Transcript

4.10.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated April May
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twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio I is a
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reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the first article titled how
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a Forgotten Being could save coffee from extinction. One leading
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botanist is scouring remote corners of the Earth to find
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new species that could keep our mugs full. By Marta Zaraska,
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Stenophilla is a coffee plant, not a criminal, and yet
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it can still lay claim to its very own wanted poster.
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In twenty eighteen, Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at
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the Royal Botanic Gardens Q in London, was desperate to
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track down the rare species, which hadn't been seen in
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the wild since nineteen fifty four. The data he'd found
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in historical records suggested that Stenophila might be resistant to
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drought and heat, increasingly valuable traits in a warming and
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drying world, so he created a have you Seen this
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Plant flyer with pictures of stenophilla's leaves, whose pointed tips
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resemble snake fangs. A colleague of his based in Sierra Leone,
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Daniel Sarmu, jumped on a motorbike and rode across the
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country's rust colored dirt roads, handing out copies to farmers.
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Most shook their heads they had never seen a plant
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like that. This went on for days, more roads, more farms, nothing.
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It was clearly not working. Davis says he had no
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choice but to start searching Sierra Leone's forests himself every day.
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The world's population consumes about two billion cups of coffee.
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It's more popular in some places than in others. The
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average American drinks as many as three cups. People drink
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even more in some European countries, such as Finland and Luxembourg.
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Ethiopia has a coffee culture, but in other African coffee
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growing nations, relatively few drink it. Brazilians drink twice as
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much per capita as Colombians, but most of Latin America
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barely touches the stuff, opting instead for less expensive bottled
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soft drinks. In Asia and Australia, people tend to prefer tea.
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Coffee is beloved as an energy booster and a mood enhancer.
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It's also a social and cultural ritual, and above all,
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a habit. Many coffee drinkers are quite particular about what's
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in their cup, whether it's a flat white or a
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venti iced caramel macchiato. When it comes to taste, coffee
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is amazingly complex. A single cup may contain up to
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twelve hundred volatile compounds. Yet what you perceive in a
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cup depends on many things besides the plant's genome, the
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environment in which it grew, the weather, the roast, the
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water used for brewing. Even the color of the cut matters.
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White makes coffee seem more intense, while clear glass makes
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it seem sweeter. As of now, almost all of humanity's
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coffee needs are supplied by just two species, Coffea arabica
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and Caffea canephora, widely known as Robusta. Arabica has plenty
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of varieties, such as geisha or bourbon, but these are
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like types of apples you can find in a supermarket.
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Whether it's a Granny Smith or a Gala, it's still
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an apple. Arabica is appreciated for its wide complex range
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of flavors, including notes described as floral and fruity. The
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crop itself is delicate, it doesn't like high temperatures, it
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doesn't deal well with droughts, and it's vulnerable to pests.
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It needs to grow at high altitudes, too, preferably more
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than thirty two hundred feet above sea level. Robusta entered
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the scene much later than Arabica, described by a Belgian
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botanist only in eighteen ninety eight, when a fungal disease
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called leaf rust decimated plantations of Arabica. At the turn
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of the twentieth century, disease resistant robusta quickly gained ground
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over its fragile cousin. Bitter, harsh, and cheap. It's more
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of a work horse, often made into instant coffee. But
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in today's changing climate, even robusta crops are failing. Both
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Arabica and robusta love water, and the places where they
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grow are getting less and less of it. Arabica likes
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at least fifty nine inches per year, as much as
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the annual rainfall in one of America's wettest states, Louisiana,
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while Robusta can do with less. It's not just about
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the quantities of water. The timing matters too. The producers
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really want to know one one thing. When does it
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start to rain, says Christian Bunn, a coffee researcher at
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the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Columbia. When the
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rains come, the plants begin to flower and the growing
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cycle begins. Now, suddenly these rains come later, they come early,
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they disrupt the dry season, or a dry spell disrupts
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the rainy season, Bun says. Bunn was the lead author
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on a twenty fourteen study showing that climate change could
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slash the global areas suitable for coffee production in half
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by twenty fifty. At the time, people were skeptical. This
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attitude has changed, he says. Coffee crops around the world
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have recently fallen short. The world's second largest coffee producing country, Vietnam,
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had a twenty percent production drop in twenty twenty three.
