Did Caffeine Create the Modern World? By James Reed

When I stumbled across this material, as a coffee addict, I thought it was a joke by some fellow coffee fanatic, kept awake at night by a pounding heart from the caffeine. But, no, there really is a book by Michael Pollan entitled: Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. While coffee and tea are important to get many people going in the morning, to go through the mincer of the daily grind, the case is made that coffee and tea had profond impacts upon the development of the West: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed . . . everything.” “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” These drinks led to coffee and tea houses that were the forums of the day for thought and discussion. Apparently, alcohol was too much of a depressant, while caffeine was a drug that got people thinking and moving.

It is plausible.

https://www.activistpost.com/2023/07/how-coffee-created-the-modern-world.html

Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world – and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat.

Pollan takes us on a journey through the history of the drug, which was first discovered in a small part of East Africa and within a century became an addiction affecting most of the human species.

Caffeine, it turns out, has changed the course of human history — won and lost wars, changed politics, dominated economies. What’s more, the author shows that the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without it. The science of how the drug has evolved to addict us is no less fascinating. And caffeine has done all these things while hiding in plain sight! Percolated with Michael Pollan’s unique ability to entertain, inform, and perform, Caffeineis essential listening in a world where an estimated two billion cups of coffee are consumed every day.

How Coffee Created the Modern World

Author Michael Pollan discusses his latest work on the world’s most-used psychoactive substance. It is the world’s most-used drug, one many of us simply refuse to live without, opting for addiction over the loss of that first, or second, or in some cases the third cup that gets us through the day and now its seductive powers, its dark history, its health benefits, and its harmful side effects are on full display in best-selling author Michael Pollan’s new audiobook “Caffeine: How Coffee and Tea Created the Modern World.”

Pollan explains in a section of the audiobook on the substance’s origins that caffeine was first discovered in China around 1000 B.C. in the form of tea. The discovery of coffee is traced to Ethiopia around 850 A.D.

According to the legend, a herder who noticed how jumpy his goats got after eating the berries of an arabica plant gave some of the berries to a local monk, who used them to concoct the world’s first cup of coffee. As time went on, caffeine’s history took a dark turn. Growers and sellers built the industry on the backs of enslaved people forced to harvest both the coffee beans and the sugar needed to sweeten the bitter drink that had become increasingly popular in the West.

He also suggests that the consumption of caffeinated drinks even might have helped societies that embraced them to thrive. According to Pollan, caffeine drove a kind of “Enlightenment thinking.”

The coffee houses that stretched first across the [Muslim Civilisation] and eventually Europe became not only the internet of their day, spreading gossip and news, but also centres of discussion that fostered important cultural, political, and scientific exchanges and helped usher in a “new spirit of rationalism.”

nypost.com: Pollan goes so far as to assert that the stimulant created the modern world.

“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed . . . everything,”

He continues to write: “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” 

He notes that coffee first made its way from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula in the 15th century, at a time when the Islamic world was more advanced in the sciences than Europe. In the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had hundreds of coffeehouses, and some historians have linked the rise of java in the Islamic world with the advent of modern mathematics.

In the early 17th century, the first coffeehouse in Europe opened in Venice, and thousands soon followed, creating a new kind of intellectual space. Pollan writes: “You paid a penny for the coffee, but the information — in the form of newspapers, books, magazines and conversation — was free…” 

In England, it helped labourers work long hours in harsh conditions, and when sweetened with sugar provided a cheap source of calories. Pollan writes: “It’s difficult to imagine the Industrial Revolution without it…”

[However, Pollan concludes this comment by:] “Capitalism, having benefited enormously from its symbiotic relationship with coffee, now threatens to kill the golden goose.”