Uncommon Grounds: How Coffee Changed the World

“In the form of a hot infusion of its ground, roasted seeds, coffee is consumed for its bittersweet bouquet, its mind-racing jump start, and social bonding.”

Coffee — from its artful preparation to its secret history — holds enormous cultural mesmerism as the world’s favorite psychoactive drug. It may have taken a Founding Father to teach Americans how to make it, it wasn’t until Mark Pendergrast’s 1999 book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (public library) that coffee’s rich legacy and anthropology came into full bloom.

In a recently released updated edition, Pendergrast paints a beautiful backdrop to the story at a Guatemalan coffee planation 4,500 feet above sea level:

I pop the skin of a ripe coffee cherry open in my mouth and savor the sweet mucilage. It takes a bit of tongue work to get down to the tough-skinned parchment protecting each bean. Like peanuts, coffee beans usually grow in facing pairs. Spitting out the parchment, I finally get the two beans, which are covered by a diaphanous silver skin. In some cases where the soil lacks sufficient boron, I might have found only one bean, called a peaberry, considered by some to possess a slightly more concentrated taste. I spit out the seeds, too hard to chew.

I hear other harvesters — whole families of them — chatting and singing in Spanish. This is a happy time, when the year’s hard work of pruning, fertilizing, weeding, tending, and repairing roads and water channels comes down to ripe coffee. I sing a song with a few Spanish phrases: mi amor, mi corazón.

Coffee Arabica: leaves, flowers, and fruit

Painted from nature by M.E. Eaton, 1922 (public domain)

And yet beneath this romanticized vision of communal exuberance lies the harsh reality of thankless work on an incredibly labor-intensive crop — this vignette, in fact, is emblematic of coffee’s baked-in paradoxes:

Tiny women carry amazingly large bags, twice their eighty-pound weight. Some of the women carry babies in slings around front. A good adult picker can harvest over two hundred pounds of cherries and earn $8 a day, more than twice the Guatemalan minimum daily wage.

In Guatemala, the contrast between poverty and wealth is stark. Land distribution is lopsided, and those who perform the most difficult labor do not reap the profits. Yet there is no quick fix to the inequities built into the economic system, nor any viable alternatives to coffee as a crop on these mountainsides. The workers are in many ways more content and fulfilled than their counterparts in the United States. They have a strong sense of tradition and family life.

As the workers bring in the harvest, I ponder the irony that, once processed, these beans will travel thousands of miles to give pleasure to people who enjoy a lifestyle beyond the imagination of these Guatemalan laborers. Yet it would be unfair to label one group “villains” and another “victims” in this drama. I realize that nothing about this story is going to be simple.

THE CAFÉ DE PARIS IN 1843

From an engraving by Bosredon (public domain)

The story is, indeed, rather complicated — and the scale of complications is enormous. One of the world’s most valuable commodities, coffee provides sustenance for nearly 125 million people who labor in its various related industries. There is, however, a bitter disconnect between the beautiful settings in which that labor takes place and the economic injustice surrounding it:

The vast majority of those who perform these repetitive tasks work in beautiful places, yet these laborers earn an average of $3 a day. Many live in poverty without plumbing, electricity, medical care, or nutritious foods. The coffee they prepare lands on breakfast tables, in offices and upscale coffee bars of the United States, Europe, Japan, and other developed countries, where cosmopolitan consumers often pay a day’s Third World wages for a cappuccino.

'Ah, How Sweet Coffee Tastes—Lovelier Than a Thousand Kisses, Sweeter Far than Muscatel Wine!'

Opening bars of Betty's aria in Bach's Coffee Cantata, 1732 (public domain)

Pendergrast offers a brief history of coffee’s enduring cultural allure, inextricably entangled with controversial politics:

From its original African home, coffee propagation has spread in a girdle around the globe, taking over whole plains and mountainsides between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. In the form of a hot infusion of its ground, roasted seeds, coffee is consumed for its bittersweet bouquet, its mind-racing jump start, and social bonding. At various times it has been prescribed as an aphrodisiac, enema, nerve tonic, and life extender.

