History Fix

Ep. 70 Coffee: How Coffee Changed the World, for Better and for Worse

• Shea LaFountaine • Episode 70

Share episode

Coffee may seem like an innocent breakfast beverage to accompany your bacon and eggs, a mid afternoon office pick me up. But did you know, coffee is so much more than that? Did you know that coffee helped spark human enlightenment, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, capitalism, helped build the world as we know it? Let’s fix that. 

Sources:

Support the show! 

Shoot me a message!

There is a plant that grows in the tropics. Broad, shiny green leaves, clusters of bright red berries. It’s fairly unassuming. But inside those berries there is a seed, a seed that most refer to as a bean. And when that bean is roasted and crushed and steeped in hot water, something extraordinary is created - coffee. And if it sounds like I’m being overly dramatic, I’m not. Coffee may seem like an innocent breakfast beverage to accompany your bacon and eggs, a mid afternoon office pick me up. But did you know, coffee is so much more than that? Did you know that coffee helped spark human enlightenment, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, capitalism, helped build the world as we know it? Let’s fix that. 


Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Today we’re talking about coffee. And I planned to cover coffee in July because of the way that it sort of, actually less than you might think, ties into American Independence from Great Britain and it was the fourth of July and all that. Coffee is very American so I’d had it penciled in for this week. And then when I sat down to research the history of coffee and I’m reading articles and I get to this one on Eater which is like a foodie website and in the article it mentions a podcast called Gastropod. And I was like “oh my gosh, no way,” because my friend Lucy had just, literally just told me about Gastropod. And you’re right Lucy, it’s fantastic, I love it. They have an episode, a few episodes actually, on coffee and the one called “Grounds for Revolution: The Stimulating Story of How Coffee Shaped the World” was a major source of information for this episode. And I have that linked in the description, of course. So, just an interesting little serendipitous moment there I had to share. That keeps happening with this podcast. It’s hard to explain, all these little coincidences, where I’m like researching the great pyramid and then I look up and there’s a poster with a pyramid on it. That didn’t actually happen, but stuff like that keeps happening so much and it feels like a sign. My husband Joey likes to say when that stuff happens “we’re right on schedule.” Just feels like I’m on the right track or something, like I’m supposed to be doing this. I’m right on schedule. 


Alright, let’s talk about coffee. I, unfortunately, I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden, like over the last 6 months I do not tolerate caffeine well anymore. I used to drink a cup of coffee every morning, one cup. But over the past few months I cannot have a cup of coffee without feeling so weird and like jittery and lightheaded and anxious. I mean I still drink it, I just drink decaf now. But I don’t know what happened to my body chemistry that made me suddenly start having all these weird effects from caffeine. It’s a bummer. I ordered a latte like a week ago, drank it, and pretty much immediately realized that I totally forgot to say decaf when I ordered it. Y’all I drank this coffee at like 11 am, I literally could not fall asleep until like 1 am. Went to bed at 10ish. Laid there just wide awake for 3 hours. It was terrible. I don’t know what happened. 


Coffee is powerful. It’s super strong. And I think we forget that it’s a drug just like alcohol, or marijana, or opium, or LSD, or any of them. It is, caffeine is a drug. It’s a super socially accepted drug. Let’s actually jump into the science before we get into the history. Caffeine, we know, gives people energy. It makes them feel more awake and more focused. But what’s actually happening? Because actual energy comes from the food we eat, right? We eat food, our body breaks it down, metabolizes it, and uses the stuff in it to create energy that is used for everything we do. Caffeine isn’t actually giving us energy. It’s tricking our brains into feeling more energized. And it does this because caffeine molecules, also called 1, 3, 7 trimethylxanthine fit into receptors in our brains that are actually made for something called adenosine. Adenosine is a neuromodulator that helps regulate our sleep cycles. It tells us when we’re tired and we need to rest. Caffeine pops onto these adenosine receptors like “sorry bub, you can’t sit here,” and it blocks the adenosine from reaching the receptors in your brain. Because it just happens to fit, caffeine just happens to fit into the receptors that were made for adenosine. It hijacks them and it keeps the adenosine from sending sleepy signals to your brain.  But, like I said, it’s not real energy. It’s only an illusion. And after the caffeine wears off, after you metabolize the caffeine, all that adenosine comes flooding back. It didn’t disappear. It was still there. It was just getting blocked. But now it rushes back in, hits you all at once, and you experience a crash. You feel extra sleepy. 


