The first thing I want to write about this morning is coffee. Why? Because it is the first thing that touches my lips everyday and has for most of my adult life...I call it the elixir of life because with my kids and being a working mom, and the continual lack of sleep it is the one of the few things that actually works as advertised, every time...it gets me awake and energized! But the history of coffee is actually a very interesting one and not at all intuitive...I always thought that the reason we drink coffee is just like other foods our ancestors from eons passed it down to us as a food that wouldn’t poison us or kill us and has some nutritional value. It turns out that this is not actually the case for coffee. In fact, it seems coffee was not discovered by humans but my have been first eaten by goats in Ethiopia. It was only roasted for the first time in the 1400s and the processing of the bean into a palatable drink was quite a complicated and difficult process almost like the process of making the coco bean into chocolate, but that’s for another post).
A 2005 Canadian documentary film, Black Coffee, that I watched on public television a few months back absolutely amazed me. I couldn’t believe that a food that I consumer every single day would have had such a political and social history, have so much impact on our world today and would have caused so much pain and injustice. For example, the land where Haiti now is was planted with coffee plants painstakingly brought over by ship from France to the Carribbean (I always assumed that coffee plants grew naturally where ever they are today) as were the slaves from Africa used to work the plantations. Half of all coffee in the world was grown in Haiti by the end of the 1700s. But when the slave workers revolted against their European plantation owners (a struggle that lasted 12 years and that eventually triumphed over Napoleon’s soldiers, a fateful decision was made by the leaders of the revolution to burn all the plantations and their coffee plants to the ground...every single last one of them...it was in retrospect like killing the golden goose in way. I could imagine the agony and rage of those newly emancipated slaves who wanted, if only, to exact some form of revenge if even on vegetation. But I couldn’t help think while watching this documentary, that if those individuals would have kept at least some of those plantings intact could Haiti today have the basis for an economic crop that is the equivalant of black gold? Of would it have made them more vulnerable to recapture from Europeans who would want to their plantations back? Haiti never recovered its coffee producing ability and in fact suffers from a low level of locally produced commodities that it can sell on the global market. I never knew all of this...
Here a few more facts I bet you didn’t know (I sure didn’t!):
- Coffee is the world's most widely taken legal drug.
- Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.
- Coffee helped foster the slave trade.
- In various times, coffee has been considered both an aphrodisiac and a sex inhibitor.
- 500 billion cups of coffee a years are consumer around the world, half of them at breakfast.
- Revolutions and romances have been sparked over this dark brew.
- Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people; 100 million more depend on it for survival.
- Coffee is a green bean hidden in the red cherry of the coffee tree.
- Only the women of the house can roast the coffee beans in Ethiopia.
- Coffee traveled from Ethiopia to Arabia to Turkey and thence to Europe.
- The fertile seeds were smuggled to India, then Holland, then their colony Java.
-When Arabs tried to seize Vienna, a Pole warned the French who repulsed the Arabs, found the bags of coffee left behind, and the first European coffeehouse was opened.
- Coffee was perfected in Italy; even the Pope liked it.
- Cappuccinos name came from its resemblance to the colour and peak of the Capucin monk's cloak
- Espresso came from Neapolitan impatience; they couldn't wait for coffee to be brewed.
- Balzac is reputed to have drunk 40 cups of coffee a day.
- From Italy, coffee spread to Paris.
- The first French café—Le Procope--was opened in 1686 by Italians.
Cafés stimulated not only nervous systems but political and social ferment.
- By 1700, the English were big coffee drinkers.
- The Tatler started as a coffeehouse broadsheet, along with the institution of TIPS for service.
- The French Revolution was planned in coffeehouses.
- One of the French king's mistresses gave a coffee plant to a French lieutenant she'd slept with; on the ocean voyage to Martinique he protected the plant from storms and pirates.
- From the single Martinique plant almost all the coffee in Latin America descends.
- The deregulation of the Brazilian coffee market created extravagant wealth for some, and abject misery for others
- Only 10% of the rainforest in Sao Paolo remains, with coffee-growing the dominant reason
- By 1816 there were 1 ½ million slaves in Brazil, comprising 1/3 of the population, more than half of them working on coffee plantations from dawn to sunset, eating only once a day.
- The coffee crash in Brazil occurred only a few weeks before the 1929 economic crash.
- The scion of the Folger's coffee empire doesn't drink Folger's. He roasts and brews his own.
- The term "cup o' joe" originated in World War II.
- The coffee-break was an advertising ploy to sell more coffee.
Brazilian president Vargas committed suicide over coffee politics.
- Viet Nam became to second-largest producer of coffee and flooded the world with bad coffee, namely the Robusta beans.
- It costs a full day's wages for most coffee farmers to buy a cappuccino.
- Many coffee workers are only marginally better off than their enslaved ancestors.
- In the early 1970s, the founder of the Second Cup coffee empire was a homeless alcoholic.
- Most coffee farmers have never tasted their own coffee.
Source: http://www.langfieldentertainment.com/BLACKCOFFEE.htm
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