[…]

Beginning as a medicinal drink for the elite, coffee became the favored modern stimulant of the blue-collar worker during his break, the gossip starter in middle-class kitchens, the romantic binder for wooing couples, and the sole, bitter companion of the lost soul. Coffeehouses have provided places to plan revolutions, write poetry, do business, and meet friends. The drink became such an intrinsic part of Western culture that it has seeped into an incredible number of popular songs: “You’re the cream in my coffee”; “Let’s have another cup of coffee, let’s have another piece of pie”; “I love coffee, I love tea, I love the java jive and it loves me”; “Black coffee, love’s a hand-me-down brew.”

The modern coffee industry was spawned in late nineteenth-century America during the furiously capitalistic Gilded Age. At the end of the Civil War, Jabez Burns invented the first efficient industrial coffee roaster. The railroad, telegraph, and steamship revolutionized distribution and communication, while newspapers, magazines, and lithography allowed massive advertising campaigns. Moguls tried to corner the coffee market, while Brazilians frantically planted thousands of acres of coffee trees, only to see the price decline catastrophically. A pattern of worldwide boom and bust commenced.

By the early twentieth century, coffee had become a major consumer product, advertised widely throughout the country.

Coffee-house keepers' tokens of the 17th century (public domain)

Drawn for 'All About Coffee' by William H. Ukers, 1922, from the originals in the British Museum, and in the Beaufoy collection at the Guildhall Museum

And yet coffee is as sensitive a crop as its cultural legacy is robust:

Coffee’s quality is first determined by essentials such as type of plant, soil conditions, and growing altitude. It can be ruined at any step along the line. A coffee bean greedily absorbs odors and flavors. Too much moisture produces mold. A too-light roast produces undeveloped, bitter coffee, while over-roasted coffee resembles charcoal. After roasting, the bean stales quickly unless used within a week or so. Boiling or sitting on a hot plate quickly reduces the finest brew to a stale cup of black bile.

Early foreign and American coffee-making devices, 1922 (public domain)

1—English adaptation of French boiler. 2—English coffee biggin. 3—Improved Rumford percolator. 4—Jones's exterior-tube percolator. 5—Parker's steam-fountain coffee maker. 6—Platow's filterer. 7—Brain's Vacuum, or pneumatic filter. 8—Beart's percolator. 9—American coffee biggin. 10—cloth-bag drip pot. 11—Vienna coffee pot. 12—Le Brun's cafetière. 13—Reversible Potsdam cafetière. 14, 15—Gen. Hutchinson's percolator and urn. 16—Etruscan biggin

Pendergrast then points to the quality assessment tools modern coffee experts have developed:

Coffee experts talk about four basic components that blend to create the perfect cup: aroma, body, acidity, and flavor. The aroma is familiar and obvious enough — that fragrance that often promises more than the taste delivers. Body refers to the feel or “weight” of the coffee in the mouth, how it rolls around the tongue and fills the throat on the way down. Acidity refers to a sparkle, a brightness, a tang that adds zest to the cup. Finally, flavor is the evanescent, subtle taste that explodes in the mouth, then lingers as a gustatory memory.

'Some package coffees that advertising has made famous'

From 'All About Coffee,' 1922 (public domain)

Uncommon Grounds goes on to explore such fascinating and often contentious aspects of the coffee ecosystem as the development of mass production, the oppression and displacement of indigenous peoples, the rise of the supermarket, women’s emancipation, and the tactics of branding. Complement it with A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola.

↬ Open Culture

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Nellie Was a Lady: 1945 Radio Dramatization of Pioneering Female Journalist Nellie Bly’s Life

“The life, loves, and laughter of one of America’s most fascinating women.”

In 1889, pioneering Victorian journalist Nellie Bly, who paved the way for women in media, set out to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, inspired by Jules Verne. As if the true story weren’t riveting enough, a 1945 radio segment by Turner Bullock, titled Nellie Was a Lady, dramatized Bly’s life and her unprecedented adventure.

