Coffee - Philosophy for Everyone E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Philosophy for Everyone
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 480

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Offering philosophical insights into the popular morning brew, Coffee -- Philosophy for Everyone kick starts the day with an entertaining but critical discussion of the ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and culture of coffee. * Matt Lounsbury of pioneering business Stumptown Coffee discusses just how good coffee can be * Caffeine-related chapters cover the ethics of the coffee trade, the metaphysics of coffee and the centrality of the coffee house to the public sphere * Includes a foreword by Donald Schoenholt, President at Gillies Coffee Company

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

ForewordDonald Schoenholt

Editors’ IntroductionScott F. Parker and Michael W. Austin

PART 1 THE FIRST CUP: COFFEE AND METAPHYSICS

1 Coffee: Black Puddle Water or Panacea?Mark Pendergrast

2 The Necessary Ground of BeingMichael W. Austin

3 The Unexamined Cup Is Not Worth DrinkingKristopher G. Phillips

4 Saṃsāra in a Coffee Cup: Self, Suffering, and the Karma of Waking UpSteven Geisz

5 The Existential Ground of True Community: Coffee and OthernessJill Hernandez

PART 2 GROUNDS FOR DEBATE: COFFEE CULTURE

6 Sage Advice from Ben’s Mom, or: The Value of the CoffeehouseScott F. Parker

7 The Coffeehouse as a Public Sphere: Brewing Social ChangeAsaf Bar-Tura

8 Café Noir: Anxiety, Existence, and the CoffeehouseBrook J. Sadler

9 The Philosopher’s BrewBassam Romaya

PART 3 THE WONDERFUL AROMA OF BEAN: COFFEE AESTHETICS

10 Three Cups: The Anatomy of a Wasted AfternoonWill Buckingham

11 Is Starbucks Really Better than Red Brand X?Kenneth Davids

12 The Flavor of Choice: Neoliberalism and the Espresso AestheticAndrew Wear

13 Starbucks and the Third WaveJohn Hartmann

14 How Good the Coffee Can Be: An Interview with Stumptown’s Matt LounsburyScott F. Parker

PART 4 TO ROAST OR NOT TO ROAST: THE ETHICS OF COFFEE

15 More than 27 Cents a Day: The Direct Trade (R)evolutionGina Bramucci and Shannon Mulholland

16 Higher, Faster, Stronger, Buzzed: Caffeine as a Performance-Enhancing DrugKenneth W. Kirkwood

17 Green Coffee, Green Consumers – Green Philosophy?Stephanie W. Aleman

18 Coffee and the Good Life: The Bean and the Golden MeanLori Keleher

How to Make it in Hollywood by Writing an Afterword!The Coffee Bean Guys

Notes on Contributors

VOLUME EDITORS

SCOTT F. PARKER has contributed chapters to Ultimate Lost and Philosophy, Football and Philosophy, Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy, Golf and Philosophy, and iPod andPhilosophy. He is a regular contributor to Rain Taxi Review of Books. His writing has also appeared in Philosophy Now, Sport Literate, FictionWriters Review, Epiphany, The Ink-Filled Page, and Oregon Humanities.

MICHAEL W. AUSTIN is an Associate Professor of Philosophy atEastern Kentucky University, where he works primarily in ethics. Hehas published Conceptions of Parenthood: Ethics and the Family (2007),Running and Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), and Football and Philosophy: Going Deep (2008).

SERIES EDITOR

FRITZ ALLHOFF is an Assistant Professor in the PhilosophyDepartment at Western Michigan University, as well as a SeniorResearch Fellow at the Australian National University’s Centre forApplied Philosophy and Public Ethics. In addition to editing thePhilosophy for Everyone series, Allhoff is the volume editor or co-editorfor several titles, including Wine & Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007),Whiskey & Philosophy (with Marcus P. Adams, Wiley, 2009), andFood & Philosophy (with Dave Monroe, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). Hisacademic research interests engage various facets of applied ethics,ethical theory, and the history and philosophy of science.

PHILOSOPHY FOR EVERYONE

Series editor: Fritz Allhoff

Not so much a subject matter, philosophy is a way of thinking. Thinking not just about the Big Questions, but about little ones too. This series invites everyone to ponder things they care about, big or small, significant, serious… or just curious.

Running & Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind

Edited by Michael W. Austin

Wine & Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking

Edited by Fritz Allhoff

Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think and Be Merry

Edited by Fritz Allhoff and Dave Monroe

Beer & Philosophy: The Unexamined Beer Isn’t Worth Drinking

Edited by Steven D. Hales

Whiskey & Philosophy: A Small Batch of Spirited Ideas

Edited by Fritz Allhoff and Marcus P. Adams

College Sex – Philosophy forEveryone: Philosophers With Benefits

Edited by Michael Bruce and Robert M. Stewart

Cycling – Philosophy for Everyone: A Philosophical Tour de Force

Edited by Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza and Michael W. Austin

Climbing – Philosophy for Everyone: Because It’s There

Edited by Stephen E. Schmid

Hunting – Philosophy for Everyone: In Search of the Wild Life

Edited by Nathan Kowalsky

Christmas – Philosophy for Everyone: Better Than a Lump of Coal

Edited by Scott C. Lowe

Cannabis – Philosophy for Everyone:What Were We Just Talking About?

Edited by Dale Jacquette

Porn – Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink

Edited by Dave Monroe

Serial Killers – Philosophy for Everyone:Being and Killing

Edited by S. Waller

Dating – Philosophy for Everyone:Flirting With Big Ideas

Edited by Kristie Miller and Marlene Clark

Gardening – Philosophy for Everyone:Cultivating Wisdom

Edited by Dan O’Brien

Motherhood – Philosophy for Everyone:The Birth of Wisdom

Edited by Sheila Lintott

Fatherhood – Philosophy for Everyone:The Dao of Daddy

Edited by Lon S. Nease and Michael W. Austin

Coffee – Philosophy for Everyone:Grounds for Debate

Edited by Scott F. Parker and Michael W. Austin

Forthcoming books in the series:

Blues – Philosophy for Everyone:Thinking Deep About Feeling Low

Edited by Abrol Fairweather and Jesse Steinberg

Fashion – Philosophy for Everyone:Thinking with Style

Edited by Jessica Wolfendale and Jeanette Kennett

Yoga – Philosophy for Everyone:Bending Mind and Body

Edited by Liz Stillwaggon Swan

This edition first published 2011©2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coffee – Philosophy for Everyone: grounds for debate / edited by Scott F. Parker and Michael W. Austin.

p. cm. – (Philosophy for everyone)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4443-3712-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Coffee—Philosophy. I. Parker, Scott F. II. Austin, Michael W.