We use caffeine as a tool, to our advantage, for the most part. But it wasn’t actually supposed to be a good thing for ingesters. It’s a chemical defense, an adaptation that plants evolved as an insecticide to ward off insects. It makes insects lose their appetite so they don’t eat as much of the plant. And it also throws them off mentally, confuses them. Google “spider web on caffeine.” In the 1940s, NASA experimented with spiders and mind altering drugs - LSD, mescaline, amphetamines, caffeine - and they observed what effects the drugs had on the spider’s ability to spin a web. Well, caffeine had the most extreme effect. They spun the craziest, most disorganized, chaotic webs while on caffeine, surprisingly. But I think that’s because caffeine came about as a defense against insects. It was made to mess with them. And I know spiders aren’t actually insects, whatever, close enough. 


But, the effect that caffeine has on people, improving memory, increasing productivity and focus and alertness, that is what has made coffee such a sought after commodity for over a thousand years. It is believed that coffee originated in Ethiopia, in Africa. Although it probably came from South Sudan as well because it grows there in the wild, it’s indigenous to both of these places. There is a legend across every source that I read about the discovery of coffee that I’m going to share with you as a fun story even though it’s probably not true. There’s no documentation of it anyway, it’s like an urban legend. So the story goes, that an Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi first discovered the effects of coffee when some of his goats ate some of the red berries off of a coffee plant and became so full of energy that they had trouble sleeping. Kaldi then tried the berries himself and experienced the effects of coffee, for the first time. Now, like I said, that’s probably not true. But it is likely that people in Ethiopia were using the coffee plant as early as the year 850, possibly making tea out of the leaves, possibly making some sort of energy snack out of the berries, which house the beans that we use to make coffee today. Coffee beans are the seed inside a cherry-like red berry that grows on the coffee plant, like a cherry pit. 


By the 1450s, dried coffee beans start to be exported to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula. You’ve probably heard of Arabica coffee. It was the only type of coffee at first and that’s because of this location. Once there, the beans are brewed with hot water to make the earliest form of coffee which was called kawha. And when it arrived, it filled a void, a couple of voids actually. In Yemen, the Sufi Monks had relied on a drug called Khat, K-H-A-T. According to the US Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center which really needs to update its website, it’s like 1995 over there. But according to them quote “Khat is a flowering shrub native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula… Individuals chew khat leaves because of their stimulant and euphoric effects, which are similar to, but less intense than, those resulting from the abuse of cocaine or methamphetamine,” end quote. So these Sufi monks would chew Khat leaves to get these stimulant effects which would allow them to stay up and meditate for longer hours, you know, without falling asleep. Sufi monks practice Sufism which, according to the New York Times is a quote “form of Islamic mysticism that emphasizes introspection and spiritual closeness with God. While it is sometimes misunderstood as a sect of Islam, it is actually a broader style of worship that transcends sects, directing followers' attention inward,” end quote. So they were Muslim and they were doing this drug Khat for religious purposes. But, around this time, we’re in the 1450s, there was a shortage of Khat. That’s when a monk supposedly brought coffee beans back from Africa and it filled this void caused by the shortage of Khat because coffee also has stimulant effects. It also allowed the monks to stay up late and meditate without falling asleep. So its original purpose on the Arabian peninsula was religious. It filled the Khat void but it filled a second void as well - alcohol. According to the Quran, the Muslim holy book, alcohol is prohibited. People who practice Islam cannot drink alcohol. So coffee, caffeine was a drug that they could do. It was allowed because it seemed to have the opposite effect of alcohol. It was making people more alert and more focused and they were worshiping more and worshiping harder, more focused, praying for longer periods of time. Coffee houses sprang up in highly traveled to areas like Mecca and it wasn’t long before Europeans discovered coffee on their travels to Yemen and were like “what is this amazing miracle drink secret you guys have been keeping from us? This bean juice?” 


But at this time, Yemen was like the only place that was growing coffee, I mean I guess other than it growing wild in Ethiopia and South Sudan. They were the coffee guys, exporting it out of the port of Mocha, which is now a coffee related word because of that word. They were the ones doing coffee and they wanted to keep it that way. White people ruin everything. Sorry but we do. And I think they knew this in Yemen. They didn’t need that kind of competition. So they would only sell roasted coffee beans to the Europeans. They wouldn’t sell them the beans unroasted, which remember, the beans are just the seeds of the coffee plant. They wouldn’t sell them unroasted because then the Europeans would be able to plant them and grow coffee themselves. But, it makes its way out anyway. Rumor has it the Dutch stole green coffee beans from Yemen, or somehow acquired them. They started cultivating coffee in Java, in Indonesia which they had colonized, because white people ruin everything. 


