Coffee and tea are now huge industries worth hundreds of billions of pounds. Around the world, there are some 25 million farmers involved in growing coffee alone, and countless more depend upon it for their livelihood. Indeed, it’s hard to overestimate the importance of tea and coffee in the economic fortunes of many Third World countries. But there’s a problem. Despite the massive demand for coffee in the West, the world grows too much of it. In the early years of this century, there was a glut of coffee on the world market that led to a dramatic slump in price. Prices have slightly recovered in recent years, but coffee-growers still find it hard to get a decent price for their coffee.
As you sip your cappuccino, you might think coffee seems too expensive, not too cheap. The problem is ‘added value’. Foodsellers can make only so much profit on raw, unprocessed food. But processing food adds value and opens the way to big profits. When it comes to added value, instant coffee is a real winner, but so too are cappuccinos and espressos and lattes. Moreover, much of the global coffee industry is concentrated in a few giant corporate hands. Nestlé and Altria, along with Sara Lee and Procter & Gamble, buy almost half the world’s coffee. Such concentrated buying power, such a glut of coffee, and such massive potential added value shifted the money made from coffee dramatically away from the growers to the big multinationals. Back in 2002, in a report aptly entitled ‘Mugged’, Oxfam traced the prices paid for a kilo of coffee grown in Uganda, and showed that the price in UK shops was 700 times what the farmer got. The rise of the Fair Trade coffee movement has done quite a bit to highlight and remedy the problem, but it remains essentially there. The picture for tea is not so different.
When it comes to health, the issues are more complex than you might imagine. Chemically, both tea and coffee work primarily because they contain caffeine, a psychoactive drug that in small quantities can lift your mood and make you mentally more alert. In bigger quantities, however, caffeine can trigger anxiety, panic and insomnia. It can also cause headaches and raise blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Until recently, experts recommended that the ideal dose for raising mental alertness was one or two strong cups of coffee a day (100–200 mg), and people were frightened into switching to decaf because of the supposed increased risk of heart disease from all this stimulation. However, recent research has shown that more may not do as much harm after all, and may actually do you good. Indeed, there may have been something of the hoary caution about too much stimulation being Bad For You.
Nonetheless, tolerance to caffeine quickly builds up. Studies show that if you drink 400 mg (4–5 cups) of coffee a day for just a week, caffeine no longer keeps you awake. Meanwhile, stopping your caffeine intake suddenly can cause withdrawal symptoms including headaches, irritability and tiredness lasting from one to five days, and typically peaking after 48 hours. Interestingly, caffeine increases the effectiveness of pain relievers in dealing with headaches by up to 40 per cent, which is why many over-the-counter pain relievers include caffeine.
The caffeine content of coffee varies considerably. Typically, though, a single cup of instant coffee contains 65–100 mg of caffeine, while an espresso shot contains 100 mg and a cup of strong drip coffee contains 115–175 mg. Decaf, by comparison, contains only about 3 mg. Tea contains about half as much caffeine as coffee (30–60 mg). But none of these figures is definitive. There’s a huge variability in the caffeine content of a cup of tea or coffee prepared by the same person using the same ingredients and equipment day after day.
Besides caffeine, coffee and tea also contain another chemical – theophylline – which in drug form is good for asthma in relaxing bronchial muscles. Tea also contains another stimulant, theobromine. Theobromine’s effect is milder but more lasting than caffeine’s, and is the mood-enhancing chemical found in chocolate. So when someone says, ‘There’s nothing like a good cup of tea for cheering you up’, the effect is real, not imaginary.
But perhaps it is good to conclude with the paean of Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat:
After eggs and bacon [our stomach] says, ‘Work!’ After beefsteak and porter, it says, ‘Sleep!’ After a cup of tea (two spoonfuls for each cup, and don’t let it stand for more than three minutes), it says to the brain, ‘Now rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature, and into life: spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!’
Time to put the kettle on.
#34 Wine
What a sad place the world would be without wine. As Victor Hugo so memorably put it: ‘God made only water, but man made wine.’ We can certainly manage without it. It’s completely unnecessary. It has no nutritional value. Even the cheapest bottle costs a fair amount and the most expensive costs a fortune. And drunk in any more than moderate amounts it causes people to misbehave at the time and suffer pain and remorse later.
Worse still, wine in any quantity can cause accidents when people drive after drinking, and can lead to violence as people who’ve drunk too much become belligerent. And continued heavy wine-drinking over long periods can create alcoholic dependency and all its associated ills from social problems to liver damage.
Wine is, in fact, one of the most useless inventions ever, and it seems likely that it is to blame for more days off work than even the common cold. But of course all this is to miss the point. Saying that wine is useless is like saying pleasure has no use. True, maybe, but who’d want to forgo it altogether?
And, of course, it isn’t all about pleasure. TV comedians Mitchell and Webb have a wonderful sketch in which they liken drinking a little wine to a Masonic rite. Their big secret is that drinking just under two glasses of wine solves all problems and gives you the confidence to do anything. The punchline of the sketch is that the hero, having come to rule the world in a spirit of wonderful bonhomie, feels so on top of it all that he finishes his second glass. Of course, he’s drunk just too much and the world descends into chaos.
