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Open House 9/3/09
Current Events - Connection to Consumer Economics
September 21st, 2009 by johnk
Create a post at your blog about a current event news story. Here’s what to do for your first current events post:
1. Find any article (not more than 3 months old) from a newspaper, magazine or the internet that interests you the most. Your article could be about any topic, e.g., politics, business, sports, science, fashion, technology, music, a new consumer product, etc.,- but the article needs to have some connection to consumer economics.
2. The introduction to your post should include background to your source(s) of information. Tell us how and where you came across the article, and if you followed up by checking other sources on the same topic. Include the name of the source (title of newspaper or magazine, website URL)
3. Also include the source of any photo or video that is part of your post.
4. Then tell us why you were interested in this particular news story and what you already knew or assumed about the topic that is mentioned in the article.
5. Give a summary of the article, indicating what you have learned about the topic and any connections to consumer economics.
6. Next, explain what you would want to know more about this news story topic. You could also predict what will happen next in relation to the events described in the article.
7. Finally, try to indicate if you think there was any bias in the article. Did the author or someone presented in the article seem to show a preference for or against the idea that was the basis of the article?
8. Your category for this post will be Current Events (Humanities as Parent Category or Tag.)
Further Notes:
You will receive most credit for using NewsBank and/or EBSCO to find a current event article. Also recomended is the International Herald Tribune (linked at this blog).
The title of your post can be something such as, ‘Current Events - Consumerism.’
You can copy and paste the actual headline to the article or you can create a headline of your own.
Make sure that if you use any text from the article that you use quotation marks. When referring to information from the article, you could use a phrase such as ‘According to …’ You will earn most credit by putting information from the article in your own words. You will earn least credit if you are copying information from the article (i.e., plagiarizing).
Here’s an example of a current event story that has a connection to consumer economics. It first starts with a made-up headline.
World’s Most Expensive Coffee - Comes from What?!
On Friday, August 21, I came across the photo above posted at one of my favorite blogs, ‘The Daily Dish.’ This blog contains mostly news dealing with politics, but it also has a variety of other topics. The information about some animal eating coffee berries was only about a paragraph long, so I did an internet search to get more background on the topic. I found a useful article in the January 20, 2004 online edition of the newspaper, USA Today.
I was interested in this news story because when I read the caption to the photo at ‘The Daily Dish’ blog, there were details about Indonesia having the world’s most expensive coffee. In general, I believe the high price of a product is often based, at least partly, on the status that the consumer is supposed to acquire when buying the product, so I wanted to know how an animal eating coffee berries would lead to any consumer status.
Before reading the article about civet coffee, I already knew that there are several types of coffee that come from places such as the highland areas of South America, Africa and the Middle East. As far as Asia goes, I wasn’t aware that coffee is a major crop in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. I did know that a civet is a cat-like raccoon that lives in the forests of some parts of Asia, but I had no idea what role a civet would have in coffee production.
I assumed that the most expensive coffee is found at Starbucks, the high prices due to quality of the coffee served and the status of the brand, but I certainly didn’t realize that one type of coffee that comes from Java, in Indonesia, is marketed overseas and sold for the equivalent price of up to 1500 baht for a single cup of coffee!
The extreme high price is due to the limited supply of civet coffee, but the real surprise is what you could call the ‘inside story’ of this increasingly popular coffee. (Watch out, you might get grossed out!)
In the photo above, a civet is eating coffee berries. The coffee berries pass through the civet’s stomach without being digested and then excreted, the coffee beans embedded in feces (photo below).
That’s right, the coffee beans are in the civet’s poop! The beans have to be cleaned by hand, dried and then lightly roasted, just like any other coffee bean, right?
The civets in the photos look tamed because in the wild, civets climb the trees that have coffee berries, and then someone has to carefully scoop up the poop, making sure the beans are in safe hands.
In any case, according to the article in USA Today, coffee aficionados claim that the aroma of civet coffee from Indonesia is the world’s best. It is supposedly the ‘unique enzymes’ in the civet’s stomach that give the coffee its ‘distinctively earthy’ taste - no wonder!
The article from USA Today also brought out another aspect to the story on civet coffee that I want to find out more about, namely the safety factor of consuming such coffee. When the respiratory illness called SARS went worldwide a few years ago, China exterminated thousands of civet cats out of fear that they spread the illness. The World Health Organization also sees a possible link between civet cats and the illness.
However, that follow-up article in USA Today was posted back in 2004, and I didn’t come across any news of people negatively affected by drinking civet coffee. In fact, a civet coffee seller in Jakarta claims that there are many kinds of civets in the world, and the ones in China are not the same as the ones in Indonesia.
Also from the USA Today website article, it was Interesting to read that a man from Boston who owns a chain of coffee shops in Indonesia said this particular coffee would catch on because of its ’semi-romantic taste’ - but he did not plan to sell civet coffee in his stores because of ‘product liability lawsuits.’ In other words, he was afraid of getting sued if a customer got sick!
So, I learned about the world’s highest priced coffee (that doesn’t seem to have made it to Thailand). I also learned that the high price of a product is not only due to some marketing campaign that tempts the consumer with status; it can also be due to a limited supply.
Neither source, ‘The Daily Dish’ or USA Today, showed bias for or against the idea of drinking civet coffee, but the report from USA Today did seem more skeptical about its popularity and even referred to the possibility of there being a ‘marketing scam.’ By the way, the title to the article about civet coffee from USA Today was - ‘Good to the Last Dropping.’
Finally, here is a video clip from ‘Animal Planet TV’ that gives you more of a look at civet coffee.
(The image at the top left and the original source of information for this report are from The Daily Dish blog; the other photo is from Google images.
The Daily Dish URL is: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/
The USA Today URL is: http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2004-01-20-civet-coffee_x.htm
The video clip is from YouTube.)
Posted in Current Events | tagged Humanities | |
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on September 22nd, 2009 at 4:01 am
Greetings from Melbourne, Australia!
This like an interesting activity, and your blog is quite enticing.
Lisa Hill, Mossgiel Park PS, Endeavour Hills (Edublogs Challenge)