about the ever-abused mythical “perfect bean” — as any single genetic coffee bean lineage would be just as susceptible to a mass extinction event as the limited coffee progeny we enjoy today.
But peel back the superficial layers of Hollywood pomp, general cluelessness, and deceit, and you’ll discover a decent article on efforts to develop more genetically robust and diverse options for our drinkable coffee stocks — something of a follow-up to a post we wrote six years ago. Of some 26 documented coffee species, only two are cultivated to produce something humans would actually pay money to consume. And of those two, many consider only one of them as drinkable.
3 Comments »
WSJ has some of the better writers still left in print and online media, but it galls me when I see dumb errors with basic facts. In this case, the inability to correctly capitalize a scientific name, and calling coffee fruit on the tree ‘beans’. I don’t care if it’s a business publication, some editorial person, if not the writer, should know this. Whenever I see these kinds of mistakes, I mistrust the whole article.
Nice commentary, Greg. However, beware of what Internet sources you cite! While I wouldn’t expect the Wiki to be aware of a recently published article bringing the total known and agreed upon species in the genus Coffea to 126, it should know of a 6 year old article citing 103 species. Whoever wrote that Wiki and settled on 26 species must have been using a source that is ancient!
Great hearing from you, Shawn. And thanks for the number. Yowza. 126?!?