Dionisio Yam Moo stands about four-and-a-half-feet tall, and his skin is weathered from years in the tropical sun. A "proudly Mayan" farmer, he grows corn, beans and vegetables on a six-hectare farm in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula. The farm is surrounded by dense tropical forest, and crops grow amid fruit trees in thin soil, with the peninsula's limestone bedrock protruding in places.

Yam Moo farms using a traditional, rainfed practice called milpa, which has long involved cutting and burning patches of forest, planting crops for a few years, then letting the worn-out land regenerate for up to 30 years, before cultivating it again. Milpa has enabled generations of farmers like Yam Moo overcome the Yucatán's poor, thin soil and grow a stunningly diverse set of crops — multiple varieties of beans, squash, chili peppers, leafy greens, root vegetables, spices and corn, the plant at the heart of Mayan identity.

In recent years, however, Yam Moo and other Yucatán milperos have struggled to keep their farms alive. Climate change has brought erratic rainfall, making the growing season less predictable. Yam Moo says he has always planted his corn in May. But in 2015 for example, he says the rains didn't come until August. And then it flooded. He lost most of his crop, he says. Because milpa farming depends entirely on rainfall, which is never fully predictable, "there has always been a level of uncertainty, and the Maya have dealt with that for millennia," says José Martínez Reyes, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. "But with climate change, I think that uncertainty has grown exponentially."

Years of unpredictable rainfall and failed crops pushed Yam Moo to find a solution, and it's one that could in turn help fight climate change. Along with other farmers in the area, he developed a modified milpa called "milpa maya mejorada" or "improved Mayan milpa." Yam Moo no longer cuts down new forests, but he still grows the same diversity of crops. And he has incorporated into the ancient practice a host of modern techniques that help him farm despite the more unpredictable rains. A recently installed irrigation system, which relies on an above-ground rain water collector (the Yucatán has almost no surface water) ensures that Yam Moo can survive droughts. And he has found that by tilling in compost, chicken manure and other organic additions, he can grow far more crops per hectare. The added nutrients keep the soil healthy and productive, meaning he doesn't need to clear new ground as often, or perhaps at all.

In 2015, after the rains ended in late summer, he replanted corn in a nearby field, arranging seeds in tight rows with the aid of a small garden tiller, and added organic fertilizers to boost yields. Later that year, he planted beans and vegetables. "As long as you keep feeding the soil, the soil will feed you," he says.

Today, he's back on his feet, feeding his family with what he grows on his plot. He hopes that his success can be a model for the more than 70,000 Yucatán milperos who, like him, are facing the punishing effects of climatic changes.

Yam Moo's efforts have gotten some high-profile attention. As part of a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and private donors, the environmental group Nature Conservancy (TNC) is providing technical and financial support to get more farmers to adopt improved milpa. By helping farmers like Yam Moo adapt to the changing climate, TNC hopes to fight climate change, by reducing the deforestation traditionally involved in milpa: the practice is estimated to cause up to 16 percent of the deforestation on the peninsula. At a larger scale, the project aims to help Mexico receive payments from private companies and governments of developed countries to combat climate change.

"We're addressing drivers of deforestation with cutting-edge, science-based practices that are good for the producer, that are good for the ecosystem, and that mitigate climate change risks," says Mariana Vélez Laris, a local coordinator for TNC. The organic fertilizers and reduced burning help soil microbes thrive, she says, while sparing forests and the many species that thrive in them.

The improved milpa project is still small, with only twenty-five milperos in the area participating. But the staff at TNC has big hopes for it – they see it as a key tool to reforest much of the Yucatán peninsula. As milperos transition away from slash-and-burn practices, TNC hopes that forests can now regrow and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

As it is, milpa had been on the decline for decades, even before the effects of climate change hit farmers hard. The expansion of cattle ranching and large-scale mechanized agriculture, the Yucatán's two largest sources of deforestation, has dramatically reduced land available for milpa. Moreover, younger generation of Mexicans have opted for other professions, laments Silvia Teran, an anthropologist at the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya (Museum of the Mayan World) in Merída. Many go to work in the tourist resorts of Cancun and Tulum, or the kitchens of San Francisco and Dallas. "There is almost no connection now between young people and the milpa," she says.

