It takes extra time and work to be really healthy, things like picking slugs and bugs off your garden vegetables instead of spraying them with pesticides, and grinding your own grains instead of using packages cereals full of preservatives. Now it turns out that even coffee can be a health food, if you're willing to take the time and trouble to prepare it properly. According to a new hypothesis of Takayuki Shibamoto, a professor of environmental toxicology at UC Davis, there may be as much anti-oxidant capacity in the aromatic compounds of a cup of fresh coffee as in three oranges. Because the compounds escape rapidly into the air, Shibamoto advises that coffee should be drunk within 20 minutes of brewing for maximum benefit. But how can you brew a fresh cup of coffee from stale beans? The vast majority of coffee drinkers have never tasted fresh coffee, because the volatile oils in coffee beans go rancid within a week after roasting. Grind the beans, and coffee goes stale within three to four hours. The taste becomes bitter and health benefits evaporate along with the aromatic oils. Unfortunately, there is no method of packaging or storage that can prevent this deterioration. The practical solution offered by Merchants of Green Coffee (MGC) is a home roaster and organic green coffee beans, an old "new" concept. Until the early 1900s, many people bought green, unroasted coffee beans (which keep for years) from their local market and roasted coffee at home. Then marketing and convenience took over, and everybody came to like the bitter taste of stale coffee. The Merchants of Green Coffee home roaster is the size of a large coffee pot with a filter on top, and sits on the kitchen counter. Easy to use, you measure green beans into the roasting chamber, cover it, set the timer according to directions and desired darkness of roast, and presto! It all takes under five minutes, and there's a little smoke, but the house smells deliciously of fresh coffee for a few hours afterwards. With a few practice runs, you learn to get the beans just as light or dark as you want them. You do need to have your own coffee grinder though MGC suggests a mortar and pestle in an emergency. Merchants of Green Coffee Fresh Coffee Solution costs $28/month for 12 months. This includes the Fresh Roast home roaster, 24 pounds of specialty grade, organic, shade grown, bio-diverse, solar dried and fairly traded green arabica coffee beans (2lbs/month for 12 months), a filter, measuring spoon and MGC coffee booklet. Make sure you get the yellow booklet, which has simple, user-friendly instructions in it. My roaster came with white instructions that sounded so complicated I left it sitting on my counter for a month before daring to use it.For more information, contact Merchants of Green Coffee, 2B Matilda Street, Toronto, Ont., M4M 1L9, Phone: 416-778-6600. Fax 416-778-9796. www.merchant.org email: merchant@merchant.org