Coffee reached England in the 1650s at the same time, actually, as chocolate and tea. Which I found super surprising. I thought tea was around so much longer than coffee. And it was, obviously in other parts of the world, mostly China since ancient times. But tea did not reach England until the 1650s, the same decade as coffee. And while tea was and is more popular in the UK than in the US, they also liked coffee. Coffee was big there too, and still is. I don’t know why, in my mind, people in the UK like only drink tea. No, they also drink coffee. But they actually did kind of just drink tea for a while, we’ll come back to that. England is actually where the coffee shop culture that we know today got its start. There, and you know, the coffee houses of the Arabian peninsula which were often referred to as “schools of wisdom.” In Yemen and Istanbul (which was Constantinople then), they were meeting places where men gathered to converse and have debates and play chess. And when coffee houses became a thing in England, it was very similar. There they called them “penny universities,” because for the cost of a cup of coffee, you could sit there and learn all kinds of things as if you were attending a class at a university. They were places where intellectuals gathered to share their knowledge. And, for the first time really, they were not segregated by class. A poor man could walk into a coffee house in London and sit down next to a rich man at a long shared, communal  table. They could sit together in the same room and talk to one another. And that just was not the way things had been done prior to this. Now, notice I said man, because women, of course, were not allowed in coffee shops. According to author and professor Michael Pollan, who is interviewed on that episode of Gastropod that I mentioned, by the 1700s there was one coffee house in London for every 250 people. Which is a lot of coffee houses.


So coffee becomes this really social thing. It brings people together. But it does so much more than that. It starts to replace alcohol, not entirely, but in powerful ways. Before coffee, people mostly drank alcohol. Like, now alcohol is, a lot stronger, first of all, but also it’s mostly drunk as like an indulgent beverage, right, a way to unwind, a way to celebrate a special occasion, that kind of thing. Back then, alcohol was like what you drank, just all the time. It was a staple. You woke up in the morning, you had ale with your breakfast. You had it with lunch, you had it with dinner. You drank it when you were thirsty, nevermind its dehydrating diuretic properties. You drank alcohol because it was safer than water. Water had bacteria in it. Of course they didn’t know what bacteria was but they knew water made them sick - cholera, dysentery - these were deadly illnesses. Water could kill you. But alcohol kills bacteria so alcohol was safer to drink. But you know what else kills bacteria? Boiling the water. And they boiled the water when they made coffee. So coffee was also safer than water and had much more favorable effects on people than alcohol. Now, why they couldn’t just boil plain water and drink it, I don’t know, because coffee is also a dehydrating diuretic. I don’t know how anyone functioned back then honestly. They must have been just so dehydrated all the time. No air conditioning, drinking alcohol and tea and coffee non-stop. My mouth is dry thinking about it. 


So with alcohol being replaced to an extent by coffee, we see this major increase in productivity. Right, after you drink a beer, you just want to take a nap. After you drink a coffee, you’re ready to conquer the world. Michael Pollan says that it quote “cleared the western mind which had been badly clouded by alcohol.” And, after the introduction of coffee to Europe, we see crazy advancement - the enlightenment period, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the rise of capitalism. All of these started after coffee was introduced to Europe and America. We can actually see some of this stuff taking off in those London coffee houses. The London Stock Exchange started as Jonathan’s Coffee House. Lloyds of London which is an insurance marketplace started as Lloyds Coffee House. The magazine Tatler which is 300 years old, the oldest magazine in England still being published today, got its start in a London coffee house. I’m pretty sure I have used Tatler in my research for History Fix, by the way. I’m sure I referenced it in some episode. Ballot boxes got their start in coffee houses as ways to vote on the winners of debates that were happening there. 


But even outside of the coffee houses, coffee was fueling the workforce, helping to usher in the industrial revolution. It allowed workers to stay up late, it gave them a sense of energy, it kept them focused. They could operate heavy factory machinery without the dangers involved in operating heavy factory machinery while drunk. It made night shifts possible. Before this, we were pretty tethered to working in the daytime because humans are diurnal, we sleep at night. But with coffee, you could stay up and work all night. Coffee and electricity made that possible. 


