A17

Kevin Steen

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

We all know what's good for us. Today's nutritional discovery is tomorrow's new magic food supplement.

Take the round, red coffee berry, heretofore a waste product of the coffee harvesting process. It's been given new life in skin care products and juice because of its high antioxidant levels, with a matching high price.

Coffee itself is the world's most popular beverage, but not the accompanying kick of caffeine for 10 per cent of coffee drinkers (a world wide market of US $7 billion per year). How to satisfy that market?

Traditional decaffeination methods are expensive, but they continue to evolve. Decades ago, the use of benzene in the solvent process was abandoned for health reasons.

Today, ethyl acetate (a natural chemical found in fruit) is preferred over methylene chloride because of fears that it depletes the ozone (even though it evaporates during processing.)

Better yet, how about a coffee plant with no natural caffeine? In 2003, Japanese scientists from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology announced they had genetically-modified coffee plants to contain 70 per cent less caffeine than a regular plant.

Their one-year seedlings required a five-year growth process to produce coffee beans. If successful, the Japanese hope to adapt the technique to the Coffea arabica species, the world's most popular bean.

But not everyone is happy with the prospect of genetically-modified coffee - or genetically-modified anything, for that matter.

Lobby groups in many countries resist the idea because of unanswered environmental questions, or reductions in job opportunities for the world's poor.

So, if genetic modification isn't the answer, what if scientists could find decaffeinated coffee bushes growing in the wild?

Just last year, Ethiopia announced it was beginning a coffee growing program with seeds taken from wild bushes found in its highlands.

The story began in the 1980s with a team of Brazilian scientists who took home hundreds of wild Ethiopian coffee seed specimens as part of a prior United Nations initiative.

They finally succeeded in 2004, identifying three plants with 0.07 per cent caffeine, compared with 1.2 percent in a common coffee plant.

The possibilities are exciting, yet the process of developing a crop like this could take many years, if not decades.

If you're concerned about nutritional no-no's like fat, sugar and caffeine, fear not: until science catches up, traditional methods can still supply what you need, even if it's a great-tasting decaf skinny latte with sugar-free vanilla flavouring.

* Kevin Steen is a true coffee lover and proprietor of Damascus Coffee House in Riverview. Do you have a coffee question for Kevin? Visit him at the shop, or call him at 855-4646.