Black Magic

Where do we begin with a discussion of coffee, that mundane liquid drug we take for granted along with the toothbrush and morning newspaper as we greet each new day? The fact is that you can begin almost anywhere--an Ian Fleming novel, say, that praises the produce of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, favored by 007 and his creator. Or you may begin at my own household, where the ancient espresso maker, because of some malfunction, has suddenly and obstinately refused to deliver that vital pre-workday hit.

Or you may consider Paris’ Cafe de Procope. Established in 1689 as France’s first enduring coffeehouse, where the likes of Voltaire, Rousseau, Beaumarchais and Diderot would gather and scheme, today it is a reasonably priced restaurant (by Left Bank standards), situated opposite the Comedie Francaise.

On the question of scheming, we might do well to heed the words of coffee historian William Ukers, writing in 1935: “[W]here it has been introduced it has spelled revolution. It has been the world’s most radical drink in that its function has always been to make people think. And when the people begin to think, they become dangerous to tyrants and to foes of liberty of thought and action.”

The task of the authors examined here was to consider the liquid that revs up at least half of working adults and layabouts for the morning. Many if not most wouldn’t dream of facing the morning without a cup of the brew. We might even have a bit of fun by calling coffee a sort of skeleton key to history, or a window through which we can view the minutiae that send us spinning through near space and far. Through the things we take for granted can we view the world.

It wouldn’t be hard to judge coffee as the world’s most popular nonalcoholic drink, and immediately a comparison with tea is invited. Through officials of the East India Co., the trader Richard Wickham in 1615 heard of chai, or tea, and managed to acquire some out of Whampoa Reach, the anchorage for foreign ships just south of Canton, thus inaugurating an English tradition that’s become an addiction. Already you can see neck hairs standing on end the world over, as is wont to happen when the tyranny of personal taste enters a public discussion. Opera lovers are permitted to like Callas or Tebaldi but not both, and so it is with coffee and tea.

That latter brew is grandly served among the graffiti-marked hallowed halls of such venerable institutions as Oxford and Cambridge, while the ritual of discussions over coffee, tea enthusiasts might say, signify a lower activity and order entirely. Consider the Restoration period of the latter 17th century, when the English (personified in the diplomat Sir William Temple visiting in Amsterdam) finally learned that it was impolite to spit on the floor of coffeehouses when men were discussing, inevitably, politics.

One of horticulture’s greatest mysteries, coffee originated on the mountainsides of Abyssinia, today Ethiopia, though no one can say when or by whom it was discovered. A favorite Arab legend, however, holds that in ancient times a goatherd named Kaldi noticed that his herd seemed bewitched after chewing the glossy green leaves and red berries of a strange new tree.

Civilization (that is to say the Judeo-Christian one) didn’t know of coffee until the mid-1500s, when it was introduced by enterprising Turks, who grew it in Yemen and took it into smelly, supreme Venice, where that port’s first coffeehouse opened in 1683. Thus began a passionate love affair on the part of Europeans with the drink, and Europe would eventually mean the world.

But because coffee had Muslim roots by virtue of its introduction by Arab traders, this boiled infusion of roasted, ground seeds was highly suspect in Christendom. Asked by his priests to ban it, Pope Clement VIII reputedly proclaimed, “Why, this Satan’s drink is so delicious 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.”

Coffeehouses soon became hotbeds less of spiritual intrigue than of political. In 1675, Charles II banned such houses, known as “penny universities,” dens of sedition and worse, but later relented because of public outcry. Where else could a man express his ideas?

Coffeehouses, unlike taverns and beer halls, nurtured European intellectual life. “The city of Vienna is filled with coffee houses,” one 18th century traveler observed, “where the novelists or those who busy themselves with newspapers delight to meet.” In 1722, Jonathan Swift wrote soberly, “Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.”

Coffeehouses as meeting places for the interchange of ideas and the formation of public opinion have been blamed by such historians as William Ukers and Harold Routh for the French Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, the Industrial Revolution, slavery and the countless revolts against that institution. One might even credit the coffee bean with stimulating the radical notion that the “haves” ought to have less and the “have-nots” ought to have more, thus urging the rise of a middle class.

But these developments are late in the day, for once the bean conquered Europe, it soon proliferated throughout the world-encircling belt between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn; second only to oil, it is today the Earth’s most valuable legal bulk commodity, as spices, especially clove, nutmeg and mace, were in the Age of Discovery.