Coffee grows in tropical climates, much like sugar cane. And, much like sugar cane, Europeans got tired of importing it from the middle east. They wanted to control production because that would make it much more affordable for them and they could also export it and make money. So they turned to their colonies which mostly happened to be in tropical places. The Dutch over in Java in Indonesia did this first but they were not the last to jump on this idea. Spain starts growing coffee in the Caribbean. Portugal starts growing coffee in Brazil. Britain actually shifts towards tea at this point because they have a monopoly on growing tea in their colonies so it was just the better business decision. Coffee had competition, tea didn’t. They could make more money off of it. So Britain's pretty much just doing tea starting in the mid 1700s but coffee is taking off elsewhere in the Americas. By the late 1700s, 80% of the world’s coffee was coming from the Caribbean, mostly Haiti. But, I talked about this briefly in the Marie Laveau episode, in 1804, there was a revolution in Haiti, one of the only truly successful slave revolts in history. Where enslaved people rose up and were like enough and they toppled the sugar mills and just jammed an absolute wrench into the spokes over there. And I think this was really fueled by sugar. Before the revolution, Haiti was the world’s top producer of both sugar and coffee, amazingly. And I think sugar was the catalyst here but it affected coffee as well, obviously. Coffee buying countries, who also relied on slave labor at this time, did not want to encourage slave revolts, so they stopped buying coffee from Haiti. Coffee production expanded in Brazil instead where there were tons of enslaved Africans working these plantations and not successfully revolting. So by the 1900s Brazil was producing 80% of the world’s coffee. But, it’s like, it’s not good you guys. They are clearing the Amazon rainforest for these plantations, even though coffee naturally grows in the shade under the rainforest canopy. Nevermind that, they are chopping it all down to grow coffee in the sun and they are enslaving people to work these plantations. It is so destructive and just so parasitic. And most of this Brazilian coffee, 70% of this coffee is being drunk in the United States. 


So we gotta go back because remember Britain had pivoted to tea, they were doing tea in their colonies because they had a monopoly. And they would continue to do tea until Americans basically reintroduced coffee to them during the World Wars in the first half of the 1900s. So how did coffee become such a big thing in the US, which started as British colonies? Why is tea almost nonexistent here unless your sick or  an old lady? Well, almost all of my sources point to pre-revolutionary activities, mostly the tea tax of 1773 when Great Britain imposed heavy, heavy taxes on tea. And this is coming, you know, among other heavy and unfair taxes. Because the colonists are paying all this money and they have no representation, they can’t vote, they have no control over how the money is being spent. No taxation without representation, right? So they are fed up and, to demonstrate just how fed up they are, there’s the Boston tea party in December of 1773. Ships of tea arrive in Boston Harbor, the colonists are like “no, we don’t want it, we’re not paying those taxes, send it back.” The British officials are like “no, you have to take the tea and you have to pay the taxes.” So members of the Sons of Liberty, which was like a group of political protestors, boarded the ships at night and threw the chests of tea into the harbor. It was a whole thing, it was a big deal. So a lot of my sources were like “well it was because of the tea tax, because of the Boston tea party, so then they stopped drinking tea out of protest. It was an anti-British thing.” Which is kind of what I always thought, but historian Jonathan Morris thinks otherwise in that episode of Gastropod. He points out that Americans wouldn’t stop drinking tea altogether. They would just stop drinking British tea. But then again, Britain basically had a monopoly on tea so it may have been hard to get otherwise. But I think he’s against the theory that the Boston tea party is what made coffee take off in the US because it didn’t really take off after that. It didn’t really take off until the Civil War. 


In previous wars, soldiers were given alcohol rations. But during the Civil War that was replaced with coffee, in a big way. Union soldiers were given huge coffee rations, often drinking up to ten cups of coffee a day. And according to Michael Pollan, if you go through Civil War soldier diaries, the word coffee appears more times than the word rifle or gun. Coffee fueled the Civil War and this is what made it the drink of choice in America. Although I still think anti-British sentiment after the revolutionary war and associating tea with the British played a role. Jonathan Morris is British so, you know, factor that in to his naysaying about that theory. But yeah so after the Civil War, coffee really took off and this was helped along by an influx of Italian immigrants flooding into the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Italians love coffee too. They invented espresso, so there you go. It was also helped along by the invention of commercial coffee bean roasters around the same time. Before that, people had to roast their own coffee beans at home like in a pot over the fire or the stove or whatever. They had to roast them and then grind them and make the coffee. But after commercial roasters came out, you could buy coffee already roasted. So it became a little easier to make and harder to burn. 


So America is hooked, we’re mega hooked on coffee and it’s fueling our capitalism and it’s fueling our work until you die mentality, which is not great. Worldwide today, the coffee industry is valued at just under 500 billion dollars a year with well over half of that coming from the United States. It’s such a big deal that coffee is provided to employees. It is a straight up drug, caffeine, that employers willingly give their employees because it makes them work harder and get more done. It flows freely in office buildings. People get coffee breaks, paid coffee breaks. There was actually a court case in 1955 in Denver, Colorado in which the courts ruled that people had to be paid for coffee breaks. The owner of a necktie factory was trying to not pay his employees for morning and afternoon coffee breaks because they weren’t actually working during that time and a federal court ruled that they had to be paid for coffee breaks. That, because it affected their ability to do their jobs, it was I guess, in effect, part of the job. They were working while they were drinking coffee. And that says a lot about the role of coffee in the United States. 