TX415.C64 2011

641.3′373—dc22

2010034203

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDF 9781444393361; Wiley Online Library 9781444393385; ePub 9781444393378

For Dad, thanks for the Saturday morning walks to Broadway Coffee Merchant when I was a kid, and forSophie’s World when I was a teenager.

Scott

For Dan, a true friend.

Mike

“You know what I’m going to do?” she says to me at long last. Withoutwaiting for a reply, she says, “I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee,then go sit out on the back porch and spend the rest of the night thinkingof new ways to ask, and answer, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ”

Christopher Phillips, Socrates Cafe (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001)

No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.

Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

DONALD SCHOENHOLT

FOREWORD

Pythagoras of Samos never had a latte; Socrates never sipped a macchiato; and Aristotle thought great thoughts, but never quaffed a red eye. Anne Conway may have been familiar with coffee, but was probably not an imbiber, because during her lifetime coffee was still relegated to the English apothecary as an exotic headache remedy. From this we understand that the philosopher Novartis’s idea for Excedrin was not without precedent.

Philosophy predates coffee by more than a millennium, yet it is coffee, perhaps more than any other substance, that has been identified with Western philosophic thought since its introduction to Europe through Venice in the seventeenth century.

It is believed that ancient Mediterranean lands did not know of coffee, yet a thousand years ago, the extraordinary Persian intellect, physician, and scientist Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina, born in 980 BCE near Bukhara (modern-day Uzbekistan) and known in the West as just Ibn Sina – or in the name’s Latinized form, Avicenna – wrote about coffee and its marvelous qualities.

The Age of Enlightenment was brightened by the presence of coffee, and French philosopher Denis Diderot included images of coffee mills in the Encyclopédie project, an effort to put on paper all the knowledge known to that generation, in Europe. It also included articles by famous living men, including exotic American personages Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The result, L’Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, published in Paris between 1762 and 1777, was an intellectual triumph of the age. While Diderot was editing, Voltaire was sipping coffee. It is said that the French philosopher, who frequented Le Procope, the famed Paris coffeehouse, now restaurant, consumed fifty cups per day. Hegel also had a fondness for drinking coffee, but then so did millions of other folks during the eighteenth century.

In 1832, adjutant general of the US Army Roger Jones issued General Order 100a in an effort to curb alcohol abuse in the ranks. The whiskey ration was eliminated, replaced by coffee and tea, except in special circumstances. An Act of Congress in 1862 discontinued the special circumstances, and coffee was triumphant. Tens of thousands of Union soldiers were introduced to the coffee habit during subsequent military service during the Civil War, and the wars that have followed.

It was during the Civil War that political philosopher Abraham Lincoln was said to remark to a waiter in the President’s House, “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.” The most prominent American philosopher of the period was poet Walt Whitman, for whom I know no coffee reference; however, there is a Starbucks at the Walt Whitman Mall, in Huntington Station, New York. You can go there, buy a Tall, that is the twelve-ounce size you get if you order a “small” at Starbucks, even though there is a size called a Short that is eight ounces and is not listed on the chain’s menu boards (but the why of that is a philosophical question for another day). You can sip your coffee and just imagine what the gentle man who wrote Leaves of Grass would think about the eighty-eight retailer spaces that have his verses etched into the fascia stucco of their exteriors, and the five thousand paved parking spaces all named in his honor.

In the United States the period following the Civil War was one of enlightenment in Northern cities, and social philosophers such as Jane Adams of Chicago’s Hull House opened coffeehouses so poor working-class people could avoid taverns, and buy food without the temptation of alcohol.

The triumph of the second industrial revolution enabled coffee, reduced to nominal cost by mass production, to become a universal drink that crossed lines of class and station throughout much of the world, fueling nineteenth-century philosopher caffeinatics including Goethe and Rousseau.

Coffee makes people think. We can only guess at the philosophical discussions, debates, disputes, and dialogues that have taken place over coffee in its history. Coffee has historically been a beverage that sparks the exercise of intellectual energy, often of the more radical variety, resulting in verbosity, and on occasion leading to heresy and sedition. It has been the source of fulmination by potentates and kings from Constantinople to London who in turn closed, opened, closed again, and finally gave up the vain effort to suffocate free thought, by stifling the use of “the beverage that gives you time to think.”

Karl Marx was buzzed on his favorite blend when he attacked the idea of private property and supported free trade because he believed it would break down nation-states. He was possibly cheered on by anarchist Emma Goldman, but in the twentieth century writer Ayn Rand pulled him down, possibly while brewing and serving coffee and miniature Danish pastries to Frank O’Connor and their guests. Ms. Rand made much of cigarettes, but I don’t remember a particularly philosophical coffee reference in her writing. The polemicist, intellectual incendiary, and coffee drinker Noam Chomsky has done in Ms. Rand’s ideas, in his turn. Professor Emeritus Chomsky has some interesting ideas on the economy of coffee, expressed in Propaganda and the Public Mind, that could be easily used as fire-starter the next time coffee folks sit down to have a thoughtful discussion touching on the ideas of free trade, fair trade, and direct trade.

Bob Dylan was a leader in the philosophy of social and political awakening that was the hallmark of his poetic folk lyrics of the 1960s, but “One More Cup of Coffee,” a track from his 1976 album Desire, is a painful song of unrequited love and abandonment mulled over one last cup o’ joe.