To substantiate this extravagant claim, let’s consider that the 13.6 billion pounds of coffee grown in 1996 would form a pyramid towering 2,000 feet from a triangular base of 1,000 feet on each side.

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As was also true of spices, the art of coffee preparation was clothed for centuries in secrecy by Arab traders, who exploited the barbarism of the West. The Age of Discovery and its dreams of El Dorado had not yet brought a tidal wave of wealth sweeping across Europe. Methods for preparing and brewing coffee historically have been as diverse as the cultures claiming coffee as their own, thus introducing a plethora of variations from Yemen’s strong, clear liquid flavored with cloves, cardamom and sugar to Turkey’s strong and muddy concoction.

If there is any general rule, and most likely there is not, historians might agree that Anglo-Saxon cultures seem to prefer milk in their coffee, and that the cultures of the Mediterranean don’t. And we haven’t even considered places as varied and distant in taste and culture, not to mention space, as Brazil and Indonesia.

Appreciating a cup of joe or java is a highly personal matter, as in the case of the French novelist Honore de Balzac, who would brook no milk, preferring instead a finely ground roasted bean with only a suspicion of water, consumed on an empty stomach. The results, in his words?

“Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop. . . . Forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink--for the mighty labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

I gleaned all this lore from the four happily diverse books that unintentionally bask in one another’s reflected light.

H. Robert Bates’ work (the author is Eaton professor of the science of government and a faculty fellow in the Institute of International Development at Harvard), “Open-Economy Politics,” is a no-nonsense academic study of the politics of coffee, and it brings to mind an observation by the late eminent French historian Fernand Braudel, who wryly observed in a similar context that such goods were a luxury trade, but have not luxuries always been what instinctively seem most necessary to man?

The international coffee trade, we learn, is uniquely subject to effective regulation. Bates explores the origins of the regulatory methods employed and the ultimate demise of the International Coffee Organization, a sort of worldwide coffee cartel formed in the 1960s to control price.

The reasons for its failure are strangely reminiscent of the fate of state-sponsored colonial trading empires in bygone eras. It’s as if the various East India companies of past centuries, which dealt mainly in spices and were acutely subject to the vagaries of local and international political factions, formed a single consortium by which to regulate the coffee trade and had no basis beyond the commodity for cooperation.

In “Uncommon Grounds,” Mark Pendergrast takes a more encyclopedic approach to his subject, which is scholarly and authoritative (as was his “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola”) but clearly intended for a more popular market than Bates’ academic assessment. Bolstered by an impressive and lengthy bibliography, the book’s clever title and somewhat inflated subtitle provide a nice summary of its contents.

After introductory matter, the author begins with a short, entertaining history of coffee’s rise to worldwide popularity before plunging into a lively and anecdotal account, laced with memorable quotations, of the madness of the coffee trade, writ large and small, over the last two centuries. The bean has been blamed for spawning revolutions, condemned as a major health hazard and venerated as mankind’s greatest drink.

In analyzing the American thirst, Pendergrast reveals a surprising statistic. “[The] world coffee supply would continue to grow, stimulated in large part by the seemingly bottomless American coffee cup. While the British sipped tea, their rebellious colonies gulped a stronger black brew, destined to fuel the remarkable American entrepreneurial spirit. By the end of the 19th century the United States would consume nearly half of the world’s coffee.”

Though America’s obsession with the brew may seem farfetched, its roots may well go back to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, after which it became a patriotic duty to spurn tea in favor of coffee. Another factor was that it came to be grown closer to home and henceforth was cheaper than tea.

Though not as exhaustive as Pendergrast’s nor as scholarly as Bates’, Gregory Dicum and Nina Luttinger’s anatomy of the industry, “The Coffee Book,” is no less informative, and at only 196 pages, including a number of graphs, posters, cartoons, as well as an index, it distinguishes itself by its somewhat skeptical and antinomian stance.

The San Francisco authors, who run Fair Trade Zone, “a company that imports and wholesales ecologically and socially responsible products [including coffee] from around the world,” are environmentalists. Though they detail the history of the industry, it soon becomes clear that their central concerns are sociological: the exploitation of cheap labor with environmental damage, as well as the rising “fair trade” movement.

At the bottom of coffee’s power pyramid are the barefoot pickers, often entire families struggling for survival, who labor from dawn to dusk filling baskets with red coffee cherries. At the top of the pyramid is the Starbucks Corp., a rapidly expanding worldwide concern that in 1997 earned revenues of $967 million with 25,000 employees.

