Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast

  Chris Wille of Rainforest Alliance told the audience, “We can tell people to drink more coffee and better quality coffee—just make sure it is certified eco-friendly. The birds win. The bees win. Everybody here wins.” Yet turf battles loomed over how to label and market such coffee. Organic retailers couldn’t agree with Fair Traders. The Rainforest Alliance wanted to stamp the coffee with its seal, while Conservation International representatives planned a slightly different set of criteria. Unwilling to wait for a consensus, Paul Katzeff unveiled his own point verification system for Thanksgiving Coffee’s shade-grown brand.

  Even if they could agree on a shade-coffee seal, what would constitute sufficient shade? Also, all the attention to shade-grown coffee centered on Latin America, ignoring Africa and Asia, while the promoters didn’t discuss areas in which shade was unnecessary because of cloud cover and climate.

  Bert Beekman, the Dutch founder of Max Havelaar, gave the most pragmatic advice to the bird-loving coffeephiles: create a uniform, recognizable, high-quality product. Make it available at reasonably competitive prices in supermarkets by forming joint ventures with major roasters. Refrain from one-upsmanship, turf wars, and ego tripping. Convey a simple, clear message, and get tons of free publicity through church groups and the press. Begin the campaign intensively in one regional test market, then expand.

  No one heeded Beekman’s message. True, the SCAA added sustainability to its mission statement, and its Sustainable Coffee Criteria Group created a document urging, among other things, minimal agrochemical use, cessation of habitat destruction, and biodiversity preservation. Yet there was no concrete agenda. Even so, eco-friendly coffee now accounts for 1 percent of the specialty coffee market.

  A Troubled World

  At the Smithsonian conference, I heard a grower ask, “We are shocked and confused that specialty roasters sell our coffee for $8 or $10, when we only receive a little over a dollar a pound. How is that just?” While their U.S. colleagues made sympathetic noises, no one really answered the question.

  Later, a specialty coffee professional gave me an answer. Let us say he pays $2 a pound for Colombian Supremo green beans (and remember that this price can fluctuate). Add 11 cents for freight-in, storage, and handling, 46 cents for the 18 percent weight loss during roasting, 19 cents a pound for roasting, 35 cents to hand-pack in five-pound valve bags for wholesale shipments, and 40 cents for shipping costs. That totals $3.51. Add $2.05 to cover overhead for the roaster/distributor (everything from mortgages and machinery loans to sales commissions, repairs, and rubbish removal) and profit, and it costs $5.56 to deliver roasted coffee to a specialty retailer. Depending on the retailer’s size, rent, and other overhead costs, he or she must then charge between $9.50 and $11.50 a pound to make a reasonable profit.

  If the roasted beans go to a coffeehouse outlet, the proprietor converts the $5.56 per pound beans into a twelve-ounce regular coffee at $1.75 or cappuccino or latte for $2.50 or more. If the proprietor gets twenty-four servings to the pound, that translates to a whopping $70 a pound for regular filter coffee, and $82.50 a pound for thirty-three lattes, minus the cost of the milk, stirrer, sweetener, and stale discarded coffee. On the other hand, coffeehouse owners have to pay astronomical rents, shell out $18,000 for a top-of-the line espresso machine, and allow customers to linger for long, philosophical conversations or solitary reading over their single cup of coffee.131

  It appears that the high end-costs are probably justified, at least in terms of the U.S. economy and lifestyle. Nonetheless, there remains the glaring disparity between the affluence of the United States and the poverty of coffee-growing regions, and the talk about migratory birds seemed dilettantish to some at the conference.

  A Mexican speaker complained, “Coffee communities which produce wealth for the country live in poverty without the benefit of social policies. . . . The coffee growing areas are a powderkeg waiting to explode.” Although he was talking about Mexico, that also described conditions in many other coffee-producing nations.