Though the program — in a precursor to current debates about sponsored content — was sponsored by chemical company DuPont, it’s half an hour of unabated educational entertainment, the kind that makes one lament the disappearance of radio dramatizations:

In related exciting news: After a number of requests, Wendy MacNaughton’s glorious illustration of how to pack like Nellie Bly is now available as a print, with proceeds benefiting the Women’s Media Center in honor of Bly — enjoy:

Thanks, Bob

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Letters to Ms.: How Mary Thom (RIP) Built “Social Media” for Women’s Rights in the 1970s

Celebrating the invisible art of making a movement visible.

Yesterday, I attended the memorial for reconstructionist Mary Thom, whom we lost in a tragic motorcycle crash last month and who changed the voice of women’s rights as founding editor of groundbreaking feminist magazine Ms. In the early 1970s, just as women were emerging from the stifling grip of the Mad Men era and beginning to raise their voices against injustice at the workplace, Ms. came in as a beacon of what many of us have since come to take for granted, a brave promise of what life would be like in a gender-blind world.

Named after the form of address recommended in secretarial handbooks for when a woman’s marital status was unknown, subsequently subverted by women who wished to be recognized as individuals rather than defined by their relationship to a man, the magazine proclaimed in its inaugural half-column announcement that “Ms.” was meant “only to signify a female human being. It’s symbolic, and important. There’s a lot in a name.” Indeed, there was: From the outset, Ms. made no apologies for calling things by their true, hegemonically defiant names — in the Preview Issue, which appeared as an insert in New York magazine in the spring of 1972, Ms. launched “a campaign for honesty and freedom,” in which fifty-three women signed a statement declaring that they had had an abortion, which at the time was illegal in most states.

Mary Thom by Lisa Congdon for The Reconstructionists

Three decades before the age of social media and instant communities, Ms. presented an unprecedented avenue for women to connect with one another around the issues that impacted their lives daily, which remained taboo and thus cautiously avoided by mainstream media. It was in the letters to the magazine, collected in Letters to Ms., 1972-1987 (public library) and edited by Thom herself, that these voices come together into a chorus line for the era’s central political and social concerns — equal pay, reproductive rights, the everyday language of bias and discrimination.

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem writes in the introduction to the anthology:

Whatever Ms. readers are doing at any given moment, a third to a half of American women are doing three to five years later. You can track change through these letters, and even predict the future.

The country couldn’t have better leaders and teachers than these thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent letter writers. . . .

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem at Mary Thom memorial: 'Mary chose to be backstage and without her there would BE no stage.'

Long before the heyday of smartphones and email and text-messaging, Thom herself laments the lost art of letter-writing in the foreword, reminding us of just how monumental and paradigm-shifting a “social network” this epistolary sisterhood was:

Letter writing is nearly a lost art in this age of telephones and easy travel — and the receipt of written correspondence that is detailed and witty is a lost pleasure. As a result, when Ms. magazine began publishing in 1972, few of us who were on the staff were prepared for the experience of reading the rich variety of the letters that were addressed to the editors. They allowed us to get to know thousands of our readers on a level of intimacy that one shares with only a few real-life friends.

[…]

Ms. was founded to give voice to the concerns of a movement, and the letters help us fulfill that purpose.

And the letters were indeed exceptional — diverse yet uniformly courageous, from the confessional letters seeking a sense that others share in the same struggles and concerns to the classic “click” letters, a term coined by the magazine to denote an instant feminist insight derived from a woman’s anecdote that just “clicks.”

Many tackled the workplace revolution — at the time of the inaugural issue, some 33.5 million women were working outside their homes, but most were earning 59 cents to the dollar of an equally qualified man doing the same job. Meanwhile, the work of keeping a household running and raising children was unaccounted for in the gross national product although it essentially fueled the economy by raising the next generations. One woman had a clever solution, but was met with institutional rigidity:

Rather than hire a housekeeper and baby sitter for our three preschool children, my husband and I decided to “hire” me — to pay me a salary and contribute social security. The Internal Revenue Service said nay; this can only be done for someone not a family member. We tried to contract for disability insurance for me — in the event of my not being able to perform my housekeeping and child-care duties — but we have not yet found a carrier. I am not adding to the family income — and he cannot be compensated for a loss that does not exist.

