Can chickpeas and date seeds save you from the looming coffee apocalypse?

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Pythagoras will be happy to know that.

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I used to occasionally pick this trail side and chew a piece while out hiking in NV /UT. Never really notices any effects from such a small amount :man_shrugging:

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GIF by South Park

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To be enjoyed with your french toast!

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If, somehow I decided the caffeine free coffee alternative world was in the cards for me, I probably wouldn’t choose any of these. I have a Kentucky Coffeetree steps from my door and plenty of dandelions to harvest. Both create a reasonably palatable drink, are only going to become more sustainable as climate change takes hold, and don’t contribute to the toxic VC startup culture spreading to a new part of life.

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Apparently ok if boiled, but worth some caution.

Toxic Principle
A water soluble, heat labile toxin or group of toxins are present in the leaves and seeds. A group of complex glycosides called gymnocladosapponins may be responsible for the toxicity associated with consumption of the uncooked seeds or leaves. The cooked seeds were at one time tried as a coffee substitute. Poisoning of livestock has been associated with animals drinking water into which the Gymnocadus seeds had fallen. The toxins appear to have gastrointestinal irritation and narcotic effects.

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That’s why I haven’t bothered until now despite needing to harvest them before mowing my lawn. I used to keep a pot of the dried beans by the door purely for aesthetics but have given it away to some foraging mad friends.

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You can also make something that looks coffee toasting and grounding finely acorns, and getting the so called “Ciofeca”. The taste, isn’t exactly coffeish, as you can see in the Toto’ reaction: this is not a coffee, it’s a ciofeca!

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California Coffeeberry can be used similarly for those on the west coast. Frangula californica - Wikipedia

I’ve used roasted seeds as well as the flesh of the fruit as ingredients in an elderberry & coffee port style wine!

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https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=ilvo

The leaves and twigs contain caffeine, and American Indians used them to prepare a tea, which they drank in large quantities ceremonially and then vomited back up, lending the plant its species name, vomitoria . The vomiting was self-induced or because of other ingredients added; it doesn’t actually cause vomiting. Tribes from the interior traveled to the coast in large numbers each spring to partake of this tonic, and it was also a common hospitality drink among many groups. It remained popular as such among southeastern Americans into the 20th century and is still occasionally consumed today, with a flavor resembling another holly drink, the South American yerba mate, from Ilex paraguariensis .

It actually sounds fairly promising! I might have to try it here in 7b. I was looking at other Ilex species already.

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This article ( quoting this study claims that

Brazil - currently the world’s biggest coffee growing nation - will see its viable land decline by 79 per cent.

Countless small plantations will lose their livelihood, because they can’t just move somewhere else where the climate is still suitable for coffee plants.

I’m not sure that will be enough, according to this article:

The two coffee bean species of interest to exporters (the ones that make up the majority of coffee consumed in the world), Arabica and Robusta, are particularly vulnerable to temperature variations. Arabica produces a higher quality taste than Robusta beans, but this comes at the tradeoff of being more sensitive to temperature and rain conditions.

The article above explains
wild coffee might be the answer to that, but “over half of all wild coffee species are at risk of extinction”.

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Coffee won’t vanish. It will become more of a luxury drink like it used to be in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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Rob Riggle Challenge GIF by ABC Network

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I know a guy who had a chickpea on a bed.

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like everything else except republicans, coffee growers will move northward

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Hopefully, that’s still a good option for people who don’t want caffeine - everything is complicated by concerns like this:

Personally, I’m looking forward to this future…

Season 2 Mariner GIF by Paramount+

Season 1 Drinking GIF by Paramount+

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Puerto Rican coffee is quite delicious. :coffee:

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With the help of the German Democratic Republic, which invested in developing coffee plantations in the friendly Vietnam due to the expense of meeting domestic demand via international markets. Sadly for the GDR, they had been subsumed into the reunified Germany by the time the Vietnamese plantations came to fruition, but despite this it has been cited as the most successful example of international development ever, given the huge presence of Vietnam in coffee markets today.

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Nah, growers will switch to growing Coffea robusta before that happens.

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