  By e-mail I receive “Coffee Talk’s Daily Dose of News,” which ends with a section called “News from Origin.” The news is mostly awful in the poverty-stricken coffee-growing countries. Here is a random sampling of headlines from August 19-20, 2009, but every day brings such news:Latin Leftists Fear a Honduras Coup Domino Effect

  Colombia Arrests Ex-security Head

  Ethiopia’s Business Climate Worsening, Chamber of Commerce Says

  Mexico: Gunmen Attack Newspaper Offices

  UN Official: Zimbabwe’s Woes “Pose Significant Challenge”

  Kenya Drought Worsens Hunger Risk

  Yemen Rebels Kidnap 15 Red Crescent Aid Workers

  Indonesia Militants Plotted Obama Attack

  Group Finds More Unmarked Graves in Indian Kashmir

  Quake Hits Sumatra, Indonesia

  Ana Remnants May Regain Strength in Gulf of Mexico

  Coffee-growing regions seem plagued with more than their fair share of natural disasters. Hurricanes routinely devastate the Caribbean and Central America, and earthquakes frequently rock coffee-growing regions. In 1996, for instance, Hurricane Mitch killed an estimated 11,000 people and cut coffee production nearly in half in Honduras and Nicaragua.

  Coffee—Part of the Matrix

  Coffee is inextricably bound up in a history of inequity. On my trip to Central America, the close connection between coffee, power, and violence was brought home repeatedly. In Nicaragua, I met Alvaro Peralta Gedea, who had reclaimed his family’s finca, confiscated by the Sandinistas in the early 1980s. Before he could prune the neglected trees, he had to remove mines planted on his land. Fortunately, he had been trained by the U.S. Navy in mine removal, and he taught his campesinos. On his uncle’s farm, however, an incautious worker was blown up.

  During my time in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, I joined a trip organized by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. At a cocktail party I met General Joaquin Cuadra Lacayo, then the head of the Nicaraguan army, on Esperanza, his beautiful coffee estate. He explained how, as a Sandinista general, he had given land and guns to peasants and told them to defend it, while his government confiscated other coffee fincas. His own farms, he explained, were not suitable for confiscation.

  The next day we crossed into El Salvador, where the civilian police provided an armed escort. Our guide was Ricardo “Rick” Valdivieso, cofounder with Roberto D’Aubuisson of the right-wing ARENA party. Raised in the United States, he resembled a wholesome camp leader, yelling from the front of the bus, “Are you having fun?” It was difficult to imagine that he, like D’Aubuisson, might have been associated with death squads—an allegation he denied when I asked him about it. He told me how he had been shot and nearly killed in El Salvador just before the 1982 elections. Hospitalized for a day, he then was spirited away to a “safe house” to avoid assassination.

  The coffee economy itself is not directly responsible for social unrest and repression; we should not confuse a correlation with a cause. Inequities built into the economic system nonetheless exacerbate conflicts. Compared with many other products developed countries demand in cheap quantity, however, coffee is relatively benign. Laboring on banana, sugar, or cotton plantations or sweating in gold and diamond mines and oil refineries is far worse. Most coffee is grown on tiny plots by peasants who love their trees and the ripe cherries they produce.

  Coffee provides a fascinating interconnection between the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine, and business, and offers a way to follow the interactions that have formed a global economy. Though this history has concentrated solely on coffee, similar stories could be told for other products. The European countries extracted furs, silver, gold, diamonds, slaves, spices, sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, opium, rubber, palm oil, and petroleum from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As North America, taken over by white Europeans, developed industrially, it too joined the conquest, particularly of Latin America.

/>   Caffeine, the Drug of Choice

  Caffeine is the most widely taken psychoactive drug on earth, and coffee is its foremost delivery system. “Today, most of the world’s population . . . consumes caffeine daily,” wrote Jack James, author of two books on caffeine. He estimates that global consumption is the approximate equivalent of one caffeine-containing beverage per day for every person on the planet. In the United States, around 90 percent of the population habitually takes caffeine in one form or another.