Like most spices that earlier transformed the world’s economy, the coffee bean is grown only in “Third World countries,” and its progression from crop picked by the poorest laborer to ambrosia in your breakfast brew says much about the driving engine of capitalism.

“Coffee,” the authors write, “has been living a double life ever since it began to be traded internationally. The process of trading moves this globe-trotting bean not only through space and time but across cultures. . . . Who picked my coffee beans, and what is that person’s life like? . . . Because most coffee is traded as a commodity, any factors beyond the qualities of the beans themselves are considered extraneous by the market.”

A different cup of brew entirely is Stewart Lee Allen’s “The Devil’s Cup,” in many ways the most accessible of the lot. It is exclusively a first-person narrative, a travel book on the order of books by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, and despite the most minor of quibbles, I think it’s thrilling adventure. (A comparable book in approach, tone and scope to Allen’s is Jason Goodwin’s “A Time for Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea,” published a decade ago.)

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Allen’s obsession with coffee takes him to the forbidding regions of some of the most exotic and perilous corners of the globe--Ethiopia, Yemen, India, Brazil and Turkey--as well as the poshest and brightest capitals of Europe. No matter how he travels--by foot, freighter, bus or donkey--my enthusiasm for his account is exceeded only by my relief at not having been required to accompany him, save in spirit.

As for quibbles, I could have done without the glancing but distracting references to his lover, Nina, and his neo-hippie search for the “best of the worst cup” with his companions through America’s South and Southwest at the book’s close, which is so well-rutted a road as to be too much a non-ending for a writer of Allen’s obvious talents.

Nonetheless, he sees coffee as the substance that drives history and sets out across the globe gathering evidence to test his thesis, and therein lies the excitement of his book.

Allen is at his best when he is alone, and his mastery of the quick sketch may be envied by any writer. On sampling coffee on the Asian subcontinent, he writes: “India produces the world’s most consistently vile cup of joe. It is never fresh-brewed but made with instant ‘flakes,’ which are boiled with milk, sugar, and nutmeg. The resulting stew is best described as a sickeningly sweet, piping-hot milkshake, the memory of which is a dark blot on my soul. The whole thing is not only vile, it’s illogical. Tropical cuisines worldwide avoid dairy products like the plague. Here they are worshiped. How could a culture with such a fine cuisine be content with such a perversion?”

Here Allen is on Calcutta, “the world’s greatest city, and I’ll tell you why: unendurable suffering, arrogance, benevolence, intelligence, and greed thrive side-by-side, face-to-face, 24 hours a day, with no apology. On one bus ride I watched a woman fall dead of starvation, while across the street children in immaculate white school uniforms shrieked with pleasure over a game of croquet; two blocks earlier I’d seen a woman immersed up to her neck in a muddy pond, intently praying to the sun.”

Or hear him on “Harrar, a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands, after a grueling 24-hour train journey from the capital, Addis Ababa. . . . Its winding streets were free of both cars and thieves, a big improvement over Addis, where pickpockets followed me like flies and my one night out had ended in an attempted robbery after a ‘friendship coffee ceremony [details left to the imagination].’ I also liked Harrar’s Arabic flavor, the whitewashed mud buildings, and the colorful gypsy-African clothes worn by the girls.”

Now he’s in Vienna: “So was born the most politically loaded meal in the world--the Continental breakfast of coffee stolen from the Turks and pastry shaped to mock their flag. But when hundreds of millions of Europeans begin their day with the combo, they are doing more than unwittingly commemorating the Turkish defeat at Vienna. They are participating in a rite that lies at the heart of the most profound pharmacological revolution in European history.”

Who will have the last word on coffee? Can there be a last word on the subject? Let’s give one to Pendergrast, who turns the task over to someone writing a century ago, “Only one thing is certain about coffee, though. Wherever it is grown, sold, brewed, and consumed, there will be lively controversy, strong opinions, and good conversation. ‘The best stories [are told] over coffee,’ wrote a wise commentator in 1902, ‘as the aroma of the coffee opens the portals of [the] soul, and the story, long hidden, is winged for posterity.’ ”

As for me, I’m vexed at having just discovered that a valve on my beloved Italian espresso maker cannot be replaced because the machine is obsolete; and I’m miffed at having to settle, at least for the time being, for a Bodum French Press with its clumsy plunger to make my Sumatran brew drinkable. Short on the milk, please.