Colonial history & modern luxury market

42:06collecting. >> Okay. >> Okay. Because, you know, white people. >> So, so, so instead they collected the undigested beans from the droppings of Asian palms >> to to drink those. And then when the when the white plantation owners found out Yeah. and they tried some, they were like, "Oh, this actually tastes really good." And it became a new expensive export for the Dutch because the Dutch back then were always after getting rich. >> This is so funny cuz there's so many as like so many things in like like oxtail being 30 bucks a pound or whatever. Now it's kale salads being $20. Like oxtail and kale were eaten like when we were grow because it was cheap and it was the

42:46stuff no one else wanted and now it's been rep. >> Yeah, dude. I think it's the same with like IPAs. Honestly, there's no one who actually enjoys IPAs. All right? No one can convince me in a blind tasting that they like IPAs, okay? But they need everyone else to know that they drink IP. Anyways, so I first actually heard about it in the Bucket List movie with um Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. This is one of the things that that he wanted to drink before he um died of cancer. So the the the civet is this Asian common palm civet. It looks kind of like a raccoon to me. >> It looks like a hyena mixed with a raccoon. >> Yeah, it's it's Yeah, it and it consumes

43:27the ripest berries and the beans pass through in about 12 hours and and they become uh 10 times the value somehow. [laughter] Um, and the digestive process, it's thought that the digestive process modifies the beans chemical composition, refining flavor precursors and giving a janiqua. And there another awesome civot dropping. >> This is funny that this episode we did our first story on biosynthesis because this is another [laughter] kind of biosynthesis. Exactly. Yeah. And um you know it's actually led jokes aside it's led to a lot of unethical cage farming of these civets because obviously if you have something that is

44:07a commodity that is highly valuable and it comes from an animal humans don't care about the animals welfare and so it's it's led to like cage farming driven by the demand. So there's cage that there's demand in Japan, South Korea and USA. And the cage farming has happened in places like Vietnam and those Southeast Asian countries. So it it has become a real problem. >> I mean this is literally what we just talked about about the ethical issue of doing biosynthesis with bacteria. Yeah. >> But like this is now like you're scaling it up and it's the same problem set. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's the same problem set, right? And um this particular paper focused on wild civets. Wild civets not

44:47in captivity. in the western guts which are these mountain ranges on the western side of the Indian peninsula. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. One day we will go >> with um with our wives and whoever else. And it's in nature scientific reports.