Ponder, for a moment, the first human being who ever ate an egg, sitting there, around his campfire, or in his cave, or wherever primitive humans hung out -- Walmart? -- and seeing this white orb emerge from the business end of a chicken or whatever and thinking, "I wonder what that tastes like."

I was thinking about that as I read a story about something called civet coffee.

Civet coffee is one of those gourmet things in which those with discriminating taste go out of their way to eat disgusting things from exotic locales -- you know, like whale blubber from Japan, or horse meat from France, or soylent green from the offices of Bain Capital. Civet coffee fits that bill. It is from Indonesia. It is very expensive. And it is not the kind of coffee any normal person would consume.

And now, according to National Public Radio, which can be counted on to cover this kind of stuff, there is a scandal growing in the civet coffee industry.

It seems odd that there would be scandal in an industry that produces something for human consumption that passes through a cat. But there it is...

Oh, did I forget to mention that civet coffee is made from special coffee beans that are eaten by civets, a species of cat that lives in Indonesia, and excreted. Then, the beans are harvested and sold for up to $60 for four ounces of beans or served up in a fancy coffee places for $10 a cup.


And there is some other way fermentation occurs.

"Fermentation also happens naturally in the wild -- in an animal's digestive tract, for example," NPR reported. "And the Asian palm civet, a native mammal (not really a cat) to Southeast Asia, eats the ripest berries of a coffee plant; through the process of digestion, the seed is separated from the fruit and is fermented. Traditionally, wild civets would go about their business and humans would collect the fermented droppings."

A coffee historian was quoted as saying, "When you see it in the wild, it looks kind of like an Oh Henry! Bar."

There is a Chock full o' Nuts joke to be made here.

And you have to wonder about the first person who looked at a pile of civet poop and thought, "I could make a cup of coffee from that."

It is said that coffee that is fermented in this manner is smoother and less acidic. A barista described the coffee as "vegetabley, tea-like and earthy" A food writer for the Washington Post described it as "Petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water."

With a faint hint of Tidy Cat Multi-Cat Formula.

So it comes as a shock that there would be some in an industry that sells a product for human consumption that is harvested from cat poop are less than ethical, creating a scandal that may turn people away from drinking coffee that has passed through a cat's digestive system.
The coffee is advertised as being from wild civets and harvested by hand. (There's a job that worse than yours.) It is then taken by oxcart to an earthen kiln, where it is roasted by native coffee artisans.

(Just noting that nowhere does it say that the coffee beans are washed after being picked out of cat droppings.)

That's why the coffee is so expensive. Imagine how much cat poop it takes to get a pound of coffee beans. And imagine being the person who has to pick the coffee beans out of the cat poop. You can't get people to do that for cheap. (Well, actually, you can. Indonesian coffee workers make about $1 a day.)

You can imagine that some unethical coffee growers or civet keepers or whatever are tempted to take some shortcuts, figuring that the kind of person who would drink coffee that's passed through a cat's colon wouldn't really be all that picky about the beverage's origin.

Oliver Strand, who writes about coffee for the New York Times, told NPR that the coffee has become "so desired as a luxury good that they started caging the animals and feeding them coffee that isn't ripe."

Caged civet-crap coffee being sold as free-range civet-crap coffee. And the coffee that has passed through a cat isn't even ripe.

And it gets worse. "Some civet farmers are feeding the animals varieties like Robusta, decried by many coffee lovers as an inferior bean -- the one often used in instant coffee," Strand told NPR.

My God, can you imagine, getting coffee from inferior beans that have been crapped out by a cat.

The horror.

Civet isn't the only such product. A coffee plantation in South America sells jacu bird coffee, made from beans that pass through a bird that looks like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It's
described, on an importer's website, as "sweet" and "full-bodied."

It's probably better to stick with Chock full o' Nuts.

On second thought, maybe not.

Argento columns at www.ydr.com/mike. Or follow him on Twitter at FnMike