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Now companies are worried they don't know where the coffee
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of the future will come from, Bun says. To habitat
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loss and climate change, sixty percent of wild coffee species
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are now threatened with extinction. That's why Davis is so
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interested in rediscovering lost coffee species. It's not that any
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single species will provide a magical solution to the many
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challenges facing global coffee production. Not even a mythical heat
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and drought resistant coffee plant like stenophilla, but certain rare
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species could be used both to partly replace crops in
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areas that are becoming too hot for them and to
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cross breed new, sturdier strains. To make this happen, though,
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scientists will need genetic resources from which to choose the
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best traits, and not only those that make them unusually resilient,
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but also those that impart a great taste too. That
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last part is crucial. No species, however, resilient, can become
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the coffee of the future if people don't find it delicious.
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Davis was a teenage in the nineteen eighties when his
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mother's green thumb got him interested in botany. He earned
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his pH d at England's University of Reading in nineteen
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ninety four and went on his first coffee finding mission
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later that decade when his colleagues drafted him for a
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trip to Madagascar to look for new species. But his
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obsession with Stenofella only began about fifteen years ago with
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one antique book. He tells me, as he scans the
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shelves of his cramped office at Qu'es Herbarium. The place
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smells of old wood, dried leaves, and coffee. Through large windows,
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I see the ocean of green that is q a
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UNESCO World Heritage Site that harbors one of the most
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extensive botanic collections in the world. The gardens looked calm
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compared with Davis's office, which is a chaos of files,
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centuries old botany books, coffee grinders, pots and filters, as
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well as bags, boxes and jars filled with rare coffee beans.
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No one has discovered more Caffea species than Davis has.
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He alone has found about a third of all the
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ones known to science, and he is far from finished.
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Davis finally locates the book he was hunting for, a
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nineteen twenty five monograph on coffee by American biologist Ralph
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Holt Janey. He flips it open to read me a
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passage that describes Stenophilla beans as superior to those of
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all other species. Other old books Davis found similarly praised
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Stenophilla as exquisite and more delicious than the best Arabica.
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Old documents also claimed that this species could grow in lowlands,
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survive high temperatures and withstand droughts. I thought, Oh God,
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it's just so interesting. I'd really like to try it.
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Davis says he now has two jars of stenophilla beans
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stashed in one of his offices, covered there yellowed with age,
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which is hardly surprising considering that there from eighteen fifty six.
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In eighteen seventy three, Davis unearthed them from ques arbarium.
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At one point he was tempted to roast a few
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of the beans, but a colleague warned him that he
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might poison himself. The beans were likely laced with ancient preservatives.
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Scientists first described Stenophylla in eighteen thirty four, when it
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was still being actively farmed in Sierra Leone. Yet by
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the mid twentieth century, for no apparent reason, the species
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disappeared from coffee houses and plantations. We presume that it
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was because the British introduced Robusta, which is more productive,
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says Jeremy Hagger, an agro ecologist at the University of
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Greenwich in England who has collaborated with Davis on several projects.
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But why did it disappear totally when there is a
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clear quality difference? It seems bit strange. Not much is
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known about how people first started drinking coffee in the
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first place. According to Ethiopian folklore, it all began around
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the mid ninth century with a young Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi.
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As the story goes, one day, Caldy's goats discovered a
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new snack, red berries, hiding among the glossy, dark green
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leaves of a small tree. After they finished eating, the
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animals became agitated. Curious, Kaldy decided to try the berries himself,
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and he soon felt so energized that he started dancing
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around the field. When Caldy shared the berries with an
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abbot of a local monastery, the monk ended up wide
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awake during the evening prayers. He liked the feeling and
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decided to turn the berries into an infusion. A global
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tradition was born. Science hasn't confirmed this story, but there
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is good evidence that Caffea arabica originated in Ethiopia and
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South Sudan, and was most likely domesticated and cultivated in Yemen.
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From there via the Yemeni port of Mocha, Arabica conquered
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the world first India, then in the seventeenth century Europe,
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and a few decades later the United States. By sixteen
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sixty eight, coffee sweetened with honey and spiced with cinnamon
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was already being savored in New York. Yet it was
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the Civil War that made coffee into America's favored hot beverage.