The poet philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll, Paul Simon, wrote of despair and alienation felt by many of his generation, “And we sit and drink our coffee / Couched in our indifference / Like shells upon the shore / You can hear the ocean roar / In the dangling conversation / And the superficial sighs / The borders of our lives.”

Creative thinking and coffee appear to be mutually dependent as the philosopher poet seeks out coffee for its stimulation, comfort, and metaphoric effect, and the farmer, roaster, barista, and even the potter require the thinker to find their own raison d’être.

Levi R. Bryant, professor of philosophy at Collin County Community College, McKinney, Texas, recently posted on his Larval Subjects blog, “It seems that for some reason or other I am always waxing on about my blue coffee mugs. In part, I suppose, this is because my coffee mug is always nearby, within reach of my hand when I am sitting at my computer and readily available for my gaze to alight upon. In part, this is because coffee mugs are familiar furniture of the world and are therefore ideally suited as an example. Finally, and I find this to be odd, this is because my blue coffee mugs fill me with a deep sense of warmth and comfort.”

Coffee and philosophy, partners since the beverage’s beginnings, are destined to remain linked until the world runs out of java. Chicago’s Café Descartes, named for the French philosopher, heralds the motto, “I drink, therefore I am.” If it fits your personal philosophy you can order it on a coffee mug from zazzle.com.

SCOTT F. PARKER AND MICHAEL W. AUSTIN

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Pour yourself a hot steaming cup of joe, ’cause we’re gonna talk about the amber liquid of life … the common man’s gold, and like gold it brings to every person the feeling of luxury and nobility. Thank you, Juan Valdez.

Bob Dylan, Theme Time Radio Hour, “Coffee,” introduction

Coffee is not for everyone, but it sure comes close. In the United States of America, more than half of the population over the age of eighteen consumes coffee on a daily basis. In fact, the average American consumption of coffee per person is three and a half cups per day. The United States is also the leading importer of coffee in the world, bringing in twice as much of the bean as the second-place country, Germany. Of course, coffee consumption is not just an American phenomenon. Worldwide, over 500 billion cups of coffee are served each year. Each year Brazil turns out one third of the coffee produced in the world, which is three times as much as the next largest producer of coffee, Vietnam.1 Since it was first discovered in its native Ethiopia over one thousand years ago, coffee has spread the globe. It’s grown in the tropical regions of Africa, Latin America, and Asia; and it’s drunk there and most everywhere else. Caffeine is the world’s most commonly used drug, and the majority of it is taken in the form of coffee. Coffee consumption is clearly a widespread phenomenon.

Perhaps surprisingly, so is philosophy. At its best, philosophy provides us with a way to uncover important truths about the world and how to live. And while you may not do it consciously, everyone practices philosophy, in some sense of the term. Why? The reason is that we have beliefs about the nature of reality, what sorts of things we can know, and how best to live. Sometimes we’re aware of these beliefs, and sometimes we’re not. But hopefully we have reasons that we take to support these beliefs. These kinds of issues, and many others, fall under the domain of philosophy, which literally means “love of wisdom.” So, the question is not whether you or we are philosophers, but rather, whether or not we’re good philosophers. That’s where this book comes into the picture. Reading it will provide you with new ways to think philosophically about coffee and the rest of your life. And along the way, you’ll also learn some new things about coffee and how to more fully enjoy it.

It’s only natural that there be a book devoted to coffee and philosophy, as they are strongly linked in cultural imagination as well as in practice. So strongly linked, in fact, that in modern times they seem almost inseparable. The appropriate analogy is that coffee and philosophy go together like foreplay and sex. You can have one without the other, but the latter is better with the former, and the former often leads to the latter. Coffee is conducive to slow drinking, which leads to slowing down generally and the opportunity for conversation, reading, and thinking. And philosophy benefits from coffee, which sharpens attention and can heighten creativity. There’s an old joke that a philosopher is a machine that turns coffee into theories. In the legend of coffee’s discovery in Ethiopia, the goat herder and poet Kaldi saw his goats dancing on their hind legs after chewing the leaves and berries of a coffee tree. When Kaldi chewed on the trees and berries himself, “poetry and song spilled out of him. He felt that he would never be tired or grouchy again.”2

But if the sex analogy seems overly excited it’s not just because of the caffeine coursing through our blood and permeating the blood-brain barrier – philosophy is as active a mental stimulant as exists. The concerns of philosophy demand our attention every bit as much as does sex. What’s the nature of reality? Is there a God? How should I behave? What matters? Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” Philosophy is the big questions and it can’t be oversold.

We mention Sartre because he might be the first person to come to mind when you think of coffee and philosophy. The iconic photographs of Sartre in Paris’s Café de Flore with the porcelain cup in front of him are some of the most indelible images of what a philosopher looks like. For Sartre, philosophy is inseparable from café culture. And maybe café culture is inseparable from philosophy, too? Consider this existentialist joke. Sartre was sitting in a café when a waitress approached him: “Can I get you something to drink, Monsieur Sartre?” Sartre replied, “Yes, I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar but no cream.” Nodding agreement, the waitress walked off to fill the order and Sartre returned to working. A few minutes later, however, the waitress returned and said, “I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream – how about with no milk?”

Another Frenchman, less well known for his connection to coffee, but with a more impressive coffee resume, Voltaire drank up to sixty cups of coffee a day (although, unlike Sartre, he didn’t complement his caffeine with large doses of alcohol, nicotine, amphetamines, and barbiturates). But this kind of relationship hasn’t always been the case. Plenty of philosophers have made do without. The ancients, of course, had no knowledge of coffee. More recently, philosophy’s two greatest walkers, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, were also its two greatest coffee abstainers. Somehow, they were still able to write prolifically for many years. What makes Sartre and Voltaire, and Kant and Nietzsche, unusual is their extremity. Most any other philosopher from the past few hundred years has drunk a more moderate amount of coffee. In the United States and Europe (from where our philosophical tradition mostly emerges) coffee and cafés are cultural institutions. Coffee is part of popular culture (songs by Frank Sinatra and Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, commercials featuring Johnny Cash and Jerry Seinfeld; when Bob Dylan started his Theme Time Radio Hour show on satellite radio, “coffee” was the theme of his fifth episode); it’s a crucial part of many people’s daily routines (morning coffee, coffee break, etc.); cafés are semi-public spaces where some people like to spend their free time and some people seem to spend their entire waking lives.3

