Eat This Podcast: Coffee leaf rust is bad news
Hello
That picture is of what one scientist called the vampire of the vegetable world: coffee leaf rust.
For me, Ceylon — Sri Lanka — is synonymous with tea. That’s because I wasn’t alive 150 years ago. In the 1860s, coffee was the island’s most important crop. Coffee leaf rust, a fungus, put paid to the coffee, but only after a global downturn in coffee prices. Planters — and their British customers — switched to tea.
The rust, however, is not the reason the Brits drink tea rather than coffee, just one of the things I learned from Stuart McCook, who has studied the history of coffee leaf rust and what it might hold for the future.
Take a listen, and discover why coffee leaf rust is not, at least in the short term, a threat to your morning joe.
All the best
Jeremy