Awhile ago I heard that the best coffee was from beans that had gone through the digestive tract of foxes, if I recall correctly. Then yesterday, Bitter Coffee Reality reminded me that the world price of coffee is plunging due to low-quality Vietnamese coffee. The report talks about raising the standard of coffee grown in Mexico, but originally, according to Samantha Marshall, the Vietnamese drank caphe cut chon, which is coffee made from ripe robusta coffee beans eaten & excreted by the

civet cat, a creature of the Viverridae family that looks something like a fox but is actually a cousin of the mongoose.Vietnam's development ambitions are badgering the civet cat...

Since the Vietnam War, the government has urged migrant farmers to settle down and grow more coffee for export. Thousands of acres of forest (civet-cat habitat) have been razed. And modern farming techniques have been introduced, such as picking beans before they are entirely ripe, the effect of which is to deprive civet cats of a decent meal.

Another reason caphe cut chon is disappearing from dinner tables: Civet cats are showing up as the main course. At the bustling Bac Map restaurant in coffee country's provincial capital, Buon Me Thuot, barbecued civet cat is a big-selling delicacy among newly rich coffee traders....

By the way, Cecil Adams writes the coffee beans come out of

the Indonesian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) rather than its perfume-ingredient-producing cousins (Viverra civetta and Viverra zibetha)

The latter are subjected to a painful procedure to remove their musk. As for eating civet cats, Carrie Lee and Alice Hung write,

...a top Hong Kong scientist said it was likely that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which has killed nearly 700 people and infected more than 8,000 worldwide, jumped to humans from civet cats, eaten as a delicacy in southern China.

This is apparently different from Cecil's two types. Known in Chinese as guo3zili2 (or bai2bi2xin1 or hua1mian4li2), it is apparently the paguma larvata, or masked palm civet (the li2 suggests some kind of fox to scientific illiterates). The Chinese seem mostly interested in them for food. But then there's the question of copulatory plugs in masked palm civets: are they for prevention of semen leakage, sperm storage, or chastity enhancement?