Despite these challenges, milpa has been witnessing a revival in recent years, as tourists and Mexican consumers have started to seek organic, locally grown alternatives to industrial food, says Teran. In the town of Oxkutzcab, milperos sell attractively packaged pepitas, or squash seeds. Others use milpa primarily to feed their families, but sell honey made by the bees that fertilize the crops. A nascent "back to the land"-type movement has begun drawing young people from the city into milpa farming. The tradition's merits have even been lauded by celebrities like Mark Bittman, and are now being embraced by Mexican state and federal governments that once discouraged the practice.

But the revival remains precarious. Farmer Gualberto Casanova says milperos lack money to invest in improved milpa. Historically, milpa required little capital and equipment — just a machete or ax to fell trees, and a hoe to loosen the soil for planting. Improved milpa, by contrast, requires fertilizers, garden tillers and irrigation supplies, which most milperos, who are poor, subsistence farmers, can't afford. "If we had water, we could produce all year round," Casanova says. While the Mexican government has provided modest subsidies, the climate-change payments that Yam Moo, Casanova and other milperos hope to receive have yet to materialize.

Whatever hopes organizations like TNC might have, improved milpa is not a "magic bullet," cautions anthropologist Reyes. He says commercialization schemes promoted by outside groups can backfire, either because the market they are supposed to supply doesn't exist, or because they create too much competition among producers, undercutting the prices of their goods.

For farmers who use milpa primarily for subsistence, however, milpa maya mejorada "might be the way to go," he says. "I see it as a positive initiative."

For Yam Moo, the proof was in his hand as he harvested his crops this past October, which will provide a large fraction of the food his family, which includes his children and grandchildren, needs for the coming year. He hopes his success can convince fellow milperos to take a chance on investing in in this modernized milpa, and in the process, spare valuable forests. "If this patch is enough for me and my family," he says, "why would I go cut down more?"

For Dan Barber, the celebrated chef of the New York City restaurant Blue Hill, each course of a meal is an opportunity to tell a story. One of these stories is about a pepper — an aromatic, orange habanero without any heat.

Diners are served their heatless habaneros lightly flavored with salt and pepper. They take a bite, then wait for the feeling of a burning mouth or watering eyes that never comes. "When [our diners] question things they know to be absolute — habanero equals intense heat — it gets them to think about eating in a different way," says Barber. "It's very important to jujitsu expectations. You end up being more conscious of what you're eating."

Blue Hill is the biggest buyer of these peppers, also known as "Habanadas," which are sold through distributor Baldor Foods. The story Barber hopes to tell with these chiles is that all foods — from apples to yams — were created through a series of conscious decisions. Some plants thrive because of their disease-resistance, growing conditions, or high yields; for others, it's taste that has caused their popularity. Behind each of the foods we take for granted as finished products are tens or hundreds of generations of genetic tinkering and selection.

"We selected the habanero for heat because that's what was coveted. But what if you wanted to experience the melon-like experience of a pepper?" Barber asks. "You can't do it with a habanero — you can with a Habanada."

The man behind the Habanada is a Cornell University plant breeder named Michael Mazourek, who created it as part of his doctoral research. He got the idea after discovering a rogue heatless pepper whose genetics behaved very differently from a naturally sweet pepper like the Bell. This pepper had somehow lost whatever made it spicy in the first place. So, Mazourek wondered, what would happen if they created a habanero without the heat?

Their parent pepper, the original heatless variety, "tasted pretty bad," Mazourek recalled, "so we cross-pollinated it with a habanero, and after a couple more generations we started to get some non-hot but aromatic peppers." Mazourek had a finished variety of the Habanada as early as 2007, but it was only a few years ago that the pepper started making its way out into the world.

In 2014, the Habanada was one of the plants featured in the Culinary Breeding Network Variety Showcase, an annual event where chefs are paired with a new food variety and left to experiment. Nora Antene, chef of Portland, Oregon's Le Pigeon restaurant, got the Habanada which she turned into a summer sherbet.

Today there are two routes to get your hands on Habanadas — grow them from seed in your backyard or look for them in a restaurant. Currently, Ark Foods, a grower that helped popularize the Shishito pepper (another low-heat pepper), is the only commercial grower. Its peppers are sold to restaurants through distributor Baldor Foods. Ark Foods founder Noah Robbins says he's a big habanero fan and knew he wanted to grow heatless habaneros as soon as he heard about them. "They fit really nicely into what we're all about, which is the flavor of a vegetable rather than the yield or disease resistance."

