Nina Luttinger - The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop
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A freshly updated edition of the best introduction to one of the worlds most popular products, The Coffee Book is jammed full of facts, figures, cartoons, and commentary covering coffee from its first use in Ethiopia in the sixth century to the rise of Starbucks and the emergence of Fair Trade coffee in the twenty-first. The book explores the process of cultivation, harvesting, and roasting from bean to cup; surveys the social history of caf society from the first coffeehouses in Constantinople to beatnik havens in Berkeley and Greenwich Village; and tells the dramatic tale of high-stakes international trade and speculation for a product that can make or break entire national economies. It also examines the industrys major players, revealing how they have systematically reduced the quality of the bean and turned a much-loved product into a commodity and lifestyle accoutrement, ruining the lives of millions of farmers around the world in the process.Finally, The Coffee Book, hailed as a Best Business Book by Library Journal when it was first published, considers the exploitation of labor and damage to the environment that mass cultivation causes, and explores the growing conscious coffee market and Fair Trade movement.
Nina Luttinger: author's other books
Who wrote The Coffee Book: Anatomy of an Industry from Crop to the Last Drop? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
James Hoffmann
Kingston
Robert W Thurston
Lani Kingston
Robert W. Thurston
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Table of Contents
To our excellent families, and to David Kirkpatrick, father of this book
This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightaway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army on the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensign to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.
HONOR DE BALZAC, Treatise on Modern Stimulants (1852)
Preface
COFFEE IS AN ANCIENT COMMODITY that weaves together a mosaic of histories dating back more than a millennium and stretching all the way around the world. Its story extends from the bustling cafs of sixteenth-century Cairo to the human misery of eighteenth-century Dutch colonial slavery, from the booming growth of Brazil in the nineteenth century to the modern-day coffeehouse imperialism of Starbucks. Much more than the mere chemicals that compose it, coffee is a bit of history itself.
And we consume it zealously. The world drinks about 1.5 billion cups per daythe United States alone drinks one-fifth of this. Coffee drinking is a cultural fixture that says as much about us as it does about the bean itself. A habit-forming stimulant, coffee is nonetheless associated with relaxation and sociability. In a society that combines buzzing overstimulation with soul-aching meaninglessness, coffee and its associated rituals are, for many of us, the lubricants that make it possible to go on.
Perhaps for this reason coffee occupies a distinctive niche in our cultural landscape. It is the major beverage besides alcohol to engender public houses devoted to its consumption (and both have done so since time immemorial). Uniquely, though, coffee is welcome in almost any situation, from the car to the boardroom, from the breakfast table to the public park, alone or in company of any kind. Since its adoption as a beverage, coffee has been offered as an antipode to alcoholmore so even than abstinence, perhaps in recognition of a human need for joyfully mood-altering substances and the convivial social interactions that go along with them.
Only a handful of consumer goods have fueled the passions of the public as much as coffee. The subject of ancient propaganda and the object of countless prohibitions and promotions over the centuries, coffee has inspired impassioned struggles on the battlefields of economics, human rights, politics, and religion. Coffee may be a drink for sharing, but as a commodity it invites protectionism, oppression, and destruction. Its steamy past implicates the otherwise noble bean in early colonialism, various revolutions, the emergence of the bourgeoisie, lopsided international development, technological hubris, crushing global debt, and more. These forces, in turn, have shaped the way coffee has been incorporated into our culture and economy. Colonialism, for example, served as the primary reason for and vehicle of coffees spread throughout the globe; colonial powers dictated where coffee went and where it did not and established trading relationships that continue to this day.
The story of coffee also reveals how (and why) we interact with a plethora of other commodities, legal or not. Surprising similarities exist, for example, between coffees early history and the current controversy over marijuana. Todays national debate over the merits of marijuana, although young by comparison, is the modern version of the strife surrounding coffee in other ages. The social acceptability of each has been affected by religious and political opinion, conflicting health claims, institutionalized cultural norms, and the moneyed interests of government and of private industry. The evolution of coffees social acceptability highlights the delicate dance of interests and truths that governs the ways in which we structure our societies.
Coffee is consumed with great fervor in rich countries such as the United States yet is grown, with few exceptions, in the poorest parts of the globe. In fact, it was long one of the most valuable items of legal international trade, and it remains the United States largest nonalcoholic beverage import by value. It is the principal source of foreign exchange for dozens of countries around the world. The coffee in your cup is an immediate, tangible connection with the rural poor in some of the most destitute parts of the planet. It is a physical link across space and cultures from one end of the human experience to the other.
The coffee-trading system that has evolved to bring all this about is an intricate knot of economics, politics, and sheer powera bizarre arena trod by giants: by some of the worlds largest transnational corporations, by enormous governments, and by vast trading cartels. The trip coffee takes from the crop to your cup turns out not to be so straightforward after all, but rather a turbulent and unpredictable ride through the waves and eddies of international commodity dynamics, where the product itself becomes secondary to the wash of money and power.
Even coffee drinks are not so straightforward anymore. While writing the first edition of this book we sucked down 83 double Americanos, 12 double espressos, 4 perfect ristrettos, 812 regular cups (from 241 French press-loads, plus 87 cups of drip coffee), 47 cups of Turkish coffee, a half-dozen regrettable cups of flavored coffee, 10 pounds of organic coffee, 7 pounds of Fair Trade coffee, a quarter-pound of chicory and a handful of hemp seeds as occasional adjuncts, 1 can of ground supermarket coffee (drunk mostly iced), 6 canned or bottled coffee drinks, 2 pints of coffee beer, a handful of mochas, 1 pint of coffee concentrate, a couple of cappuccinos, 1 espresso soda, and, just to see, a lone double tall low-fat soy orange decaf latte.
Since that edition of The Coffee Book came out in 1999, a lot has changed in the coffee industry. Vietnam rose from obscurity to become the worlds second largest producer, contributing to a worldwide coffee glut that precipitated a crash in which wholesale coffee prices hit their lowest level in all of recorded history. The Coffee Crisis wreaked havoc on millions of already impoverished farmers and forced the industry to reevaluate its role as a conduit between the richest on the planet and the poorest.
At the same time, the specialty sectorthe gourmet coffee industry that began to flourish in North America in the 1990shas become an even larger part of the overall coffee industry, with thousands of new players, each vying to distinguish itself in a crowded and competitive market. But even this sectors makeup is becoming more homogenized: half of all cafs in the United States are Starbucks outlets, up from just a fifth when The Coffee Book was first published.
For a century the industry lived and died by the benchmark New York Cprice, a composite that takes into account various commodity grades. But today, as traders and consumers increasingly consider origin and varietal, as well as the environmental and labor issues behind the coffee they purchase, the structure of the market is changing.
The growth of ethical consumerism has helped propel sustainable coffeesbird-friendly, organic, and Fair Trade coffees in particularinto the mainstream. Even large, mainstream coffee companies are dipping their toes into alternative approaches that help farmers and protect the environment, making some parts of the coffee trade at least bright spots in the otherwise dismal worldwide picture of heartless globalization.
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