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Union generals believed that men fought better when dosed with arabica,
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and the troops were awash in it their daily rations,
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enough to brew more than two cups per person per day.
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As Jonathan Morris writes in his book Coffee, a Global History,
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the drink was such an important part of battlefield life
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that the word coffee appeared in the diaries of Union
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soldiers more often than either bullet or rifle. The genus Coffea,
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to which Arabica, Robusta, and Stenophylla all belong, has a
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wealth of diverse species. There are some with hairy fruits
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and some whose fruits look like pears with the brain
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shaped seed inside. Some are high in caffeine, while others
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are naturally caffeine free. Some taste like dark caramel, some
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like sausage rolls. At first, Davis says his work with
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pure botany just filling out the kafea family tree Madagascar
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has a secluded ecosystem brimming with endemic species. I went
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there not realizing how difficult it is to find coffee
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in the wild. It was really, really tricky, he says.
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A local botanist named Frank Rakatona Solo showed Davis how
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it's done. You don't scan the greenery for the characteristic fruits.
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Most often the plants don't have any, nor for leaves.
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There are two many lookalike plants. Instead, you seek out
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the distinctive architecture of the kafaya genis. Davis draws the
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shape in the air with his hands straight up. That's
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the trunk. Then slash slash to the sides. That's the branches.
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The branches are always held in a certain way, he says. Yet,
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even knowing what to look for, the two botanists often
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had to trek for days through rainforests, sometimes knee deep
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in water. They got caught in a cyclone. Davis almost
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died of hookworm one day. He recalls, When I took
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my shoes off, my feet were white. It was just insane.
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Davis went on to name one of the species he
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discovered in honor of his mentor, Kafea Rakatona SOLOI. As
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a taxonomist, Davis had made it his main goal to
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discover and describe new species of coffee to understand the
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genetic diversity of the genus more fully. But around to
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one thousand and nine, Davis started thinking seriously about how
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to help coffee farmers adapt to the warming planet. He
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hands me a photo taken in Uganda by a member
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of his research team. It shows rows of robusta plants,
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all wilted, sticking out from cracked, dry soil. Without lots
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of water, this robusta will be dead, he says. Hagar,
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the University of Greenwich professor, noticed signs of this worrying
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trend in the mid aux in Nicaragua. That was the
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first time I saw a coffee production system just start
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to collapse, he says. That year, the usual dry season
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of five to six months extended into seven. At first,
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the plants were doing just fine, but then suddenly, in
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the space of one or two weeks, it was just
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like finally the system ran out of water and everything
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started dropping leaves and dying back. Hagar says, it was
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quite incredible to see that tipping point. This concern is
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driving the effort to bring new species to market. Along
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with Stenophilla, Davis is hopeful about Cafea zanglibarie, an East
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African species that prospers in hot weather. Kafeya excelsa, native
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to Central Africa, survives without water long after Robusta gives up,
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and Kafeya rasamosa, whose beans are as tiny as lentils,
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is resistant to most pests. But once Davis's wanted posters
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had failed, he decided it was time to search the
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forests the way Rakatona Solo had taught him. But by
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twenty eighteen, many of the forests were gone, chopped down
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for fuel and farms. One place he and his team
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could still look was the Ksawe Forest Reserve, a hilly
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area in central Sierra Leone. It took the scientists all
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morning to find their way to the remote reserve. We
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got there, walked up this steep hill for about an hour,
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looked around and everyone was like, is this it? And
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I said no, this is it? Definitely no. When they
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finally found the plant, it ended up being measley, with
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no fruits or flowers. To an untrained eye, it looked
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like any other shrub in the forest, but Davis knew
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right away he saw that distinctive architecture. After all these
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years of wanting to find it, it felt fantastic, he says. Bizarrely,
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though his team couldn't find any more specimens, there was
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just the single scrawny plant to protect it. The scientists
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cleared the undergrowth around the stenophylla and marked the location
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with stones. Then it was time to head back. Hagar,
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who was part of the expedition, remembers the group's feeling.
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It was kind of bitter sweet because we had found it.
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But with one plant, there's not so much you can do.