The implication is clear — the establishment is making it more attractive to leave the home and let others raise their families. So I went job hunting. Results: very few jobs open in my field; higher salaries for men of the same background; hesitation to hire a woman with three “little ones” because I might not be dependable (miss work). Let’s find out why men with families are considered good, stable, desirable employees and women are not.

Mary Fortuna
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
February 1973 issue

But the bias didn’t only come from “the establishment” — one anonymous woman notes its most devastating manifestation:

I work part time at a gas station in Oakland. I pump gas, wash windows, put air in tires, check and charge batteries, check transmissions, change oil, hub jobs, and other basic things. I don’t claim to be a mechanic; I’m not. But I’m getting a little tired of women asking me to get “one of the men” to check their tires, water, and oil. I have been trained on the job to do these things. Men seem to trust and accept my service much more willingly than the women. One woman asked me to check her transmission. I did and found that she was completely empty and suggested she add a quart of transmission fluid. She didn’t believe me and asked that I get “one of the men” to check it out. So I did, and he told her the same thing. This happens every day. I wish there was something that could be done. It is hard enough for women to seek positions in fields that are dominated by men without having to deal with mistrust and lack of support from other women.

Name Withheld
September 1973

A “click” letter poignantly considers just how deeply rooted and systemic the unequal pay problem is:

It occurred to me the other day to wonder at the discrepancy in wages that I pay to those high-school students who baby sit and those who do lawn cutting and gardening for me. Most of the “lawn and garden” people, who happen to be boys ask for a dollar an hour. Most of the baby sitters, who usually happen to be girls, ask seventy-five cents an hour.

Now I ask myself, is caring for my children less important, less valuable, less a responsibility? Or is lawn cutting and gardening considered harder and more taxing physical work? (Two active children under five can be pretty hard, taxing, physical work, too.) Or is it that boys just ask for and receive high wages from the beginning? And is it that child care is, anyway, considered to be “women’s work” and not deserving of pay? Click!

Marge Mitchell
Baltimore, Maryland
September 1974 issue

One woman shares an amusing anecdote of claiming empowerment by turning back on the establishment its own double standards of sexual objectification:

I finally got up the courage to challenge an old established male tradition in my office. I do telephone sales. Our working area in the office has always been covered with “girlie” pictures and photographs of devastating (and devastated) maidens. This made us few women in the office feel terribly uncomfortable.

When the majority of the male staff was out to lunch, we proceeded to rape the latest issue of Playgirl of its best. Over my desk now hangs one gorgeous specimen of the male species, the centerfold. Everywhere there was a girlie picture there are now beautiful stud photographs.

I think the reactions of the men in the office could best be summarized in terms of shock. Although everyone tried to be good humored about it, jokingly or otherwise, they all compared themselves in some way to the models. It was a marvelous experience to see super-duper macho stud types go all to pieces when confronted with the same thing we have had to face for years — images of ourselves as we could never hope to be, images of ourselves as seen only in the minds of men.

Name Withheld
October 13, 1975

Others shared moments of small daily triumphs, the glimmering light of hope for an equal future:

One day last week I pulled up to a four-way stop in my taxi. At one of the other stop signs sat a police officer in a chase cruiser, and at the third, a telephone installer in a Bell Canada van. What made the occasion memorable was the fact that all three of us were women. We celebrated with much joyful laughter and raised thumbs.

Jill Wood
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
November 1980 issue

But in academia, a field still notorious for its gender discrimination, things were far from joyful:

In 1972, as full professor, I sued the university for discrimination in salary on the basis of sex. They were simply paying the men more than the women, especially me. It took all these years of stonewalling, avoiding, ignoring, before they finally admitted I was right, and settled out of court. Of course, I had to promise not to tell anyone how much they gave me and to be a good girl and not encourage any other woman professor to do the same heinous act of subversion of the rights of administration to set salaries. At age seventy-two (I retired in 1975), my lawyer and I decided to settle.

So how much I got is a deep dark secret, but you will notice this letter is being written on a new word processor. There are other things I have done, too. But the most is to enjoy, heartily, the last laugh.