While there are so-called pepper wars being fought between growers trying to beat the Carolina Reaper for the title of hottest pepper in the world, many pepper lovers are looking for something new, says Judith Finlayson, author of The Chile Pepper Bible.

A normal, unaltered habanero can get up to 300,000 on the Scoville scale – which measures levels of capsaicin, the chemical that causes the burning sensation we call "heat. The Reaper registers at over 2 million. Reaper-eating challenges on the Internet often end in disaster for those who attempt it. Common side effects include: vomiting, sweating, stomach cramps, blisters in the mouth, and all around agony. Potential physical illness aside, "You get to a point where it's so hot that you aren't tasting anything but heat," Finlayson says. "You're in a state of numbness from the heat."

Robbins sees the growing popularity of the heatless habanero as a sign that people want new experiences with a pepper. Taking away the heat, Robbins explains, is almost like getting the essence of a pepper.

As with most matters of taste, everyone describes the Habanada a little differently. Some say it has a citrus flavor, while others cite floral notes or even a hint of guava. But in some ways the main payoff of the Habanada is the anticipation it builds inside eaters' mouths. "Imagine as though you're tasting a habanero, so your taste buds feel as though there will be a rush of heat — but it never comes," Robbins describes.

For most of the last 50 to 100 years, Barber says, the chef has been left out of the conversation of which plants were valuable. That decision has instead been in the purview of grocers, farmers, distributors, and others whose main concern wasn't taste but practicality. As a result, Barber says, we've dumbed down taste, flavors, and diversity for the sake of the industry that wants things to be controlled. "Chefs don't want that control. Just as a painter wants different colors of paint, chefs want different flavors of food."

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

Everyone loves a cheap eats list. A treasure map to $1 tacos! $4 banh mi! $6 pad Thai! More often than not, the Xs that mark the cheap spots are in the city's immigrant enclaves. Indeed, food media is never so diverse as when it runs these lists, its pages fill with names of restaurateurs and chefs of color.

These lists infuriate me.

Before I became a restaurant owner, I spent my childhood in my relatives' pho restaurants. Because of that, I have deep compassion for and understanding of the pressures facing immigrant restaurateurs.

I watched my aunts and uncles work 16-hour days, only to charge cut-rate prices for their food. And I also witnessed the grueling hours that their employees put in, also at cut-rate wages. It is a cruel reality that immigrant enterprise is powered by the cheap labor of fellow immigrants.

Restaurant workers are already among the lowest paid workers in America. Many full-time workers rely on public assistance to make ends meet. Often enough, restaurant workers could not afford to eat at the restaurants where they work. And at the bottom of this system are the employees of the restaurants on these cheap eats list.

American enterprise has long been a gateway to the American dream for many immigrants. But much of it was also built on exploited labor. Enslaved African-Americans built Southern plantations. Chinese immigrant workers built the railroads. Latino migrant farm workers are the backbone that turned California into America's agricultural powerhouse.

This view of people of color as sources of "cheap" labor bleeds into our restaurant culture: Immigrant food is often expected to be cheap, because, implicitly, the labor that produces it is expected to be cheap, because that labor has historically been cheap. And so pulling together a "cheap eats" list rather than, say, an "affordable eats" list both invokes that history and reinforces it by prioritizing price at the expense of labor.

At my restaurant, an appetizer of spring rolls is $7. A chicken banh mi with house-made mayo and a side of fries or slaw is $12. A chicken pho is $11. I use sustainably grown chickens; the vegetables are from the farmers market. My staff are paid well over minimum wage. Generally, though, my prices are compared not to other restaurants that use sustainable ingredients and work towards paying their workers a living wage, but to Vietnamese restaurants where bowls of pho run $7, banh mis are $3 (or you can buy two and get one free). And because of that focus on price above all else, I've been criticized for being too expensive. I've been told flatly by Yelpers, customers and food reviewers that my restaurant is too expensive "for Vietnamese food."

I'm fully aware of the irony here: My family and I came to the U.S. as refugees in the 1970s and '80s. My relatives, like so many immigrant entrepreneurs, did what they had to do with their restaurant to survive and created a business model that worked for their time. That business model became the dominant model. It continues to be the dominant model. That business model is the one the ultimately traps the entrepreneur who would like to break out of this mold.

