Banning genetically modified (GM) food is just another example of promoters of "incumbent products" seeking to restrict competition argues Calestous Juma in yesterday's Financial Times:
Take coffee: in the 1500s Catholic bishops demonised coffee as "Satan's drink" and urged a ban. It was competing with wine. In its defence, Pope Clement VIII proclaimed: "Why, this 'Satan's drink' is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptising it and making it a truly Christian beverage."
More than a century later, coffee was pitted against tea as the incumbent English drink. To defeat the competition, King Charles II decreed the banning of coffeehouses in 1675 only to revoke the decision two days before it came into effect.
In Germany, coffee was outlawed or its sale severely restricted for economic reasons. "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors," declared Frederick the Great in 1777.
Historical cases of technological competition were limited in their reach. Today's global economy demands that governments find ways to ensure that the benefits of new technologies are widely shared. Judicial rulings will safeguard the integrity of international trading rules. But they will not guarantee consumer enthusiasm for products that threaten their settled ways.
Calestous Juma was writting about a WTO finding, published earlier this week, that the current European Union moratorium on GM food crops breaches trade rules, click here for earlier post.
I was first introduced to premium coffees in 1982. My early favorite was Kenya AA, but I found I liked a darker roast, and for some reason nobody I could find offered a dark roast Kenya. So I gravitated to the French and Italian roasted blends and for a while dabbled in Papua-New Guinea, which is quite brisk. I've since settled on Columbian Supremo.
Now this is a long way of saying, I don't need a double-blind taste test to tell good coffee, any more than a wino has to swap brown bags with his buddies to tell the difference between Frapple and Night Train Express.
And this is an even longer way of saying, the organic industry has things hopelessly *wrong*. It's not *how* you produce it, it's what the product *is*. And organic coffee might be pollinated by endangered songbirds for all I care, but it ferdangsher makes a lousy cuppa and costs way more.
Schiller.
It could also be surmised that the opposition to coffee at that time was because it was the beverage of the Saracens - bloody Arabs.
I wouldn't say it's "hopeless" but it's certainly not within the realms of scientific rigour. The (organic) coffee I drank this morning sure met the standard!
Petal: Try a blind taste test then come back to us. Taste testing when you know what you're drinking already is hopeless.