So coffee’s a big part of culture and it’s compatible with, even conducive to, philosophy. What does philosophy have to say about coffee? Quite a bit, actually. Some of the big questions we face as coffee consumers are explicitly moral questions. How important is it that we buy coffee that’s fair trade or direct trade? Shade-grown? Organic? Also, with “coffee” now comprising $130-per-pound Hacienda La Esmeralda Special, a cup of joe that’s been sitting out all day at the gas station, the ever-mockable half-caf, three-pump, extra-foam, skinny whatever, and myriad other varieties, there are important aesthetic questions to ask. Can one coffee really be better than another? If so, what makes it better? Is anyone really tasting notes of lemongrass? But coffee isn’t drunk exclusively for aesthetic reasons. And neither is it drunk for entirely utilitarian reasons. Yes, people drink it to stay awake, but there’s more to coffee drinking than that. There’s a large, diverse, energetic culture surrounding it. So when we talk about coffee, we’re talking about everything that goes along with it, too: its associations with conversation and friendship, art and reading, politics and revolution – all of these are of philosophical interest. And then, in addition to using philosophy to think about coffee, philosophy can use coffee to think about the larger world, asking metaphysical questions about what coffee can tell us about God, ourselves, and reality. These four areas of philosophy – metaphysics, culture, aesthetics, ethics – are the categories we’ve grouped the book’s chapters in. Most of the contributors are philosophers, but there are also chapters written by coffee experts, journalists, and historians, though each chapter is connected to some of the big or small questions philosophers ask.

But just what are these areas of philosophy? These days, people often associate metaphysics with the section of the bookstore containing volumes on the healing power of crystals, but philosophers understand metaphysics in a very different way. When a philosopher does metaphysics, she is seeking to understand the nature of reality. In order to understand this, consider the sorts of questions asked which philosophers consider metaphysical questions: Is there a God? Is the color red identical to a particular wavelength of light? Is there such a thing as the self? If so, what is it like? Do we have freedom of the will? Is coffee merely black puddle water, or is it in fact a panacea?

Okay, that last question might not seem to fit, but for anyone with a love of coffee, it is an important metaphysical question with very practical implications. And it is a question explored in the first unit, “The First Cup: Coffee and Metaphysics,” in the chapter by Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed our World. Pendergrast takes the reader on a wide-ranging tour of the debates about the place of coffee in human life. In the chapter by Michael W. Austin, “The Necessary Ground of Being,” some of the recent debates about the metaphysical foundations of ethics are explored, ideally with a cup of your favorite beverage close at hand. Kristopher G. Phillips writes about what it’s like to be a coffee drinker, and gives us very practical advice on how to more deeply appreciate the substance and nuances of coffee. Steven Geisz shares several insights grounded in Indian philosophical thought as he discusses life, suffering, death, reincarnation, the human self, and that all-important morning cup of coffee. Finally, in her chapter, “The Existential Ground of Community: Coffee and Otherness,” Jill Hernandez writes about the connections between existentialism, coffee, and the elusive good of community that so many of us long for and sometimes seek to acquire at our favorite coffeehouse, ending on a hopeful note.

In the spirit of lively debate, some of the chapters in the second unit, “The Grounds for Debate: Coffee Culture,” argue against each other, offering different readings of the virtues and vices of coffee culture. Scott F. Parker reflects on the role coffeehouses can play in making philosophy more accessible to the average person and argues that being philosophically engaged with the world is a responsibility of being human (no surprise one of the book’s editors would say something like this). Asaf Bar-Tura argues that laptops and other technologies have turned coffeehouses into places people go to isolate themselves instead of to participate in community, and then gives models of how coffeehouses can once again be locales for social change. In “Café Noir: Anxiety, Existence, and the Coffeehouse,” Brook J. Sadler finds in coffee the perfect drink for our anxious, isolated postmodern condition. The culture sections ends with Bassam Romaya taking up the question of why coffee – more than tea, beer, cola, or some other beverage – is the drink most compatible with philosophy.

The third unit, “The Wonderful Aroma of Bean: Coffee Aesthetics,” investigates coffee in terms of aesthetics, or the branch of philosophy that is interested in beauty and taste. In “Three Cups: The Anatomy of a Wasted Afternoon,” Will Buckingham spends an afternoon in a café and demonstrates what it can be like to do philosophy. He combines everyday observations and an openness to letting his mind wander with a reading of Emmanuel Levinas to form his own philosophical reflections on the values of coffee, cafés, and idleness. Moving from the level of the café to the level of the coffee itself, coffee expert Kenneth Davids examines three coffees of various qualities and by way of asking “Is Starbucks Really Better than Red Brand X?” offers a set of standards for how to judge and enjoy coffee. Next, in “The Flavor of Choice: Neoliberalism and the Espresso Aesthetic,” Andrew Wear traces the aesthetic of espresso from its origins in the Italian caffè to its redefinition as a mass-market beverage, and considers how that aesthetic has been impacted for the sake of profit.

Aesthetics and ethics in coffee end up being pretty closely tied. Good coffee beans, for example, tend to come from coffee farmers who are paid well for their work. John Hartmann and Scott F. Parker focus their attention on this relationship in two chapters that serve as a transition to the final unit on ethics. Hartmann, in his chapter “Starbucks and the Third Wave,” examines third wave coffee in the context of Starbucks’ immense influence on how we drink coffee and what we expect from a coffee company in the way of social responsibility. Parker takes up similar ground from a different angle in an interview with Stumptown Coffee’s Matt Lounsbury.