I have worked hard to combat the underlying racism that drives so much of the "celebration" of "cheap eats," and I believe that consumers and food media can play a large part in this fight. We need to rethink the very idea behind cheap eats lists. We need to recognize that the narratives we tell ourselves about immigrant resourcefulness and tenacity also makes us willfully blind to the human cost that makes the $3 banh mi possible.

These lists are part of a broader restaurant culture that devalues labor and ignores the consequences of that devaluation. And these lists make it difficult for immigrant businesses — and I include my own here — to break out of the trope that equates communities of color with cheap food and cheap labor. I don't see treasure in cheap eats. Restaurants where workers are paid fairly and the food respected? That's the true treasure.

Diep Tran is the chef and owner of Good Girl Dinette, a popular Los Angeles diner serving local, seasonal Vietnamese comfort food.

This essay was crafted in response to a summit on racism and difference in food, staged at Rivendell Writers Colony by The Southern Foodways Alliance and Soul Summit.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

President Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as "an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice." The president's muddled tense – it came out sounding as if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter following – provoked some mirth on social media. But the spotlight on one of America's great moral heroes is a welcome one.

Douglass was born on a plantation in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818 – he did not know his birthday, much less have a long-form birth certificate – to a black mother (from whom he was separated as a boy) and a white father (whom he never knew and who was likely the "master" of the house). He was parceled out to serve different members of the family. His childhood was marked by hunger and cold, and his teen years passed in one long stretch of hard labor, coma-like fatigue, routine floggings, hunger, and other commonplace tortures from the slavery handbook.

At 20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an anti-slavery orator and activist. Acutely conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution he had escaped, he made sure to document his life in not one but three autobiographies. His memoirs bring alive the immoral mechanics of slavery and its weapons of control. Chief among them: food.

Hunger was the young Fred's faithful boyhood companion. "I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog – 'Old Nep'– for the smallest crumbs that fell from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in the combat," he wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom. "Many times have I followed, with eager step, the waiting-girl when she went out to shake the table cloth, to get the crumbs and small bones flung out for the cats."

"Never mind, honey—better day comin,'" the elders would say to solace the orphaned boy. It was not just the family pets the child had to compete with. One of the most debasing scenes in Douglass' first memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes the way he ate:

"Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied."

Douglass makes it a point to nail the boastful lie put out by slaveholders – one that persists to this day – that "their slaves enjoy more of the physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the world."

In truth, rations consisted of a monthly allowance of a bushel of third-rate corn, pickled pork (which was "often tainted") and "poorest quality herrings"– barely enough to sustain grown men and women through their backbreaking labors in the field. Not all the enslaved, however, were so ill-fed. Waiting at the "glittering table of the great house"– a table loaded with the choicest meats, the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay, platters of fruit, asparagus, celery and cauliflower, cheese, butter, cream and the finest wines and brandies from France – was a group of black servants chosen for their loyalty and comely looks. These glossy servants constituted "a sort of black aristocracy," wrote Douglass. By elevating them, the slave owner was playing the old divide-and-rule trick, and it worked. The difference, Douglass wrote, "between these favored few, and the sorrow and hunger-smitten multitudes of the quarter and the field, was immense."

The "hunger-smitten multitudes" did what they could to supplement their scanty diets. "They did this by hunting, fishing, growing their own vegetables – or stealing," says Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College, who, of course, is named after the activist. "In their moral universe, they felt, 'You stole me, you mistreated me, therefore to steal from you is quite normal.'" If caught, say, eating an orange from the owner's abundant fruit garden, the punishment was flogging. When even this proved futile, a tar fence was erected around the forbidden fruit. Anyone whose body bore the merest trace of tar was brutally whipped by the chief gardener.

But if deprivation was one form of control, a far more insidious and malicious one was the annual Christmas holidays, where gluttony and binge drinking was almost mandatory. During those six days, the enslaved could do what they chose, and while a few spent time with distant family or hunting or working on their homes, most were happy to engage in playing sports, "fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey; and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the feelings of our masters. ... It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas." To encourage whiskey benders, the "masters" took bets to see who could drink the most whiskey, thus "getting whole multitudes to drink to excess."

The nefarious aim of these revels was to equate dissipation with liberty. At the end of the holidays, sickened by the excessive alcohol, the hungover men felt "that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum." And so, Douglass wrote, "we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field – feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery."

Douglass sounds even angrier at these obligatory orgies – he calls them "part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery"– than at other, more direct forms of cruelty.

