Pynchon's favorite drink, probably because capitalism. Discuss.

Wed Apr 22 08:06:05 UTC 2020

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How Coffee Became a Modern NecessityFor much of its 500-year history, the
drink was viewed with confusion, suspicion and disgust
A man cupping coffee beans in Ethiopia.PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
By
Augustine Sedgewick
April 4, 2020 12:01 am ET

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Coffee is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget how unusual it is.

Its defining, namesake ingredient, caffeine, is not only the world’s most
popular mind-altering drug—used regularly by perhaps 90% of the planet—but
also, as Michael Pollan has noted, the only one we routinely serve to
children. This nearly universal acceptance is all the more striking
considering that, for much of its 500-year history, coffee drinking was
viewed with confusion, suspicion and disgust.

What changed? Once used to fuel extraordinary acts of worship and
creativity, coffee has become a necessity we rely on to meet the everyday
demands of modern capitalism.

Coffee is native to Ethiopia, but Sufi monks in Yemen seem to have been the
first to consume the brewed form, probably in the 15th century. According
to many etymologies, “coffee” is derived from the Arabic word qahwah, which
carried several meanings, including “to make unappealing,” “dark” and
“wine.”
An advertisement for Café du Brésil, with a woman drinking a cup of coffee
over a landscape of Rio de Janeiro, circa 1900.PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

This raised some early questions. In 1511, officials in Mecca, suspicious
of the drink’s intoxicating effects, decreed a coffee ban. Police torched
the city’s supplies, but that hardly settled the matter.

A century later, around the time that European travelers recorded their
first encounters with coffee, the beverage was so widespread in the Ottoman
Empire that, according to the scholar Markman Ellis, it appeared “the
perfect symbol of Islam.” Marked with foreignness, coffee entered Europe
through a scrim of prejudice. In 1610, the British poet George Sandys
judged it “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.”

Like alcohol, coffee changed people who drank it, but there was no
consensus on how. Some women in London claimed that it made men impotent
and lazy, but the city’s employers disagreed. Morning draughts of ale
rendered apprentices and clerks “unfit for business,” but coffee helped
them “play the good-fellows,” wrote court historian James Howell in 1657.

Europeans didn’t understand why. The medical thinking of the age emphasized
balancing the body’s four humors—blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow
bile—by using foods as drugs. Foods were classified within one of four
prescriptive categories: hot, cold, wet and dry. Yet coffee, along with tea
and chocolate, didn’t fit neatly into any one quadrant. It was hot and
stimulating but also cooling and diuretic, confounding ideas of the human
body that had been fixed for 1,500 years.

The picture wasn’t clarified by the chemical isolation of caffeine in a
German laboratory in 1819. “Coffee acts on the diaphragm and the solar
plexus, where it spreads to the brain via immeasurable emanations that
escape all analysis,” Honoré de Balzac wrote 20 years later. “However, we
can presume it is the fluids of the nervous system that conduct the
electricity which this substance releases, and which it either finds or
stimulates in our bodies.” Balzac himself drank coffee in prodigious
quantities as he wrote his nearly 100 novels. By some accounts, he downed
50 cups a day, exacerbating his heart disease.
A poster for a German cafe, 1910s. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

Balzac died in 1850, but if he had lived just a few more years, he might
have seen a breakthrough. A new concept of the body was then emerging in
the West to take the place of the humoral system, one based not on the
balance of fluids but on cycles of input and output. The analogy was no
longer a scale but an engine.

The crux of this shift was the discovery, in part through analysis of steam
engines, of energy: the overarching force unifying what had been thought of
as discrete phenomena, including motion, heat and light. The first law of
thermodynamics, stating that energy is neither created nor destroyed but
rather converted from one form to another, posed a fundamental question:
Were human beings exceptional creatures, or did they operate on the same
principles as machines? Hermann von Helmholtz, commonly credited as the
author of the first law, suspected the latter.

By 1900, the new science of nutrition had applied thermodynamics to human
physiology via the calorie, a unit of measure that expressed the needs and
abilities of the body in common terms—inputs and outputs, food and work. On
its own, the calorie didn’t resolve questions about coffee, which contains
very few calories per cup. But the calorie did provide a stable framework
for understanding coffee’s physiological effects since it made work look
like the basic function and natural condition of a living body, much like
an engine. This ascendant biology of drudgery informed a new consensus on
coffee: It was lubricant for the “human machine.”

That idea was translated into advertising in the 1920s. Brazilian coffee
growers and American coffee roasters cosponsored research to contest the
claims of John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post, who, peddling trademark
breakfast staples of their own, blamed coffee for an American epidemic of
enervation and frailty. Samuel Prescott, an MIT biology professor, ran the
study from 1919 to 1923, drawing heavily on earlier research funded by the
Coca-Cola <https://quotes.wsj.com/KO> Com pany which concluded that
caffeine increased the body’s capacity for muscle or cognitive work within
15 minutes of consumption.
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Prescott’s lasting contribution was to rebrand coffee’s apparent
contradiction—generating work without calories, output without input—as a
kind of miracle. Coffee was better than food, he concluded: a form of
instant energy, a work drug not subject to the limits of appetite and the
delays of digestion. The implication was that the human body on coffee was
liberated from the laws of energy consumption and expenditure that governed
the rest of the universe. Based on these findings, the coffee planters and
roasters began to push a novel proposal: a pause in the workday for coffee,
especially late in the afternoon.

After five centuries, we still have questions about coffee, but we agree on
what we need it to do. Most of us drink coffee not because we have a finely
calibrated understanding of its role in blocking the adenosine that makes
us feel tired and increasing the dopamine that makes us feel good. Instead,
we drink coffee because we have adopted (in part from the coffee business
itself) a way of understanding ourselves and the world that makes it look
like a godsend when we have no choice but to keep working—or even the
fulfillment, for a moment, of our bottomless desire for more ideas, more
talk, more energy, more time, more life.

—Prof. Sedgewick teaches history and American studies at the City
University of New York. His new book, “Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire
and the Making of Our Favorite Drug,” will be published on April 7 by
Penguin Press.

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