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Because the plant had not yet flowered, there were no
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seeds to gather and cultivate in a research plot. Still,
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the scientists now knew the type of ecosystem where Stenophila
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might be found. Over the coming months, they managed to
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locate several more of the plants in Sierra Leone's forests
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and gather beans. By twenty twenty, Davis's team had finally
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collected enough stenophilla in the wild to roast nine grams,
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a tiny amount, but enough for him to finally have
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his first long awaited taste. The whole process was far
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from standard to begin with, the beans were dried on
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a plastic chair on someone's patio in Sierra Leone. Still,
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the first sip took Davis by surprise. Stenophilla resembled Rwandan
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bourbon coffee, a premium Arabica of exceptional quality. I was like,
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oh my god, this is amazing, he says. In a
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later panel tasting of Stenophila, Davis's impressions were confirmed. The
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tasters agreed that it rose to the level of high
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quality Arabica. It was sweet, with undertones of peach, jasmine, chocolate,
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and elderflowers syrup. As we walk among the rows of
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aged shelves and drawers that make up the archives of
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Kew Gardens or Burium, Davis tells me that there are
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more than seven million dried specimens here, collected around the
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world over the past one hundred and seventy years. They
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include four hundred and fifty picked by Charles Darwin during
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his trip aboard h MS Beagle. Expecting my visit, Davis
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has pulled out several dry coffee specimens to show me.
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One as a large leaf of Coffea Liberica, collected by
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an explorer named J. D. Snowden in nineteen thirty in
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what is now South Sudan. It's paled with age and
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glued to a well worn card. It looks brittle, Yet
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Davis says, such leaves are an invaluable source of high
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quality DNA. You might be looking through the specimens saying,
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I know what that is, I know what that is. Oh,
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this looks a bit different, and then you do DNA tests,
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chemical tests, micromorphology with an electron microscope, and you realize
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it is different. He says. Some of the specimens in
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the herbarium are unnamed, awaiting a label. Others have been
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miscataloged as known species while DNA data clearly shows they
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are something else. The Liberica specimen, Davis shows me, is
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in fact an Excelso coffee, a species that he has
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recently proved to be separate from Liberica the paper awaits publication.
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The clear cup Davis's hand me is filled with freshly
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brewed rasamosa, the pest resistant coffee with minuscule beans. You're
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probably one of only fifty people who've drunk this, he says,
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as he takes a second cup for himself. It smells
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nothing like coffee, minty with the hint of rosemary. Some
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of the major compounds you find in Arabica are not
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in this coffee, and some compounds that are in this
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coffee are not in Arabica. He adds. As with the smell,
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the first flavors I taste are not very coffee like.
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There is some black currant, some annis. The aftertaste, though,
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is very much coffee. It's unusual, I tell Davis, but delicious. Nevertheless,
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the next coffee we taste is Liberica. To my untrained
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taste buds, this one is even more bizarre, with hints
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of wild mushrooms. It's still nothing compared to some Madagascar
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coffees Davis has tasted. He tells me. One was a
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bit meaty and super super acidic, he says. The poor
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taste is also the reason why naturally caffeine free coffees
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likely won't hit your supermarket shelves anytime soon. They're not
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producing caffeine, they're producing other acids, Davis says, and those
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acids often translate into odd flavors. While stenophilla has an
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amazing taste and climate sturdy traits, it also likely won't
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conquer the world in the near future. A major issue
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is low yield, Davis says, especially compared to Robusta. This
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might be one reason Stenophylla disappeared in the twentieth century,
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but Davis hopes Stenophila could be bred together with other
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coffee varieties. He and his colleagues in Africa are already
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engaged in studies using traditional cross breeding methods. According to
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Bin Waber Tron, a plant geneticist at Sea RAG, a
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French agricultural research organization, the Rassamosa could also be crossed
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with another wild species, such as coffea cessiliflora, to produce
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something that's drought resistant, but with bigger beans, the wild
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species are reservoirs of genes that can be very interesting
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for the future of breeding. He says. Biodiversity is not
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just for fun, it's a gene pool. Bun of the
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International Center for Tropical Agriculture agrees we're losing these resources
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and we need them. In the meantime, scientists are advising
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coffee growers and consumers to think about the industry's effects
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on climate change. One big issue is fertilizers, which are
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applied in large quantities to coffees grown in open fields.
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These fertilizers release nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. That's
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why Haggar advises environmentally conscious consumers to choose shade grown coffee,
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which requires less fertilizer. Coffee pods and capsules are problematic too.