"It was a form of bread and circus," says Opie. "Slaves were also given intoxicated drinks, so they would have little time to think of escaping. If you didn't take it, you were considered ungrateful. It was a form of social control."

When he was about 8 years old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore, which proved to be a turning point. The mistress of the house gave him the most precious gift in his life – she taught him the alphabet. But when her husband forbade her to continue – teaching slaves to read and write was a crime – she immediately stopped his lessons.

It was too late. The little boy had been given a peek into the transformative world of words and was desperate to learn. He did so by bartering pieces of bread – he had free access to it; in Baltimore, the urban codes of slavery were less harsh than in rural Maryland – for lessons in literacy. His teachers were white neighborhood kids, who could read and write but had no food. "This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge," Douglass wrote in one of the most moving lines in Narrative.

"This also shows the ingenuity of enslaved people," says Opie, "and how they tricked and leveraged whatever little they had to get ahead."

Today, when one thinks of Frederick Douglass, the image that springs to mind is of a distinguished, gray-haired man in a double-breasted suit. It is difficult to imagine him as a half-starved boy garbed in nothing but a coarse, knee-length shirt, sleeping on the floor in a corn sack he had stolen. As he wrote in Narrative, "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes."

It is a heartbreaking image – redeemed by one little word, "pen." A pen that he wielded with passion, clarity and irony to gash the life out of slavery.

Nina Martyris is a journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit NPR.

Among the rolling hills of ancient Africa, sometime around 8000 B.C., a dusty traveler was making gastronomic history, quite by accident.

Thirsty from a long, hot journey, the weary herdsman reached for the sheepskin bag of milk knotted to the back of his pack animal. But as he tilted his head to pour the warm liquid into his mouth, he was astonished to find that the sheep's milk had curdled. The rough terrain and constant joggling of the milk had transformed it into butter —- and bewilderingly, it tasted heavenly.

That's likely how it went down, as author Elaine Khosrova explains in her new book, Butter: A Rich History. From happy Neolithic-era accident to inspiration for student protests to tabletop staple, butter has had quite the ride over the past 10,000 years.

The story of butter, Khosrova says, is a historical roadmap of humanity. "I felt like I had uncovered an epic story that very few people had been paying attention to," she tells NPR.

Butter appeared on the world scene soon after the domestication of animals, although the first primitive batches would scarcely resemble the sticks that sit on your refrigerator shelf. Instead of cows, she writes, early butter came from the milk of yak, sheep and goats — the very first tamed beasts of our ancestors.

And while archaeologists have unearthed a 4,500-year-old limestone tablet depicting early butter-making, it's not clear precisely how our ancestors shifted from "accidental discovery" to purposeful manufacturing. Khosrova writes that after trial and error, early civilizations probably realized that if they removed the milk pouch "off the back of animal and hung [it] like a cradle from a tree limb," it could be deliberately "agitated" into sumptuous golden kernels. According to Khosrova, isolated communities in North Africa and the Middle East still make their butter in this way.

As butter spread, it took on new uses and meaning. Ancient Romans associated it with barbarism, much preferring to slather their bread in locally abundant olive oil rather than resort to the food of their enemies, the marauding army from Gaul. But they appreciated butter for its "curative properties," Khosrova says. Romans used butter for cosmetic purposes and also as a healing balm, often sneaking tiny licks in between applications on their wounds.

Perhaps most surprising is the story of butter's sacred and supernatural past. For many ancient civilizations, the unexplained mystery behind milk's transformation into butter made it seem magical. It "seemed like a marvelous event," Khosrova says.

Ancient Sumerians offered up gifts of butter at temple in honor of the "powerful fertility goddess Inanna, protector of the seasons and harvest," she writes.

Recent discoveries in Ireland of ancient bog butter — wooden buckets loaded with butter and hidden in expanses of mossy swamp — date back as far as 400 B.C. These long-lost provisions were probably buried by early Celts, who knew that the Irish wetlands would preserve their spoils, keeping them edible for leaner times. But Khosrova also writes that ancient bog butter was likely presented to the pagan gods, as a way of appeasing the mystical "'faeries' that alternately terrified and awed country folk."