The move into ethics is completed in our final unit, “To Roast or Not to Roast: The Ethics of Coffee.” Ethics is concerned with our moral obligations, the moral virtues, and what it takes to be truly fulfilled as a human being. Gina Bramucci and Shannon Mulholland draw from first-hand experience visiting African coffee farms to compare fair trade coffee with the increasingly common direct trade model. Kenneth W. Kirkwood takes up the caffeine in coffee and analyzes its use as a performance-enhancing drug. In the penultimate chapter, Stephanie Aleman provides several ways to think about the question “Is coffee green?” And finally, in “Coffee and the Good Life: The Bean and the Golden Mean,” Lori Keleher uses Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to help locate coffee’s place in the good life – an appropriate place, we think, to end.

While this book celebrates coffee, it’s important to acknowledge that there is no shortage of opposition to it. Coffee has been banned by religions, it’s been called “the drink of the Devil”; it has been accused of both stirring the passions and stymieing them; it’s been thought to stunt growth, cause cancer, weaken bones. And let’s not forget that caffeine is a poison certain tropical plants have evolved to protect themselves against predators.

We note these concerns about coffee, but we do not share them. And we assume you don’t either. So, please, pour yourself a cup of coffee at home, or order a cappuccino at your neighborhood café. These essays are best enjoyed as they were written – with coffee in hand. Finally, it is our hope that reading this book will whet your appetite for coffee, philosophy, and coffee and philosophy.

NOTES

1http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/guatemala.mexico/facts.html.

2 Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 4–5.

3 See, for example, the web series Coffee Bean Guys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCNuc5bXi_s and the afterword to this book.

PART 1THE FIRST CUP: COFFEE AND METAPHYSICS

MARK PENDERGRAST

CHAPTER 1COFFEE

Black Puddle Water or Panacea?

Throughout coffee’s history, critics have accused the drink of causing horrendous health problems, while those who love the brew have espoused its almost miraculous curative powers. This extreme devotion and condemnation continues today.

Coffee grows wild on the mountainsides of Ethiopia. It is likely that the seeds of bunn, as coffee was called there, were at first ground and mixed with animal fat for a quick-energy snack, while the leaves were brewed to make a weakly caffeinated brew. Tribesmen made wine out of the fermented pulp as well as a sweet beverage called kisher out of the lightly roasted husks of the coffee cherry. At some point during the fifteenth century, someone roasted the beans, ground them, and made an infusion. Coffee as we know it finally came into being.

At first, coffee was apparently used primarily by Sufi monks in Ethiopia and across the Red Sea in Yemen, where coffee trees were cultivated by the fifteenth century. The drink helped them stay awake for midnight prayers, and it added zest to the whirling dance of the mystic dervishes. The drink became a kind of communion wine for the Islamic Sufis, for whom alcoholic beverages were forbidden. In Yemen, the monks sometimes recited the traditional ratib, the repetition 116 times of the phrase “Ya Qawi” (“O possessor of all strength”), while sharing ritual cups of coffee. The reference was to Allah, but coffee itself was also seen as possessing much strength. The word “coffee” probably derives not from Qawi but from qahwa, the Arab word for wine, since coffee similarly seemed to possess some kind of stimulating drug.

The Sufis carried coffee beans throughout the Arab world, including Mecca. The beverage quickly spread beyond the monasteries and into secular use. Thus, while coffee was at first considered a medicine or religious aid, it soon enough became an everyday habit. Wealthy people had a coffee room in their homes, reserved only for ceremonial imbibing. For those who did not have such private largesse, coffeehouses, known as kaveh kanes, sprang up. By the end of the fifteenth century, Muslim pilgrims had introduced coffee throughout the Islamic world in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa, making it a lucrative trade item.

As the drink gained in popularity throughout the sixteenth century, it also gained its reputation as a troublemaking social brew. Various rulers decided that people were having too much fun in the coffeehouses. “The patrons of the coffeehouse indulged in a variety of improper pastimes,” Ralph Hattox notes in his history of the Arab coffeehouses, “ranging from gambling to involvement in irregular and criminally unorthodox sexual situations.”1

When Khair-Beg, the young governor of Mecca, discovered that satirical verses about him were emanating from the coffeehouses, he determined that coffee, like wine, must be outlawed by the Qur’an, and he induced his religious, legal, and medical advisors to agree. Thus, in 1511 the coffeehouses of Mecca were forcibly closed.

The ban lasted only until the Cairo sultan, a habitual coffee drinker, heard about it and reversed the edict. Other Arab rulers and religious leaders, however, also denounced coffee during the course of the 1500s and into the next century. The Grand Vizier Kuprili of Constantinople, fearing sedition during a war, closed the city’s coffeehouses in 1633. Anyone caught drinking coffee was soundly cudgeled. Offenders found imbibing a second time were sewn into leather bags and thrown into the Bosphorus. Even so, many continued to drink coffee in secret, and eventually the ban was withdrawn.

Why did coffee drinking persist in the face of persecution in these early Arab societies? The addictive nature of caffeine provides one answer, of course; yet there is more to it. Coffee provided an intellectual stimulant, a pleasant way to feel increased energy without any apparent ill effects.

Coffeehouses allowed people to get together for conversation, entertainment, and business, inspiring agreements, poetry, and irreverence in equal measure. So important did the brew become in Turkey that a lack of sufficient coffee provided grounds for a woman to seek a divorce. “O Coffee!” wrote an Arab poet in 1511 (the same year the drink was banned briefly in Mecca), “Thou dost dispel all care, thou are the object of desire to the scholar. This is the beverage of the friends of God.”2 Even though Mohammed (ca. 570–632) never drank coffee, a myth arose that the Prophet had proclaimed that under the invigorating influence of coffee he could “unhorse forty men and possess forty women.”3

Europeans Discover Coffee

At first Europeans didn’t quite know what to make of the strange new brew. German physician Leonhard Rauwolf published Travels in the Orient in 1582, describing “a very good drink, by them called Chaube that is almost as black as ink, and very good in illness, chiefly that of the stomach; of this they drink in the morning early … as hot as they can; they put it often to their lips but drink but little at a time, and let it go round as they sit.”4

The Venetian Gianfrancesco Morosini wrote disapprovingly in 1585 about the “time sunk in idleness” in drinking coffee in Constantinople. “They continually sit about, and for entertainment they are in the habit of drinking in public in shops and in the streets, a black liquid, boiling [as hot] as they can stand it, which is extracted from a seed they call Caveé … [that] is said to have the property of keeping a man awake.”5

In 1610 British poet Sir George Sandys noted that the Turks sat “chatting most of the day” over their coffee, which he described as “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.” He added, however, that it “helpeth, as they say, digestion, and procureth alacrity.”6

In a book published in Germany in 1656, Adam Olearius, an astronomer and surveyor who had traveled to Persia, wrote about coffee, warning that “if you partake to excess of such kahave water, it completely extinguishes all pleasures of the flesh.”7 He claimed that coffee had rendered a Sultan Mahmed Kasnin impotent. His book, translated and published in France in 1666, helped fuel anti-coffee sentiment there.