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A twenty twenty one study showed that they have the
23:12
largest carbon footprint of all common coffee preparation methods. If
23:18
you are just taking ground coffee out of a bag
23:21
and putting it into a French press, then you are
23:24
avoiding a lot of these sorts of emissions, Hagger says.
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Regarding the future of Stenophila, Hager says he and Davis
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are now just sitting around and waiting. They oversee a
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plot with about eight thousand Stenophila plants in Sierra Leone, which,
23:40
if things go well, should bear fruit this year. Yet
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Davis believes that for the near future, Stenophila will be
23:48
just a niche coffee, something for a small group of connoisseurs.
23:52
He is not ready to promote Stenophila to farmers. We
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don't know what the yields are going to be, he says.
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We don't know how resistant it's going to be to
24:02
pests and diseases. We don't know how it will work
24:05
for farmers. From a profitability standpoint, there are so many unknowns,
24:11
but farmers urgently need solutions. If they can get better breeds,
24:15
better varieties, maybe their farms can survive. That's where Davis
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comes in, cataloging more and more types of coffee, searching
24:25
for new genotypes, lurk looking for resilient species that could
24:29
be both used for cross breeding sturdier hybrids, and planted
24:33
directly on farms. As high profit specialty coffees. We need
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people like him to understand coffee diversity and put ideas
24:42
out there, says Tanya Humphrey, director of Research and Development
24:46
at World Coffee Research, a non profit formed by the
24:50
global coffee industry. Maybe he can narrow it down to
24:54
the top three or five that are interesting, and eventually
24:57
that material can flow into a bree eating pipeline. As
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for Davis, he is already preparing his next trip to Africa.
25:07
New species of coffee are still waiting to be found
25:11
to help farmers thrive and keep the world wide awake. Finally,
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this new book reveals the daredevil lives of four Italian
25:21
women who stood up to Hitler and Mussolini by Sonia Anderson,
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Anita Malavasi's first delivery was salt. In the fall of
25:31
nineteen forty three, she brought a packet of it into
25:33
the mountains outside the city of Reggio Emilia in northern
25:37
Italy to supply a growing group of soldiers lacking food stables.
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These fighters were the anti fascist resistance men who deserted
25:45
the armies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and were
25:49
preparing to fight for freedom. Though Mussolini had been voted
25:52
out of power that July, Italy was still firmly under
25:56
German control, and Nazis were killing or deporting any Tossia
26:00
they came upon. Once twenty two year old Malavasi was
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comfortable sneaking salt, pasture and checkpoints on her bicycle, she
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started ferrying illicit publications to the mountains, as well as
26:11
clothes and food. She wore low cut fitted dresses and
26:15
thirted to disarm axis officers. She smuggled guns by strapping
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them to her body beneath her clothes. One day, she
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biked through a checkpoint with two heavy bags hanging from
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her handlebars, each containing concealed bombs. Malavasi's earlier involvement in
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the Italian resistance helping Axis soldiers desert their posts had
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been motivated only by humanitarian principles. She said, as a woman,
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you saved another woman's son. But as a clandestine courier,
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Malavasi came to see her efforts as something conscious, part
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of a loftier goal and Italy free of fascism. Malavasi,
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whose story is little known outside Reggio Emilia, is one
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of four brave heroines featured in historian Suzanne Cope's new
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book Women of War, The Italian Assassins, Spies and Couriers
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who fought the Nazis. Cope zooms in on the lives
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of mala Vasi and three other Italian women who contributed
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significantly to Italy's resistance against fascism. There's Bianca Guidetti Sara,
27:15
who dodged bullets while delivering newspapers to anti fascists in
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the Alps, Carla Capponi, who bombed German vehicles outside Rome's
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opera house and got away with shooting a German colonel
27:27
on a busy street, and Theresa Mattei, who delivered secret
27:30
messages for the resistance and later wrote Italy's constitution. While
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these women were essential to the Italian resistance. They also
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found new frontiers of personal freedom as their responsibilities exposed
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them to the possibilities of gender equality they'd never known.
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As mala Vasi said after the war, I didn't want
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to listen to my brothers or fathers telling me what
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to do. The Italian people had thrown off fascism, and
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she had broken free of convention. I did not intend
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to rebuild it. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine
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for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
28:08
for listening, and have a great day.