Even the first-ever documented student protest in American history is linked with butter. Harvard University's Great Butter Rebellion of 1766 began after a meal containing particularly rancid butter was served to students, who (not unlike modern college-goers) were frustrated over the state of food in the dining hall. As reported in The Harvard Crimson, Asa Dunbar (who would later become the grandfather of Henry David Thoreau), incited the student body into action by hopping onto his chair, shouting, "Behold our butter stinketh! Give us therefore butter that stinketh not!"

Once avoided for fears of making us overweight, butter is now making a vigorous comeback, with artisanal interpretations aplenty. And through small-batch production and experimentation, producers have returned to quaint traditions, such as slow-churning and hand packing, to recapture simple flavors and generate new ones.

As Khosrova sampled butter from around the world, she says that she was amazed by how a food with only one ingredient could produce so many diverse "nuances of flavors, textures and color."

How this happens is a mystery that has astounded and confounded humanity for centuries. The history of butter is both humble and wondrous. With a simple batch of milk and a little creativity, a luscious — and magical — golden food is born

Read an Excerpt of Butter: A Rich History.

The Indonesian island of Java has long been synonymous with coffee. But it's only in the past decade or so that Indonesians have begun to wake up and smell the coffee — their own, that is.

Big changes are brewing in the country's coffee industry, as demand from a rising middle class fuels entrepreneurship and connoisseurship.

The trend is clear at places like the Anomali Coffee shop in South Jakarta. It roasts its coffee just inside the entrance on the ground floor.

If you walk into the roasting room at just the right moment, as the heat caramelizes the sugars in the coffee beans, it smells like someone is baking cookies.

Get close to the roasting machine, and you can hear the beans snap and pop. "It is the bean expanding because of the heat of the core," explains Anomali's founder Irvan Helmi.

Anomali Coffee includes a trading company that wholesales to hotels and other businesses. It also has a barista training academy.

And upstairs from the roasting ovens is one of its seven cafes. On a table, bags of beans from a half-dozen single origins are on sale. A blackboard ranks the beans in terms of their acidity and body.

"In Toraja, you also have a medium body, chocolaty and caramel, herbs," Irvan says, picking up a bag of beans from Sulawesi Island.

Indonesia's more than 17,000 islands teem with cultural diversity, and more plant and animal species than researchers can catalog.

Little wonder, then, that from Aceh in the west to Papua in the east, the archipelago has more coffees than Irvan's tasters can get around to tasting.

"From Aceh alone, we have more than 100 samples each season," Irvan says. "Can you imagine?"

Irvan notes that Indonesian coffees are known for their "earthiness" and body. Indonesians often drink these coffees black, and therefore, he says, they don't need the dark roast and acidity needed to be tasted above all the milk and syrup added to them in Western-style cafes.

Colonialists started growing coffee in what was then the Dutch East Indies in the 17th century. After parasites decimated plantations of Arabica beans in the 1880s, the Dutch introduced the hardier Robusta variety, which continues to account for most of Indonesia's crop today.

Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest producer of coffee after Brazil, Vietnam and Colombia, and it exports more than it consumes.

But Irvan explains that this has been changing in recent years, as demand from Indonesia's growing middle class has taken off, and improved logistics have helped build a thriving, archipelago-wide market.

And that's where Irvan saw his chance.

"The mission becomes clear," he declares, "to promote Indonesian coffee as a curator."

Irvan acknowledges the contribution of Starbucks to the Indonesian market. He jokingly calls the Seattle-based chain his "marketing department," as it has the financial muscle to penetrate new and remote cities and give local consumers an introduction to authentic espressos, cappuccinos and the like.

Irvan says most coffee companies blend different coffees together to make a consistent product. But each of Anomali's coffees comes from a single origin.

"We don't care about consistency," he sniffs. "If it's a high quality, we want it."

So you could say that each of their coffees is, well, an anomaly. "That's the big difference between Anomali and the mass market," he says. "And we're very proud of it."

Mirza Luqman Effendy, a friend and colleague of Irvan's who runs a café called Brewphobia (something he got over a long time ago), explains to me that younger Indonesians have different tastes in coffee from their parents' generation.

"The fact is, my father is a coffee addict," Mirza says. "He really likes very intense coffee, like Robusta, roasted very dark, and then basically he drinks coffee with putting some sugar and ginger."

He says that recipe is way too old-school for him: "My father's coffee is just like ... coffee. You cannot taste any attributes besides the coffee taste."

But Mirza tastes so much more in a cup than just coffee. He hones in on the attributes of each bean, the notes of citrus and spice, the feel on his palate and the lingering aftertaste.