This is the point about wine. In the right quantities, it is a balm that smoothes away anxiety. It takes away the sense of unease we have in so many social encounters. And it turns a simple meal into an occasion. There is probably a psycho-chemical reason for this. Scientists believe that alcohol works through affecting neurotransmitters such as serotonin and GABA – by its disinhibitory effect – but there is certainly more to it than this. Wine, of course, is not just alcohol but when at its best a richly flavoured, deliciously aromatic, vividly coloured creation – the end result of a long labour and maybe years’ preparation to bring the drinker maximum pleasure.
Wine inspires the kind of interest that no other drink does. Many vintners devote their lives to growing and creating the best possible vintages. Just as many drinkers are equally dedicated connoisseurs, relishing every nuance of taste and history. Many more simply enjoy knowing a little and tasting a lot. ‘Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things in the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection,’ wrote Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, ‘and it offers a greater range of enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory things.’
Wine has been drunk (and probably people have been too) for over 8,000 years. Indeed, people started drinking wine not long after the invention of the pots that would have been needed to hold it. The oldest signs of wine-drinking have been found at Shulaveri in the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, where infrared spectroscopy has been used to identify wine residue in the form of tartaric acid on jars dating back to 6000 BC. Wine jars almost as old have been found at Hajji Firuz in the Zagros Mountains in Iran.
There’s no way of telling what fruit this early wine was made from. Wine can, of course, be made from just about anything that is rich enough in sugar to ferment. Wild grapes (Vitis vinifera subsp. silvestris) certainly grow in the area but they seem too small and bitter to be used f
or wine. It’s not clear when grapes were domesticated – the earliest seeds found date from about 3000 BC – but they have two huge advantages over wild grapes. First, the fruits are much bigger and sweeter. Second, the vines are self-pollinating. The Chinese started with a slightly different wild grape, the mountain grape (Vitis thunbergii), until they too imported the domesticated grape, which has gradually been carried around the world and is now, of course, grown wherever the climate is suitable, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile, South Africa and California, far from its native home in the Caucasus.
In the Ancient World, the great masters of wine-making were the Greeks, and the amphorae (jars) that contained Greek wine have been found all over the Mediterranean and beyond. The seventh-century Greek poet Alkman sang the praise of Denthis wine from the slopes of Mount Taygetus with its flowery aroma, while Aristotle talks of Lemnian wine, from Lemnos, which is still produced today. Yet the Greek wine industry declined with its civilisation, and the realm of the master vintners shifted west to Italy, Spain and in particular France, where the chateau system reached a Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century when Bordeaux wine achieved a pinnacle of taste. The last 50 years, of course, have seen the emergence of New World wines, with Australian and Chilean wines sometimes taking the connoisseurs’ crown away from the traditional French vintages.
The French remain great drinkers of wine. It is often claimed that in spite of their very fatty diets, French people suffer less from heart disease because they down a lot of red wine in particular. What they neglect to point out is that other countries where they drink a lot of red wine, such as Bulgaria and Hungary, have quite high rates of heart disease.
Nevertheless, in recent years, some neuroscientists have been singing the praises of red wine, or rather a key ingredient of red wine called resveratrol. Italian scientist Alessandro Cellini found that fish given high doses of resveratrol lived 60 per cent longer, and when other fish died of old age at twelve weeks, these Methuselah fish still had the mental agility of young fish. Resveratrol seemed to protect the fish’s brain cells against age-related decline. Similar studies show that resveratrol is an antioxidant, protecting cells by mopping up free radicals, while others show that it actually encourages nerve cells to re-grow. One group of researchers even suggested that a glass or two of wine a day can increase neural connections sevenfold. It may even protect against Alzheimer’s.
However, before you hit the bottle, it’s worth remembering that alcohol is a major brain toxin. Even quite small amounts of alcohol can slow your thinking, ruin your sense of balance, wreck your judgement and completely obliterate your short-term memory. Long-term heavy drinking shrinks the brain and leads to memory loss and mental disorders. And the fish that benefitted from those high doses of resveratrol were on the equivalent of 72 bottles of wine day! A glass of red wine a day for women and two for men won’t do any harm, but it’s far from proven that it really will do you good.
Of course, some people have always attacked wine for the moral damage it does, not the physical. Some Muslims are firmly against drinking any kind of alcohol, and through the ages many Christians have preached abstinence. On the other hand, there are those like Cardinal Richelieu who retorted: ‘If God forbade drinking, would He have made wine so good?’ But perhaps we should all heed this warning from the Roman playwright and clown Plautus: ‘The great evil of wine is that it first seizes the feet; it is a crafty wrestler.’
#33 Romance
Softly, he touched her on the arm and pointed to the little wooden boat that fluttered gold on the water in the sun’s last rays. As she turned, she saw it was filled with red roses, her favourite flowers, and written clumsily on the side was her name in silver letters. ‘It’s yours,’ he said, as her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘That’s so romantic,’ she whispered. And it was.
