DO NOT DRINK CIVET COFFEE
If the all-caps title feels a bit like a shout, well then good - that's the idea! Jes Hooper of the The Civet Project Foundation says, "Tourists are central to the civet coffee trade. And the civet coffee trade is central to animal exploitation. Everybody has a responsibility to make sure that this type of industry doesn't last."
Civets are small mammals of the feliformia suborder and therein of the viverridae family that also includes the genet, oyan and the awesome bearcat, the binturong. Civets are at home in Africa and in Asia and are rarely seen due to their reclusive nocturnal nature. These omnivores are key to healthy biodiversity.
Now here's where things get ugly. Actually, in below documentary, none other than Jane Goodall says, "It's obscene." In colonial times, the Dutch had their coffee plantations in Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies, and it was then that one heck of a curiously odd person observed that civets ate the coffee fruit (they actually are fruit, not beans. What we think of as the coffee bean is actually the pit of the coffee fruit).
Why curiously odd, you ask? Well, here's why: After observing the coffee-fruit-eating civets, this curiously odd person in the 19th century in Java thought, hey, let me see what happens if I A) pick up the civet's poo; B) collect the coffee pits/beans from that poo; C) clean them and then roast them same as I would process any other coffee bean; D) Drink it!
It could have all ended there - but instead it became something special. Not because it was particularly good, but because it was particularly rare. After all, you had to actually go find and collect civet poo. This was, for a long time, unknown to most of the world. You can thank tourism, you can thank Tripadvisor - and you can thank the 2007 movie The Bucket List (starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman), for making civet coffee (or kopi luwak) famous (Nicholson's billionaire character always drank it).
Today civet coffee is still considered the most expensive coffee in the world. Because it is supposedly still a rarity with all of that hard work finding civet poo. The reality is a very different one. Today there are civet plantations, where countless civets are kept in single cages and fed coffee fruit and coffee fruit and more coffee fruit. Because of the growing tourism interests, with visits to such plantations and coffee shops everywhere selling that rarest of coffee, more and more civets are needed. The international civet coffee market continues to grow, and its market value is expected to reach an estimated $10.9billion USD by 2030.
They are snared in the wild and there's no telling just how many civets have been snared and mutilated and misused over the course of the past twenty years. There's also no way of knowing how many other wild animals were caught in thousands of snares.
I came across Jes Hooper on LinkedIn last year - and only through her and her passion discovered the truth behind this strangest of coffees. I had tried it once, tasted nothing particular about it and never tried it again. The Civet Project (founded by Jes in 2019) made a hugely insightful documentary happen, produced and directed by Jack Wootton - entitled: "Civet Coffee: From Rare to Reckless" and subtitled "The sobering truth behind the world's most expensive coffee".
📽️ Watch the full 30min documentary here (below is just the trailer)
The film is eye-opening and focuses particularly on the situation in Vietnam and it highlights another element that is kept under the radar: zoonotic diseases. You'd think we're a bit smarter after COVID - but, clearly, we've learned nothing. Business first. Human health? Not our problem! Civets absolutely can be carriers and now we ensnare them en masse, cage them in plantations and have hordes of tourists come visit.
In the documentary you'll hear several voices urging action - here are three things that we can all do:
Don't drink that coffee, at all. Don't buy it, don't drink it.
If you're a tourist and you see mistreatment of animals, report it and, at the very least, leave a very negative review. That may seem like a little thing, but it is part of a huge thing because
that huge thing is Tripadvisor. You can sign the Civet Foundation's petition, a call on TripAdvisor to put animal welfare warnings on all civet coffee attractions. 👉 Sign the petition (over one thousand have already signed)
And that's that for this article. Did I mention not to drink civet coffee? Well just in case I didn't: DO NOT DRINK CIVET COFFEE!