Of course, it's young people like Irvan and Mirza, sharing their passion for coffee, that drives the coffee scene in many countries.

But with its rich variety of beans and long history of cultivation, Indonesia is building a coffee culture — and a pride in it — that is truly homegrown.
 

Near Esparto, in the beautiful Capay Valley region of central California, 1,400 young almond trees flourish in a century-old orchard overlooking the hills. Since November, they've stood in perfect rows without a hint of foliage — resting, naked and dormant, for the upcoming growing season. Their branches now swell with bright pastel blooms in preparation for pollination.

Like most almond growers, Brian Paddock, owner of Capay Hills Orchard, relies on bees to provide this important aspect of crop development. "No bees, no almonds. It's that simple," he says.

Often considered pests, frightful little creatures with a nasty sting, bees play a critical role in agriculture and the pollination of countless crops. Without them, many varieties of fruits and vegetables would come to an end. It's an agricultural doomsday scenario that has Paddock worried.

Bee deaths have been on the rise, with losses outpacing colonies' ability to regenerate. Last year, the U.S. lost 44 percent of all honeybee colonies — a species essential to commercial pollination in this country. Other species of bees have neared mass extinction, including the rusty patch bumble bee and seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees.

A world without bees may seem far-fetched, but experts are looking for ways to help plants survive without them. Eijiro Miyako, a researcher at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, has designed what he believes could one day be a partial solution: an insect-sized drone capable of artificial pollination. Coated with a patch of horse hair bristles and an ionic liquid gel, these pint-sized robots can collect and transfer pollen from one plant to another.

The project stems from a serendipitous moment. Miyako had previously experimented with using the specialized gel for electrochemical applications. When the gel performed poorly, he tucked the bottles away in a drawer and forgot about them — until he moved out of his lab two years ago. As soon as he rediscovered the gel, he thought about the pollination crisis and honeybee decline.

Conventional gels, Miyako explains, are mainly made of water and lose their stickiness over time. But his ionic liquid gel, by contrast, is a substance with a long-lasting "lift-and-stick-again" adhesive quality – ideal for moving pollen from one plant to the next.

"The continued adhesiveness and non-volatility of the ionic liquid gel was exciting," says Miyako.

The team first tested the biocompatibility and eco-friendliness of the gel against ants (which are also pollinators) and cells from mice, and found that it had no harmful effects after three days. And when a drop landed on the floor and attached to an ordinary piece of dust, he was sold.

Miyako performed additional tests on living samples. In one experiment, he placed ants in a box of tulips. One subset of the insects had the gel applied to their backs, while the others remained untouched. Those with the sticky residue collected pollen from the flowers.

Another experiment, involving houseflies (Musca domestica), showed that the gel had a camouflage effect, changing color with different sources of light, which could help the pollinators avoid predators. (Yep, houseflies are pollinators, too.)

With the live-model tests deemed a success, Miyako turned his attention to drones. He settled on a bee-sized, four-propeller drone, commercially available for around $100 each. He and his colleagues found that the gel alone was not enough to hold the pollen, so they added horse hair to mimic the fuzzy exterior of bees and provide an electric charge to keep the grains attached. Using fluorescent microscopy, the team observed pollen glowing in test tubes – offering strong proof that fertilization was successful.

Although artificial pollination is already possible, it's a tedious, time-consuming process. When done by hand, using a brush to apply the pollen, a person can pollinate five to 10 trees a day, depending on the size of the trees. Tackling thousands of trees takes major manpower and a hefty budget.

But even if cost were no object, an army of pollinating robot bees would face myriad obstacles.

"There are 1 million acres of almond trees in California," says Marla Spivak, a MacArthur Fellow and entomologist at the University of Minnesota. "Every flower needs to be pollinated to set the nut. Two million colonies of bees are trucked in to pollinate the almonds, and each colony has between ten and twenty thousand foragers. How many robots would be needed?"

She notes there are 20,000 species of bees in the world, each with unique flight patterns and body sizes to get into different flowers. Bumble bees, for example, are far better pollinators for tomatoes, while leafcutter bees are aces at alfalfa. The diversity of bees and flight patterns leads to more efficient and effective pollination.

Although Spivak is skeptical about using drones for fertilization, she believes robots could be beneficial in delivering pesticides — which can harm bee health — in a very precise way to reduce drift and overuse.