But of course there’s a dark side. And not just that it’s led to an overworked society of burnt out employees who mask their true exhaustion with caffeine and never take a day off. That too, but there’s an even darker side. I already mentioned the slave labor and the de-rainforestation happening in Brazil to feed America’s coffee frenzy. It gets even worse in El Salvador which is in Central America. Gastropod interviewed professor Augustine Sedgewick, author of the book “Coffeeland” which details the horrific plight of the Salvadorian people following the introduction of coffee plantations in their country. Before coffee, El Salvador was a small agricultural, mostly subsistence farming, country. It was quaint, very chill. But the government soon realized how much money Brazil was making off of coffee and, having a similar climate, they figured they should cash in as well. So in the late 1800s, they started encouraging people to start coffee plantations - everyone, they were like “hey guys let’s all grow coffee,” - Salvadorians and also newly arrived European immigrants. But it was the European immigrants who decided to actually go for it - the white people. They had connections, international connections. They could get loans, they had capital to get these plantations started. But they didn’t have land. The native Salvadorians had the land but no means to start a plantation. The Europeans had the means but no land. So the government started basically taking land from indigenous groups. Some people were paid, very little, for the land. Some people couldn’t prove that they owned the land, it was just their ancestral land, but they had no actual proof, no paperwork, and so the government just took it and they gave it to the European transplants to start their coffee plantations. And soon coffee became the economy of El Salvador. It made up over 90% of their exports and over 25% of their GDP which is super significant. Sedgwick says basically, you know, never, never is a country that reliant on a single industry. El Salvador was coffee. 


But these European plantation owners weren’t working in the fields themselves and slavery is done at this point. So, of course, it’s the native Salvadorians who are needed to do all of the labor. They don’t have land anymore. They can’t grow their own food like they used to. They have to eat somehow. So they show up to work on these coffee plantations mostly in exchange for food. They are also paid but it is a menial amount. It’s pennies. And the plantation owners start to use food as a way to control the workforce. They offer food strategically at certain times and in certain places where the workers were needed. In America, the main consumer of coffee, people started wanting cheaper and cheaper coffee and so plantation owners paid the workers less and less, they were literally starving. In 1932, they finally reach a breaking point and they decide to revolt. They grabbed farming tools, shovels, machetes, literal pitchforks and sought to overturn this system, to return El Salvador to times when people had enough to eat. The government catches wind of this impending revolution, and they launch a month long genocidal counter attack where they kill 10,000 to 30,000 of these Salvadorian people. This came to be called La Matanza which means “the massacre” in Spanish. And it was in response to the coffee worker revolt but really what it ended up being was an attempt to exterminate the native Salvadorian people, their language, their culture. And the US government allowed it. We let it happen. We propped up a violent military dictatorship in El Salvador to protect our own interests in their corrupt coffee industry. El Salvador was a banana republic, except with coffee, a coffee republic. Something similar happened in Honduras except with actual bananas and the US propped up that military dictatorship as well. 


So there’s a dark side to coffee of course. There’s a very dark side to coffee. There’s destruction of the rainforest, there’s enslavement, there’s the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral lands, there’s violent governments exterminating their own populations to control the export of coffee. It got real dark. And these things don’t happen without support. If the rest of the world had put its foot down. If we had stopped buying coffee from El Salvador, how many lives would have been saved? But humans are selfish and we want what we want and we want it cheap no matter how much damage it’s doing. It reminds me of rum in a lot of ways, that was episode 37. Coffee and rum, they both have dark histories of oppression and destruction and death and selfish motives causing people to turn a blind eye, and yet, on the other end, they both built empires. Coffee catapulted human productivity and advancement. It launched mankind into a new era of enlightenment and understanding. It fueled production - factories, railroads, infrastructure, technology. It helped build the world we know today. We can’t know the extent of the role it’s played because we can’t go back and see the world without coffee. But anyone who’s had a cup of coffee knows its effect on the human mind is extraordinary and an extraordinary mind can do extraordinary things. 


Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. Also, join the Patreon for exclusive bonus content plus all regular weekly episodes early and add free. That $5 a month, 16 cents a day, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  


Information used in this episode was sourced from Gastropod podcast, Encyclopedia Britannica, the National Coffee Association, Eater, Coffee or Die magazine, the US Department of Justice, the New York Times, and the Mirage News. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.