Romance has become such a cliché, yet it is a cliché that seems to seduce us all – not just the millions of (mostly) women who read romantic novels (a market worth $1.37 billion a year in the USA alone), but everyone who longs for that climactic moment of love, that perfect fantasy moment when time stands still and your head spins with the magic of it all. It’s estimated, though who knows how, that a billion cards are sent every year on Valentine’s Day, which has now become one of the most widely celebrated of all festivals around the world. And yet there are many people, perfectly loving, to whom the whole idea of romance is baffling.
Over the last few decades, scientists have devoted countless hours of research to finding just what love is, but it remains elusive. Some scientists have wired up lovers to see what romance does to the brain. Their findings suggest that it all happens in three stages. First of all, there’s ‘lust’, which makes you go looking, boosting your sex hormones: testosterone for men and oestrogen for women. That’s apparently quite short-lived.
Then there’s ‘attraction’. When two people fall in love, chemical nerve transmitters go haywire in their brains. MRI scans show that floods of dopamine light up the pleasure centres in their brains, rather like cocaine does. A surge in norepinephrine sets their hearts aflutter and makes their cheeks flush and their mouths go dry. It can also make them restless and unable to eat or sleep. And a slump in serotonin makes them fixated – people suffering obsessive compulsive disorder apparently have the same serotonin slump. This, they say, lasts much longer, up to eighteen months.[1]
Finally, if all goes well, it settles down into ‘attachment’. The pleasure chemicals no longer kick in, but instead as the lovers bond they get a mutual rise in oxytocin, the so-called cuddle hormone, which is released after sex and also helps cement the bond between mothers and babies. They also get a boost in vasopressins. Experiments showed that if pairs of prairie voles, which normally bond for life, were given a drug to suppress vasopressin, they quickly lost interest in each other.
Other scientists have tried taking a psychological tack on romance. Some talk about romance being a ‘commitment device’ that has evolved to keep parents together for long enough to raise their children. Some psychologists insist that you get a year of ‘romantic’ love followed by years of ‘companionate’ love; others have found that ‘romantic’ love can last a lifetime. And the newspapers are full of research results that seem to show exactly what makes people attracted – and that all seem to prove nonsense when put to the test.
So science has a long way to go before it quite manages to take the magic out of romance entirely.
Of course, the sex drive is a primal instinct as powerful as the need for food. Love, too, is natural bond as old as humanity. But romance is something different and rather special. It adds something exciting and wonderful to the attraction between two people that is nothing to do with natural drives.[2] For the people who experience it, it opens the most extraordinary and beautiful time of their lives – a time when life has a meaning and one meaning only, a time when all the worries of life slip away, a time of unimaginable bliss, a time when time stands still …
It seems so transcendent, and runs so deep, that it seems as if people must always have felt this way. Yet the chances are that the idea of romance is quite new. People fell in love, of course, and passionately at that, but they never aspired to this idyllic state called romance. The very name gives a clue to romance’s relative youth. Romance only really began to bloom after the fall of Rome. The word comes from the Old French romanz or roman, which originally just meant ‘slangy’, and in turn came from what Romans called the colloquial version of Latin, Romanice.[3]
Some time around the twelfth century, writers scribbling away in the French cathedral schools, who were of course well versed in Latin, decided to tell their own, popular versions in French of old Latin and Greek tales of love and adventure. Some were simply adaptations of the Greek versions of thrillers; others were cut-down versions of the great epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. They worked so well that soon the French scribes were telling new stories, based on knights and fairies, dragons and lost lov
e. One of the most famous is Chrétien de Troyes’ Roman de la Rose.
There was a very special quality to the love in these stories, however, which was entirely new and may well come from the songs of unrequited love and inspirational stories of knightly honour that were emerging from the Islamic world through Spain.[4] Love is never easy in the romances. Lovers are parted, they suffer, they go through enormous difficulties, but their love sustains them through all their trials – until finally they are reunited, even if it is only through suicide or death through grief on finding their beloved dead. The epitome of these is the beautiful and tragic story of Tristan and Isolde, which was retold many times. The love they share has a very special quality. It is idyllic, high-flown, ecstatic, passionate yet at same time remarkably pure.
The nature of love in the romances is partly inspired by ‘courtly love’, a love modelled on the feudal relationship between a knight and his liege lord. The knight serves his lady with the same deference and loyalty that he would his lord. She controls the relationship, but he is ennobled by his submission, since he is inspired by her to do great deeds to be worthy of her love.
From these medieval stories emerged the wonderful literature of romance in Western Europe, which both shaped and reflected our changing experience and expectations in love. The bar was set high by Shakespeare with his remarkable sonnets and plays, especially Romeo and Juliet. Love in Shakespeare is idealised, a miraculous emotion that endures all. ‘Love is … an ever-fix’d mark,’ Shakespeare writes, ‘That looks on tempests and is never shaken.’ So too is a lover. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’
The World's Greatest Idea Page 11