By the time Olearius’s book was published, Europeans were already discovering coffee. Pope Clement VIII, who died in 1605, supposedly tasted the Moslem drink at the behest of his priests, who wanted him to ban it. “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious,” he reputedly exclaimed, “that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptizing it and making it a truly Christian beverage.”8

In the first half of the seventeenth century, coffee was still an exotic beverage, and like other such rare substances as sugar, cocoa, and tea, initially was used primarily as an expensive medicine by the upper classes. Over the next fifty years, however, Europeans were to discover the social as well as medicinal benefits of the Arabian drink.

Surprisingly, given their subsequent enthusiasm for coffee, the French lagged behind the Italians and British in adopting the coffeehouse. In 1669 a new Turkish ambassador, Soliman Aga, introduced coffee at his sumptuous Parisian parties, inspiring a craze for all things Turkish. Male guests, given voluminous dressing gowns, learned to loll comfortably without chairs in the luxurious surroundings, and to drink the exotic new beverage. Still, it appeared to be only a novelty.

French doctors, threatened by the medicinal claims made for coffee, went on the counterattack in Marseilles in 1679, no doubt encouraged by French winemakers: “We note with horror that this beverage … has tended almost completely to disaccustom people from the enjoyment of wine.”9 Then, in a fine burst of pseudoscience, a young medical student named Colomb blasted coffee, asserting that it “dries up the cerebrospinal fluid and the convolutions … the upshot being general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence.”10

Six years later, however, Sylvestre Dufour, another French physician, wrote a book strongly defending coffee, claiming that it relieved kidney stones, gout, and scurvy, while it also helped mitigate migraine headaches. “Coffee banishes languor and anxiety, gives to those who drink it, a pleasing sensation of their own well-being and diffuses through their whole frame, a vivifying and delightful warmth.”11 By 1696 one Paris doctor was prescribing coffee enemas to “sweeten” the lower bowel and freshen the complexion.

The French historian Michelet described the advent of coffee as “the auspicious revolution of the times, the great event which created new customs, and even modified human temperament.”12 Certainly coffee lessened the intake of alcohol while the cafés provided a wonderful intellectual stew that ultimately spawned the French Revolution. The coffeehouses of continental Europe were egalitarian meeting places where, as the food writer Margaret Visser notes, “men and women could, without impropriety, consort as they had never done before. They could meet in public places and talk.”13

Coffee and coffeehouses reached Germany in the 1670s. By 1721 there were coffeehouses in most major German cities. For quite a while the coffee habit remained the province of the upper classes. Many physicians warned that it caused sterility or stillbirths. In 1732 the drink had become controversial (and popular) enough to inspire Johann Sebastian Bach to write his humorous Coffee Cantata, in which a daughter begs her stern father to allow her this favorite vice: “Dear father, do not be so strict! If I can’t have my little demitasse of coffee three times a day, I’m just like a dried-up piece of roast goat! Ah! How sweet coffee tastes! Lovelier than a thousand kisses, sweeter far than muscatel wine! I must have my coffee.”14 Later in the century, coffee-obsessed Ludwig van Beethoven ground precisely sixty beans to brew a cup.

By 1777 the hot beverage had become entirely too popular for Frederick the Great, who issued a manifesto in favor of Germany’s more traditional drink: “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors.” Four years later the king forbade the roasting of coffee except in official government establishments, forcing the poor to resort to coffee substitutes. They also managed to get hold of real coffee beans and roast them clandestinely, but government spies, pejoratively named coffee smellers by the populace, put them out of business. Eventually coffee outlived all the efforts to stifle it in Germany. Frauen particularly loved their Kaffeeklatches, gossipy social interludes that gave the brew a more feminine image.

Every other European country also discovered coffee during the same period. Nowhere did coffee have such a dynamic and immediate impact, however, as in England.

The British Invasion

Like a liquid black torrent the coffee rage drenched England, beginning at Oxford University in 1650, where Jacobs, a Lebanese Jew, opened the first coffeehouse for “some who delighted in noveltie.”15 Two years later in London, Pasqua Rosée, a Greek, opened a coffeehouse and printed the first coffee advertisement, a broadside touting “The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink,” described as “a simple innocent thing, composed into a Drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boiled up with Spring water.”16 Rosée’s ad asserted that coffee would aid digestion, cure headaches, coughs, consumption, dropsy, gout, and scurvy, and prevent miscarriages. More practically, he wrote: “It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to Watch; and therefore you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.”17

By 1700 there were, according to some estimates, two thousand London coffeehouses, occupying more premises and paying more rent than any other trade. They came to be known as penny universities, because for that price one could purchase a cup of coffee and sit for hours listening to extraordinary conversations. Each coffeehouse specialized in a different type of clientele. In one, physicians could be consulted. Others served Protestants, Puritans, Catholics, Jews, literati, merchants, traders, fops, Whigs, Tories, army officers, actors, lawyers, clergy, or wits. The coffeehouses provided England’s first egalitarian meeting place, where a man was expected to chat with his tablemates whether he knew them or not.