  Humans clearly crave stimulating concoctions, drinking, chewing, or smoking some form of drug in virtually every culture in the form of alcohol, coca leaves, kava, marijuana, poppies, mushrooms, qat, betel nuts, tobacco, coffee, kola nuts, yoco bark, guayusa leaves, yaupon leaves (cassina), maté, guaraná nuts, cacao (chocolate), or tea. Of those in the list above, caffeine is certainly the most ubiquitous, appearing in the last nine items. Indeed, caffeine is produced by more than sixty plants, although coffee beans provide about 54 percent of the world’s jolt, followed by tea and soft drinks. As cartoonist Robert Therrien has a character proclaim, “Coffee is my drug of choice!”

  Caffeine is one of the alkaloids: organic (carbon-containing) compounds built around rings of nitrogen atoms. Alkaloids are the pharmacologically active chemicals produced by many tropical plants. Because they have no winter to provide relief from predators, tropical plants have evolved sophisticated methods to protect themselves. In other words, caffeine is a natural pesticide. It is quite likely that plants contain caffeine because it affects the nervous system of most would-be consumers, discouraging them from eating it. Of course, that is precisely the attraction for the human animal.

  Caffeine, C8H10N4O2, was first isolated from green coffee beans in 1820. It consists of three methyl groups (H3C) attached around a xanthine molecule—one of the common building blocks of plants and animals—making caffeine (a trimethylxanthine) a knobby molecule that bumps about in the bloodstream, though it readily passes through biological membranes such as the gastrointestinal tract. The human liver treats caffeine as a poison and attempts to dismantle it, stripping off methyl groups. It can’t cope with all of them, so quite a few whole caffeine molecules make it past the liver and eventually find a docking place in the brain.

  The caffeine molecule mimics the neurotransmitter adenosine, which decreases electrical activity in the brain and inhibits the release of other neurotransmitters. In other words, adenosine slows things down. It lets us rest and probably helps put us to sleep once a day. When caffeine gets to the receptors first, however, it doesn’t let adenosine do its job. Caffeine doesn’t actively keep us awake—it just blocks the natural mental brake.

  The brain isn’t the only place caffeine affects. There are receptors throughout the body, where adenosine performs varied functions. Thus, caffeine constricts some blood vessels. In low doses, it appears to slow the heartbeat, while larger amounts cause the heart to beat more rapidly. Caffeine causes certain muscles to contract more easily. At the same time, however, it can relax the airways of the lungs and open other types of blood vessels. Caffeine is a diuretic, and small amounts of calcium float away in the urine, leading to concern over possible bone loss. The latest research indicates that this is a potential concern only for elderly women with low calcium intake.

  Coffee and caffeine have been implicated in an enormous array of ailments, but subsequent studies have failed to confirm most of the negative findings. As Stephen Braun concluded in his book Buzz, “The effects of caffeine on such things as breast cancer, bone loss, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and mental dysfunction have been examined in . . . detail and, to date, no clear evidence has been found linking moderate consumption of caffeine . . . with these or any other health disorder.”

  Jack James, in his book Understanding Caffeine, agreed that there is no unequivocal linkage, but he felt that caffeine probably contributes to heart disease. In addition, he pointed out that boiled or unfiltered coffee has been linked to higher serum cholesterol levels. “Even the equivalent of one cup of coffee produces modest increases in blood pressure lasting 2 to 3 hours,” James argued. “Experienced over a lifetime, these daily elevations of blood pressure probably contribute to cardiovascular disease.” His conclusion was that there is no safe level of caffeine consumption, and that the drug should be avoided completely.

  Few doctors would go so far, though all authorities agree that people with high blood pressure, as well as those with insomnia and anxiety disorders, should consult their physician about their caffeine intake. They also recommend that patients taking other drugs ask their doctor about possible interactions with caffeine. In the stomach, caffeine stimulates gastric acid secretion. Thus, while it helps some people digest food, it gives others an acid stomach. Caffeine does, however, have a synergistic effect with analgesics, making it useful in painkillers.

  Most authorities recommend “moderate consumption.” There are many anecdotal and clinical reports that drinking too much caffeine can cause problems. The lethal dose for humans is about 10 grams, though it would be virtually impossible to consume that much quickly by drinking coffee, requiring more than one hundred cups. Initial signs of toxicity include vomiting, abdominal cramps, and a racing heartbeat. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) includes caffeine intoxication as a bona fide ailment.

