Tag Archives: civet

ST. HELENA COFFEE.

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CORRECTION. Weasel Coffee is Not Civet Cat Coffee. Last month I said that weasel coffee and civet cat coffee are the same thing, but I was wrong.

What is the most expensive coffee in the world (that didn’t come out of cat or weasel poop)? The idea of drinking coffee from beans that were picked out of animal poop does not appeal to me. I suspect that most people feel the same way I do about that. The most expensive coffee in the world produced the normal way (by picking the beans off coffee bushes by hand) comes from the small island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. After the Battle of Waterloo, the British exiled Napoleon Bonaparte to St. Helena, where he lived until his death. Napoleon didn’t live in a prison, but a mansion. He was allowed to have guests visit and stay with him, including old comrades. The British also allowed people in France to send Napoleon gifts, including furniture, furnishings, food, and wine. Napoleon wrote letters to his admirers in France who wanted to send him gifts with suggestions. Among the things Napoleon specifically told people not to send him was coffee. He told people that the coffee grown on St. Helena was exceptionally good. Napoleon said: “The only good thing about St. Helena is the coffee.” When people in France heard that, everybody wanted to get coffee from St. Helena. However, the island is very small, and only a small portion of the land is suitable for agriculture. St. Helena only exports a few hundred pounds of coffee beans a year. Their coffee has won a lot of awards. If you want to buy coffee from St. Helena, you can order it online from growers on the island. It costs between $150 to $300 a pound.

MORE CAT TALES.

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Landlords and Catnip.  Catnip is easy to grow. It is green all year round (at least here in the Bay Area), and it has pretty pink and white flowers with purple spots. Catnip has a pleasant fragrance, and its aroma repels garden pests, like aphids. Catnip might seem like an ideal plant for use as ornamental ground vegetation, but it’s not. The photo below shows what happens when a landlord plants catnip around his building.


Cat Security Guard. There is a sign in front of the security guard station in the photo below that says in Turkish that no one can enter this building without showing an entry pass to the security guard. Surprisingly, many people did show their entry passes to the cat as they entered the building.


Civet Cat Coffee. San Francisco has the most billionaires per capita of any city on Earth – and by a huge margin. In San Francisco, there is one billionaire for every 11,000 people. In New York City, Dubai, and Hong Kong; there is one billionaire for every 80,000 to 100,000 people. Very rich people in San Francisco buy some astonishing stuff, like civet cat coffee. It is made from coffee beans that were eaten by civet cats. Civet cats eat coffee berries but cannot digest the beans inside and expel them in their poop. These beans are hand gathered from the cat poop, washed, dried, and shipped to coffee roasters. There are several places in San Francisco’s financial district where you can buy 100% civet cat coffee. It costs around $70 a cup. You can also buy civet coffee on Amazon for $700 a pound. Here is how to buy it. https://www.amazon.com/Weasel-Coffee-Special-Organic-Arabica/dp/B08HZ9PB42 Amazon calls it Vietnamese weasel coffee, but it’s the same thing as civet coffee. You can find much cheaper civet coffee on the market, but it isn’t 100% pure. The cheap stuff is a mixture of a few civet beans and a lot of regular coffee beans. (By the way, civet coffee is not kosher. A rabbi familiar with this product once told me at a trade show: “You cannot make kosher food from something that came out of a cat’s rear end.”) If someone offered me a cup of civet coffee, I would turn them down because I would be thinking about how it is produced. Would you drink it?

Civet Absolute and Castoreum

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CIVET ABSOLUTE. I regularly go to industrial food shows. A big one is coming up in January. That’s where I get to meet chocolate processors and their technical experts. When I come back from these shows, people sometimes ask me: “What was the most disgusting thing you saw at the show?” Well, there are a lot of terrible ingredients in commercially processed foods, but for me, the most repulsive food additive is an artificial flavoring called civet absolute. It is used to give candy a caramel, butter, or rum flavor. Civet absolute is a secretion produced by African civet cats to scent mark their territory. Civet absolute is scraped out of the anuses of civet cats. (Yes, you read that right.) This oily secretion is collected twice a week. The cats have to be sedated first because the scraping is so painful. Civet absolute has a very powerful odor. In full strength, civet absolute just smells like cat urine, but when diluted to 1/10 of 1% or less, it smells wonderful! I once smelled it myself at a food trade show. It smelled like sweet butter with a slight scent of lily. I felt ashamed of myself afterward, thinking about the suffering of those poor, miserable cats.

Several years ago, I saw an orthodox rabbi at one of these wholesale food shows working at the booth of a kosher certifying organization. I asked him if civet absolute is kosher. The rabbi gave me a stern look. I never forgot his answer. He said: “You can’t make kosher food out of something that came out of a cat’s rear end.” He looked angry, as though he was mad with me for asking the question. Because civet absolute is very expensive, most candy makers now use civetone instead. It’s synthetic version of the real thing. Today, most civet absolute is purchased by cosmetic companies. Some of the world’s most expensive perfume contains civet absolute. Under pressure from animal rights groups, some department stores are now refusing to sell perfume containing civet absolute.

CASTOREUM. Sadly, there are quite a few other food additives for sale at industrial food shows that are as repulsive as civet absolute, products like castoreum. Have you ever seen ‘The Angry Beavers’ TV show? Well, castoreum is probably what the beavers are angry about. Castoreum is used to make artificial strawberry and raspberry flavoring. It is a secretion produced by beavers to scent mark their territory. I like beavers. I think it’s fascinating to watch these small, industrious animals building enormous dams. I never get tired of watching busy beavers at work. At food trade shows, I sometimes look at the salesmen selling products like castoreum and civet absolute and wonder: “What kind of person would sell something like this for a living?” And – just in case you were wondering – No, I do not use civet absolute or castoreum! In fact, I never use artificial flavors or colors.

‘NATURALLY FLAVORED’ STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM.

Before I leave the subject of castoreum, I would like to say something about the term ‘naturally flavored.’ You can find the words ‘naturally flavored’ on the labels of thousands of food products, but this term does not mean what most people think it means. ‘Naturally flavored’ just means that the flavor came from an organic source. If you buy cheap strawberry ice cream or raspberry sorbet, the odds are pretty high that it is flavored with castoreum. Don’t bother looking for the word ‘castoreum’ on the label. You won’t find it there. The government does not require food processors to tell you if a product contains castoreum, so none of them do. If you want real strawberries in your strawberry ice cream, beware of the words ‘naturally flavored’ on the label. Instead, look for the words ‘strawberry’ or ‘strawberry puree’ on the ingredients list. It’s usually the expensive brands, like Ben and Jerry’s and Haagen Dazs, that are made with real strawberries. So the next time you see cheap strawberry ice cream for sale in a supermarket, before you put it in your cart, ask yourself: “I do really want to eat ice cream that is flavored with beaver urine? Beaver urine!”

Would you like to know more or less about what is in the commercially processed foods that you buy? Would you like to know more so you make better choices, or is this information just too depressing to read about?