Before the advent of coffee the British imbibed alcohol, often in Falstaffian proportions. In 1774 one observer noted that “coffee-drinking hath caused a greater sobriety among the nations; for whereas formerly Apprentices and Clerks with others, used to take their mornings’ draught in Ale, Beer or Wine, which by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, make many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakefull and civill drink.”18

Not that most coffeehouses were universally uplifting places; rather, they were chaotic, smelly, wildly energetic, and capitalistic. “There was a rabble going hither and thither, reminding me of a swarm of rats in a ruinous cheese-store,”19 one contemporary noted. “Some came, others went; some were scribbling, others were talking; some were drinking, some smoking, and some arguing; the whole place stank of tobacco like the cabin of a barge.”20

The strongest blast against the London coffeehouses came from women, who unlike their Continental counterparts were excluded from this all-male society (unless they were the proprietors). In 1674 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee asked, “[Why do our men] trifle away their time, scald their Chops, and spend their Money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty bitter stinking, nauseous Puddle water?”21 The women were convinced that the drink was emasculating their mates. “We find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour.… Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.”22 This condition was all due to “the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called Coffee, which … has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind gallants.… They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.”23

The Women’s Petition revealed that a typical male day involved spending the morning in a tavern “till every one of them is as Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-house to drink themselves sober.” Then they were off to the tavern again, only to “stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee.”24 In response, the men defended their beverage in their own broadside publication. Far from rendering them impotent, “[coffee] makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme.”25

On December 29, 1675, King Charles II issued “A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses.” In it he banned coffeehouses as of January 10, 1676, since they had become “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons” where tradesmen neglected their affairs. The worst offense, however, was that in such houses “divers false malitious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majestie’s Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm.”26

An immediate howl went up from every part of London. Within a week, it appeared that the monarchy might once again be overthrown – and all over coffee. On January 8, two days before the proclamation was due to take effect, the king backed down.

Ironically, however, over the course of the eighteenth century the British began to drink tea instead of coffee for various reasons. While the black brew never disappeared entirely, its use in England diminished steadily until recent years have seen a coffee renaissance.

Postum and Coffee Neuralgia

The arguments over coffee and its effects on the human body continued unabated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century, King Gustav III of Sweden conducted an experiment to show that coffee was a poison, forcing a convicted murderer to drink it every day, while another prisoner drank tea. Both prisoners outlived the king and their observing doctors.

The isolation of caffeine in 1819 did not substantially alter the tenor of the debate, although with the decline of the theory of the “four humours,” experts stopped talking about whether coffee was too dry, wet, hot, or cold in nature.

After the Boston Tea Party of 1773, coffee surpassed tea in the colonies and the young United States to become the patriotic beverage of choice. Of course, the pragmatic North Americans also appreciated the fact that coffee was cultivated much nearer to them than tea and was consequently cheaper.

In late nineteenth-century America, coffee was challenged by new health concerns. In 1890 Charles W. Post, an energetic entrepreneur, suffered a nervous breakdown and joined other sufferers in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the famed Sanitarium, or “San,” of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

Kellogg had made himself the impresario of health faddism, and one of his particular dislikes was coffee. “The tea and coffee habit is a grave menace to the health of the American people,” he intoned, adding that the drinks caused arteriosclerosis, Bright’s disease, heart failure, apoplexy, and premature old age. “Tea and coffee are baneful drugs and their sale and use ought to be prohibited by law,” wrote Kellogg. He even alleged that “insanity has been traced to the coffee habit.”27

Post’s nine months at the San failed to cure his indigestion or nervous disorder, so he left. By 1892 Post had recovered sufficiently to open his own Battle Creek alternative to Kellogg’s Sanitarium, which he christened La Vita Inn. In 1895 Post first manufactured Postum, a grain-based coffee substitute that bore a suspicious resemblance to Kellogg’s Caramel Coffee (served at the San).

By May 1897 sales were booming, largely due to scare ads that depicted harried, desperate, and dissipated people hooked on caffeine. They warned of the hazards of “coffee heart,” “coffee neuralgia,” and “brain fag.” Abstaining from coffee and drinking Postum would effect the promised cure. “Lost Eyesight through Coffee Drinking,”28 one headline blared. “It is safe to say that one person in every three among coffee users has some incipient or advanced form of disease.”29 Coffee was a “drug drink” that contained “a poisonous drug – caffeine, which belongs in the same class of alkaloids with cocaine, morphine, nicotine, and strychnine.”30 One ad featured coffee spilling slowly from a cup, accompanied by an alarming text: “Constant dripping wears away the stone. Perhaps a hole has been started in you.… Try leaving off coffee for ten days and use Postum Food Coffee.”

When he wasn’t frightening his readers Post buttered them up, appealing to their egos. He addressed an ad to “highly organized people,”31 telling them that they could perform much better on Postum than on nerve-wracking coffee. Post also addressed the modern man, asserting that Postum was “The Scientific Way To Repair Brains and Rebuild Waste Tissues.”32 Coffee was not a food but a powerful drug. “Sooner or later the steady drugging will tear down the strong man or woman, and the stomach, bowels, heart, kidneys, nerves, brain, or some other organ connected with the nervous system, will be attacked.”33

Post was not alone in damning coffee. Most doctors of the era warned against the beverage’s habitual use. In 1906 a London doctor – perhaps more loyal to tea – stated, “Coffee drunkards, as I may call them, are greatly increasing in number.” He added that the coffee habit produced “palpitations of the heart, an irregular pulse, nervousness, indigestion and insomnia.”34

Even American physicians such as George Niles had harsh words for the drink so beloved by his countrymen. True, he thought that “strong coffee, either alone or with a little lemon juice, is often useful in overcoming a malarial chill or a paroxysm of asthma.”35 But he went on to warn that “it is easy to form a coffee habit, which, yielded to, may lead into muscular tremors, palpitation, a feeling of praecordial oppression, tinnitus aurium, hyperesthesia, muscular lassitude, vertigo, heartburn, vague symptoms of indigestion, constipation and pronounced insomnia.”36 On the whole, coffee came in for an inordinate amount of criticism in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The beleaguered coffee industry responded with anecdotal stories to illustrate the drink’s beneficial effects on longevity. For instance, Mrs. Christine Hedin of Ironwood, Michigan, celebrated her hundredth birthday by “drinking coffee all day long,”37 as was her normal habit (from four to ten cups daily). A centenarian Frenchman was told that coffee, which he drank to excess, was a poison. “If it is poison,” he said, “I am a fine example of the fact that it is a very slow poison.”38

In 1911 Harry and Leta Hollingworth conducted groundbreaking double-blind experiments on caffeine’s effects on humans, the first really scientific effort to look at the issue. The experiments indicated that caffeine, in moderate amounts, improved motor skills while leaving sleep patterns relatively unaffected.