  Yet moderate caffeine intake has benefits. As Harry Hollingworth found in his 1911 double-blind studies, caffeine can minimally improve motor skills and reaction time while leaving sleep patterns relatively unaffected. Coffee boosts athletic performance (perhaps through stimulation of more adrenaline) to the point that the International Olympic Committee used to call caffeine a “doping agent.” Caffeine can help those who suffer from asthma and is given to infants suffering from neonatal apnea (cessation of spontaneous breathing). Some adults with allergies find that caffeine allays symptoms. It can mitigate the pain of migraine headaches (though withdrawal from caffeine causes other headaches). For those who need a diuretic or laxative, coffee provides relief. Some studies even commend the drink’s use as an antidepressant to prevent suicide.

  Caffeine has been shown to increase sperm motility, so it may prove useful in artificial insemination programs (though some fear it may harm the sperm while speeding it on its way). Combined with analgesics such as aspirin, caffeine appears to help alleviate pain. While coffee often is accused of providing no nutrition, it provides traces of potassium, magnesium, and manganese. Like red wine, it is an important source of antioxidants. In fact, according to a 2005 University of Scranton study, coffee is by far the largest supplier of those vital chemicals to the average American. Because it raises the metabolic rate, it may help with dieting, but the effect is slight.

  Caffeine has a paradoxical effect on hyperactive children with attention-deficit disorder: coffee seems to calm them down. Coffee consumption can apparently help prevent Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, liver cancer, colon cancer, type 2 diabetes, and gallstones.

  I am somewhat skeptical about these findings. All too often we hear that what caused cancer ten years ago is now supposed to cure it, or vice versa. Yet many of the recent coffee studies are epidemiologically sound, following huge numbers of people for many years and carefully weeding out possible confounding factors. For example, a 2006 study on liver disease, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, tracked 125,580 people, concluding that “there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis.” A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association the previous year followed 193,473 participants. It found not only that coffee protected against type 2 diabetes, but that the more cups you drank, the lower your risk of diabetes.

  Surprisingly, there is little evidence that caffeine harms children. Like adults, however, children are subject to withdrawal symptoms—from soft drink deprivation more frequently than from coffee. Many doctors have expressed concern about pregnant and nursing women who drink coffee.
Caffeine readily passes through the placental barrier to the fetus, and it turns breast milk into a kind of natural latte. Because premature infants lack the liver enzymes to break down caffeine, it stays in their systems much longer. By the time they are six months old, most children eliminate caffeine at the same rate as adults, with a bloodstream half-life of around five hours.

  Research has failed to prove that caffeine harms the fetus or breast-fed infant, but some studies appear to implicate caffeine in lower birth weights. Jack James has urged pregnant women to abstain from drinking caffeine beverages. On the other hand, the National Coffee Association (which certainly has a vested interest in the matter) has asserted that “most physicians and researchers today agree that it’s perfectly safe for pregnant women to consume caffeine.” For those who choose to err on the side of caution, the NCA recommends one or two cups daily.

  Experts in fact don’t agree on much when it comes to coffee and caffeine intake, partly because individuals exhibit remarkably different reactions. Some people are wired for hours with a mere sip; others can drink a double espresso right before falling into a sound sleep. Thus, every coffee lover should determine his or her level of comfortable consumption, preferably no more than two or three cups a day.132

  Are You Addicted?

  Some people can drink dozens of cups of coffee a day without bouncing off the walls because they have developed a caffeine tolerance. If they quit cold turkey, they would probably suffer exquisitely, like Cathy Rossiter, who took part in a 1993 Johns Hopkins study on the effects of caffeine withdrawal. Rossiter favored Mountain Dew, chugging the heavily caffeinated lemon-lime soft drink all day. Her need was so intense that she found herself standing in a supermarket line holding a Mountain Dew in either hand while she was in labor with her second child.