94 Coffee production in India, Yemen, and Indonesia was of little concern, amounting to just over 3 percent of world production.
95 In densely populated Ruanda-Urundi (soon to become the separate countries of Rwanda and Burundi), where high-grown arabica coffee was the primary export, tribal tensions erupted in 1959 as the Hutu, poor farmers, rose up against their minority overlords, the Tutsi. The fall in coffee prices undoubtedly had made life even worse for the Hutu. After bloody fighting, the Tutsi king and over 140,000 members of his tribe fled, but violence recurred for decades to come.
96 He was speaking of the João Goulart regime. Goulart, who always had championed the poor and who tolerated Communists, came to power in 1961. Under his regime, inflation raged out of control, with the government printing new money to pay its debts. Goulart did attempt to carry out agrarian land reform, however, which was his undoing. On March 31, 1964—a month after Averell Harriman’s Senate testimony—Brazilian army units marched into Rio de Janeiro to oust Goulart. Within four hours President Lyndon Johnson sent a telegram congratulating the officers who executed the coup. Goulart fled into exile on April 4, and a twenty-year era of Brazilian military dictatorships commenced.
97 At first it appeared that European consumption would continue to climb. In 1963 Europe imported over 20 million bags for the first time. By 1965 consumption leveled off, and teenagers in Europe too found soft drinks more appealing than coffee.
98 Although Alfred Peet inspired a generation of coffee idealists, he was not the first in the tiny San Francisco vanguard. Graffeo and Freed, Teller & Freed predated him. So did Hardcastle’s, founded in 1963 by Jim Hardcastle and Herb Donaldson. In 1968 they changed the company name to Capricorn.
99 McNulty’s, a venerable Greenwich Village coffee outlet founded in 1895, also experienced a renaissance in 1968, when Bill Towart rescued it from near oblivion, making it a vital part of the specialty coffee scene.
100 Caturra, a mutant of bourbon, was discovered in the 1950s in Campinas, Brazil. Catuai, a cross between Mundo Novo and caturra, was created in the 1960s. “One after the other, the fine coffees carefully grown and harvested on the upper hills of America, Africa and Asia have become more scarce,” wrote a lone voice in 1972.
101 One such survey, for instance, concluded that blue-collar workers were 43 percent more likely to die of heart disease than sedentary white-collar workers. Does this mean that breathing factory air contributes to heart attacks? Or class differences? Or eating habits?
102 One unusual indication of America’s newborn interest in quality coffee made the news in 1975 when a federal judge in Suffolk County, New York, asked a deputy sheriff to buy him a cup of coffee from a refreshment truck outside the courthouse. Outraged by the awful brew, the judge ordered the vendor handcuffed and brought to his chambers, where the judge screamed at him, releasing him only after he promised never again to serve poor coffee.
103 Ogilvy & Mather was the ad agency for Maxwell House. General Foods retained Young & Rubicam for Sanka. Nestlé hired Leo Burnett for Taster’s Choice and Nescafé but chose Case & McGrath for Decaf. Folgers employed Cunningham & Walsh.
104 In fact, the price war in the Syracuse area lasted for four years. As Paul De Lima Jr. testified in 1979, Syracuse was a “profit wasteland for the period from October 1974 to at least mid-1978.” The FTC suit was eventually dropped, however.
105 The Colombians named it the “Holy Frost,” however.
106 By 1974 twenty-two Jewel home routes were operated by women, but with fewer housewives staying home, the door-to-door business declined throughout the decade and was sold off a few years later.
107 Claude Saks left the coffee business after suffering a massive heart attack. He discovered New Age spirituality and wrote advice such as “Picture in front of your eyes a light golden mist which is gentle, warm, and full of unconditional love just for you.” Perhaps Saks could have given these instructions to the Ugandans in their concentration camps.
108 General Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza García had established his Nicaraguan dynasty in 1934. His son, Anastasio Jr., “Tachito,” had taken dictatorial control in 1967, but popular agitation against his regime increased, particularly after the 1978 murder of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, the leading daily newspaper.
109 Finca laborers also were exposed to dangerous levels of pesticides by the late 1970s. During 1978 hearings on the U.S. export of banned products, the Food and Drug Administration revealed that DDT, DDE, BHC, chlordane, aldrin, dieldrin, endrin, and heptachlor were among the banned pesticides used on coffee in Latin America. Because the coffee bean was protected by the fruit, only traces of the chemicals were found in green beans, and those were burned off during the roast. There was, therefore, no health hazard for consumers. Yet the same was not true for unprotected campesinos.
110 In 1992 Rigoberta Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Nonetheless, some of her stories were exaggerated. Anthropologist David Stoll, who interviewed Menchú’s childhood neighbors, found that she did not spend most of her childhood picking coffee as she asserted, but was sent away to a Catholic boarding school. “Her plantation stories may be poetically true but are not her own experiences,” Stoll observed.
111 “If you misspelled one word, you were in deep trouble,” longtime Chock employee Peter Baer recalled. One day Baer left a memo stuck halfway through the letter-slot on Black’s door, then realized it contained an error. Rushing back to retrieve it, he felt resistance at the other end. “I yanked it and heard a yell from the other side. I’d given Mr. Black a paper cut. I put my hand over the peephole, ducked, and scurried around the corner.”
112 In 1982 Standard Brands shed the ailing Chase & Sanborn to the General Coffee Corporation, a Miami organization headed by Alberto Duque Rodriguez, the flashy young son of a wealthy Colombian coffee grower. Duque had built his empire—complete with vast estates and yachts—entirely on fraudulent loans that collapsed spectacularly in 1983. Nestlé snapped up the tarnished Chase & Sanborn name the following year. In 1985 MJB, seeing the handwriting on the coffee wall, sold out to Nestlé as well.