Drone Pollinator Process

Miyako's current robo-bee prototype is still very much a work in progress, far from a real-world field test. For one thing, it's not autonomous. The drones must be remote-controlled, by humans, and can be difficult to maneuver. "It was hard to control the robotic pollinators so that they would precisely hit the target sites," says Miyako. He's looking into incorporating artificial intelligence, GPS, and a high-resolution camera in future prototypes.

Quinn McFrederick, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, sees some potential for eventually using drones to pollinate commercial crops, especially if programmed with artificial intelligence. But he, like many experts, says it makes much more sense to protect our natural pollinators than to develop new technology.

"On top of more practical arguments, such as costs to smaller farms," he says, "I would not like to live in a world where bees are replaced by plastic machines. Let's focus on protecting the biodiversity we still have left."

Miyako acknowledges the skepticism about his project, but notes that he sees his drones not as a replacement for bees, but as a potential future ally in the face of extinction.

Crystal Ponti is a science, technology and health reporter based in Augusta, Maine.

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When it comes to climate change, we often think of the cars we drive and the energy we use in our homes and offices. They are, after all, some of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. But what about the toast you ate for breakfast this morning?

A new study published Monday in Nature Plants breaks down the environmental cost of producing a loaf of bread, from wheat field to bakery. It finds that the bulk of the associated greenhouse gas emissions come from just one of the many steps that go into making that loaf: farming.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Sheffield, in the U.K. They wanted to understand the environmental impacts of the entire life cycle of a common staple. They chose bread and used a "real-world supply chain," says Liam Goucher, the lead author of the study and a research fellow at the Grantham Center for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield. "We focused on a specific farm, which was in Lincoln, in the U.K., and we focused on a specific mill and a specific [commercial] bakery."

They collected and analyzed data for emissions involved at every step of the process, including growing the wheat, fertilizing it, harvesting the crop, transporting the grains to the mill, grinding the grains into flour, transporting the flour to a bakery and then baking and packaging a loaf of bread. Scientists call this a life cycle analysis.

Many stages were energy intensive and involved with emissions — for example, the machinery involved with tilling the soil, harvesting, and irrigation, or the electricity required to operate the mill and the bakery. But the vast majority of emissions — nearly 66 percent — came from growing wheat.

"We found that over half of the environmental impacts of producing a loaf of bread come from wheat cultivation," says Goucher. "The interesting thing is that 40 percent is attributable just to the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizers alone, which is a huge amount, when you consider it." The fertilizers also cause a lot of water pollution when they run off into streams and rivers.

Globally, agriculture is thought to contribute about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. That includes the emissions from deforestation to create farmlands. And we also know about the emissions involved in manufacturing fertilizers (an energy-intensive process) and their use on farms. Farmers typically use more fertilizers than they need to, and not all nitrogen in the fertilizers is used up by plants. Some of the nitrogen goes back into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

What is new about the study, says Goucher, is that it breaks down the emissions at every step, so we can figure out which steps to focus on to reduce emissions.

"It kind of points to the fact that if you want to reduce the climate impact of food production, we need to think of fertilizer manufacturing and fertilizer application as one place where we have big leverage to reduce climate impact," says Navin Ramankutty, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, who was not involved in the study. There are known ways to reduce use of nitrogen fertilizers, like applying fertilizers only at certain times of the growing season, when plants need them the most.

The study is "very interesting, very complete," says James Galloway, an expert on nitrogen cycles at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, who was not involved in the new study. "This is exactly the kind of thing that should be done with other food commodities."

Galloway says it would be even more useful to do such analysis on animal products like beef and pork, which we know are bigger sources of greenhouse gas emissions. "That would have interesting results and would be even more useful if you're going to ask the question, 'What can society do about the issue?'" he adds. "This type of analysis would generate very well the take-home message that if you only eat the amount of protein you're supposed to eat, as opposed to overconsumption, you would decrease the environmental footprint."

In the future, this kind of analysis could be used to create a market for foods with lower emissions, says Ramankutty. The way to do that is by "asking consumers to vote with their money," he says.

If for example, customers demand "climate-smart bread," then bakeries would have to prove that their bread uses less energy than the average loaf. Bakeries can in turn influence the supply chain. "They can go back to the farmer and say, 'Can you use less fertilizer, or use organic fertilizer?'" Ramankutty says. That could become a productive way to make sure that the food we eat has a smaller climate impact, he adds.

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