Birth Defects and Pancreatic Cancer

Health concerns about the effects of coffee and caffeine continued to simmer, however, and in the 1960s they began to receive support through a series of epidemiological studies. “A new problem for the coffee industry is rearing its ugly head,” wrote Samuel Lee, the technical editor of the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal in 1966. “Serious scientific workers are trying to demonstrate that prolonged, continued or excessive consumption of beverage coffee may be deleterious, or even a serious health hazard.”39

In November 1979 Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) filed a petition with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking for warning labels on coffee and tea packages reading: “Caffeine May Cause Birth Defects.” At a press conference, he presented a woman who claimed that her heavy coffee consumption offered the only “reasonable explanation” for her child’s deformities.

In response, the National Coffee Association (NCA) pointed out that experimental rats were being forced to ingest the equivalent of thirty-five cups of coffee all at once. The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), founded in 1978 with soft-drink money, joined the NCA to conduct epidemiological studies on caffeine. Coca-Cola was particularly concerned about saving caffeine’s reputation, since it sold both coffee and Coke. Caught in the political riptide, the FDA waffled. “We’re not saying caffeine is unsafe,” Sanford Miller of the FDA said. “We’re just not saying it’s safe.”40 The agency issued a warning against caffeine consumption by pregnant women, but it did not demand a warning label.

The next year, an epidemiological study appeared to link coffee to pancreatic cancer, triggering widespread media attention and sick jokes about coffee being “good till the last drop dead.” Then a new study purported to link caffeine with the formation of benign breast lumps. Yet another claimed that coffee produced heart arrhythmia, while a Norwegian survey found higher cholesterol levels in heavy coffee drinkers.

The 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, bible of the American Psychiatric Association, included “caffeinism” as a diagnosis, making the consumption of too much coffee a bona fide psychiatric disorder. In 1981 Charles Wetherall published Kicking the Coffee Habit, calling coffee “Public Health Enemy Number One,” which was waging “a pathological war on this country.”41

The NCA moved vigorously to counter the calumnies against its drink, funding more studies and assembling a file of thousands of articles from the medical and scientific literature. Many other independent scientists and doctors also pointed out flaws in the anti-coffee findings, and a 1982 study of twelve thousand pregnant women revealed no detectable ill effects from coffee consumption. Nonetheless, the damage was done. During the 1980s, coffee was associated with over one hundred diseases and disorders and, though subsequent studies threw every negative finding into question, the implanted fears led more consumers to decaffeinated alternatives or away from coffee completely.

The Pendulum Swings Back to Pro-Coffee

Today the debate over coffee and caffeine rages on, though for the moment the pendulum has swung to the positive side. Caffeine is the most widely taken psychoactive drug on earth, and coffee is its foremost delivery system. “Today, most of the world’s population … consumes caffeine daily,” wrote Jack James, author of two books and many articles on caffeine.42 He estimates that global consumption is the approximate equivalent of one caffeine-containing beverage per day for every person in the world. In the United States, around 90 percent of the population habitually takes caffeine in one form or another.

Humans clearly crave stimulating concoctions, drinking, chewing, or smoking some form of drug in virtually every culture in the form of alcohol, coca leaves, kava, marijuana, poppies, mushrooms, qat, betel nuts, tobacco, coffee, kola nuts, yoco bark, guayusa leaves, yaupon leaves (cassina), maté, guaraná nuts, cacao (chocolate), or tea. Of those in the list above, caffeine is certainly the most ubiquitous, appearing in the last nine items.

Caffeine is one of the alkaloids: organic (carbon-containing) compounds built around rings of nitrogen atoms. Alkaloids are the pharmacologically active chemicals produced by many tropical plants. Because they have no winter to provide relief from predators, tropical plants have evolved sophisticated methods to protect themselves. In other words, caffeine is a natural pesticide. It is quite likely that plants contain caffeine because it affects the nervous system of most would-be consumers, discouraging them from eating the plants. Of course, that is precisely the attraction for the human animal.

Caffeine, C8H10N4O2, readily passes through biological membranes such as the gastrointestinal tract. The human liver treats caffeine as a poison and attempts to dismantle it, stripping off methyl groups. It can’t cope with all of them, so quite a few whole caffeine molecules make it past the liver and eventually find a docking place in the brain.

The caffeine molecule mimics the neurotransmitter adenosine, which decreases electrical activity in the brain and inhibits the release of other neurotransmitters. In other words, adenosine slows things down. It lets us rest and probably helps put us to sleep once a day. When caffeine gets to the receptors first, however, it doesn’t let adenosine do its job. Caffeine doesn’t actively keep us awake – it just blocks the natural mental brake.

The brain isn’t the only place caffeine affects. There are receptors throughout the body, where adenosine performs varied functions. Thus, caffeine constricts some blood vessels. In low doses, it appears to slow the heartbeat, while larger amounts cause the heart to beat more rapidly. Caffeine causes certain muscles to contract more easily. At the same time, however, it can relax the airways of the lungs and open other types of blood vessels. Caffeine is a diuretic, and small amounts of calcium float away in the urine, leading to concern over possible bone loss. The latest research indicates that this is a potential concern only for elderly women with low calcium intake.

As Stephen Braun concluded in his book Buzz: “The effects of caffeine on such things as breast cancer, bone loss, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and mental dysfunction have been examined in … detail and, to date, no clear evidence has been found linking moderate consumption of caffeine … with these or any other health disorder.”43