113 The United States could have vetoed the agreement if one other consuming country had voted against it.
114 Across the border in Honduras, coffee producers were also frustrated with the Contra military bases. “They have forced a war on us that doesn’t interest us, that kills us,” one grower said. Though Honduras farmers resented the Sandinista artillery barrages and mined roadways, they also complained that the Contras were “cold-blooded killers.”
115 The Folgers ads were aimed at adults, though they test-marketed a few spots in which children drank coffee too. Irate customers called. “How dare you show kids drinking coffee?”
116 Maxwell House president Stephen Morris resigned in 1987, citing “philosophical differences” with Bob Seelert. “He believed in grinding out short yardage, winning inches of very expensive turf through promotion deals,” Morris recalled.
117 As a brand, regular Folgers had surpassed Maxwell House a decade earlier. Now the combined Procter & Gamble coffee brands beat all of the General Foods coffees, including Yuban, Sanka, and others.
118 In fact, Colombia’s drug lords already owned or controlled around 10 percent of the country’s coffee crop.
119 The demise of the IBC meant that Brazilian beans no longer needed to be lumped together for sale, allowing higher quality producers to form the Brazil Specialty Coffee Association. They faced an uphill battle to change the poor image of Brazilian coffee, however.
120 In 1991 one coffee expert estimated that the break-even point for arabicas was between 80 cents and $1 a pound, and a bit over 60 cents a pound for robustas.
121 In England, Gold Blend sales jumped 20 percent within eighteen months of the campaign’s introduction in 1987. Actress Sharon Maughan regretted a television role in which she had said, “I hate coffee,” but no one seemed to care.
122 By 1991 Detroit-bas
ed Coffee Beanery had forty-eight franchised stores, primarily in the Midwest. In New Orleans, PJ’s Coffee stores had begun to franchise. California’s Pasqua chain served Italian sandwiches along with its coffee in twenty stores. In Canada, Timothy’s had expanded to forty locations, while Second Cup and Van Houte had both broken one hundred stores. In Boston, Coffee Connection had expanded to six stores. There were eighty-one Florida-based Barnie’s outlets, mostly in the Southeast. In Manhattan, however, Donald Schoenholt and partner Hy Chabott closed their Gillies retail stores in order to concentrate on wholesale and spend more time with their families.
123 Some who had built the “Starbucks experience”—a favorite Schultz phrase—did not share in the booty, however. Dawn Pinaud, for instance, quit in January 1992, before the IPO, to pursue other coffee ventures, and a disillusioned Kevin Knox resigned in 1993 with only 200 stock options, complaining that he was “surrounded by all these fast-food people with no passion for coffee.”
124 Business reporters guessed that Procter & Gamble paid anywhere from $20 million to $100 million for Millstone.
125 Even Fair Trade prices are insufficient. A 2008 survey of Fair Trade coffee farmers in Latin America revealed that more than half still went hungry for several months of the year.
126 The first wave made bad coffee, the second wave pioneered specialty coffee, and the third wave are younger specialty obsessives.
127 In October 2009 Welker was sentenced to a thirty-three-month jail term for embezzling over $465,000 from the SCAA.
128 In Ground Up (2009), Michael Idov penned a funny autobiographical novel about his dismally unsuccessful coffeehouse venture in New York’s Lower East Side.
129 Exporters, importers, and brokers are usually necessary middlemen between growers and roasters, in contrast to coyotes, who offer exceedingly low prices to desperate farmers.
130 I have proposed a program called Harvest for Humanity, in which local roasters or retailers would sponsor consumer ecotourism trips to coffee farms. Here are Web sites for coffee ecotourism opportunities: www.selvanegra.com; www.fincaesperanzaverde.org; www.jaguarreserve.org/bienvenidos.htm; www.coffee-estate.com; www.fincalerida.com; www.cafefincaelplacer.com; www.tourtokenya.com; www.widescopetours.com; www.javaventures.com; www.riftvalley-zanzibar.com; www.badracoffee.com/aboutus.htm; www.globalexchange.org/tours.
131 Everyone in the coffee industry appears to envy everyone else. Growers object to the brokers’ making a commission just by picking up the phone to sell their beans to exporters. The brokers think the exporters have it made, but exporters feel at the mercy of importers, who sell to rich Americans. Importers, caught in savage price swings, feel pinched with a tiny profit margin, but they think the roasters make millions. Roasters see retailers doubling the price of their roasted beans, while coffee bars convert the beans to expensive beverages. Yet the coffeehouse owner is working fifteen-hour days, six days a week.
132 The three-cup limit is based on an average 100 milligrams of caffeine per six-ounce cup, but this amount will vary depending on cup size, brew strength, and blend. Robusta blends will have substantially more caffeine than pure arabicas. Those who quit smoking may find that their normal coffee intake suddenly affects them more, since smoking lessens the effect of caffeine.
133 Peter Dews, a Harvard professor emeritus, conducted research funded by what Jack James called “the caffeine lobby”: organizations such as the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), the International Food Information Council (IFIC), and the National Coffee Association that have portrayed caffeine as “an enjoyable, benign, and even beneficial substance.”
Copyright © 2010 by Mark Pendergrast
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pendergrast, Mark.
Uncommon grounds : the history of coffee and how it transformed our world / Mark Pendergrast.—Rev. ed. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-465-02404-9
1. Coffee—History. 2. Coffee industry—History. I. Title.
TX415.P45 2010
338.1’7373—dc22
2010014683
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 52