Good luck to all embattled species.

Name Withheld
August 14, 1982

Many of the letters dealt with the politics of women’s bodies and minds. This particular one made me sigh, after having recently been told by my own (female) gynecologist that, at the exact age of this letter-writer, I was wasting my golden hour for procreation, the sublime fulfillment of my womanhood. (Never mind I assured the good doctor I didn’t want kids.)

[The gynecologist] sprang into the examining room waving my medical history and inquired melodramatically why I was so terrified of pregnancy. Without waiting for a response, he informed me that I have one two-year-old child, a fact which had not escaped my notice, and that it was high time I had another, especially in view of the dismal statistics on the incidence of Down’s syndrome and other misfortunes in change-of-life babies. I am all of twenty-eight.

Since I didn’t then jump off the table and rush home to attempt conception before my time ran out, he coyly reminded me that if I stalled too long, and my one child died, I’d be (choke) barren. He darkly hinted at past patients, too numerous to mention, who had suffered nervous breakdowns after being unable to conceive that precious second child. My observation that a woman whose whose self-fulfillment rests on producing children needs a psychiatrist more urgently than a gynecologist fell on deaf ears.

In a last-ditch effort to summon up a satisfactory haul of guilt on my part, he spoke of women with serious physical problems who risk death to bear a child. “And then,” he said, “there are people like you. . . . .”

Dianne C. Felder
Old Bridge, New Jersey
April 1973 issue

Many of the letters found humor and wisdom in the innocent comments of young children, unburdened by the cultural baggage of gender roles:

The analysis of power-preserving notions of behavior based on biological characteristics in Steinem’s article was topical for our family. Only a few weeks ago our three-year-old daughter added to the list of attitudes toward genitalia undocumented in print.

Her behavior occurred in the locker room with her father after a swimming lesson. Observing all the male genitals, she asked if all people grow up to have penises. Her father told her that only men and boys have them. She studied him carefully and consoled him. “Don’t worry, Dad, it’s only a little one.”

Alice Fredricks
Mill Valley, California
September 23, 1978

Another, from one of Ms.’s male readers — a pastor, no less:

I recently had an experience that I suppose falls into the click category. I was sharing the bathroom with my daughter, who is not yet three. She made an observation and the following conversation ensued:

“You don’t wipe your bottom when you tinkle.”

“No, Kristin, I don’t.”

Reflective pause, then, “Why?”

“Because my tinkle comes out a different place than yours.”

Another reflective pause, then, “Why?”

“Because boys and girls are different.”

Another reflective pause, then with certainty, “No, boys are different.”

My interpretation of this sample event is that she does not see the society or the world in terms of masculine “norm,” with her own status defined only in relation to that “norm.” I Hope my interpretation is correct. As parents, we must be doing something right.

Robert J. Shaw, Minister
Tabernacle Christian Church
Franklin, Indiana
July 1981 Issue

Another section of the anthology is dedicated to letters championing equality in language, a topic particularly apt for a magazine whose very title offers meta-commentary on the subject:

Recently I was “called in” by a secondary-school district where I substitute-teach. I was told that I would be dropped from their list of substitute teachers, unless I stopped using “Ms.” when writing my name on the board at the beginning of a new assignment — “because ‘Ms.’ makes students think of sexuality and liberation.”

When I asked if there weren’t other women on the faculty using “Ms.” with their names, I was told, “No, we don’t have very many young, unmarried women working for us.” Click … crash!

Patricia R. Bristowe
La Honda, California
October 1973 Issue

Others found in the language issue a venue for small but meaningful acts of courage and resistance:

I resigned from my job yesterday as a matter of principle. I was given a letter to type by a senior secretary to the auditing firm that had recently been in our books. A woman headed up the team of accountants at our company for several weeks.

The letter was opened to “Gentlemen.” I changed it to “Greetings.” I was told that the letter must be redone because it was the policy of the company to use the salutation “Gentlemen.” I was told that management determined company policy, not uppity secretaries who didn’t know their place. I decided to resign and didn’t redo the letter.

I’m looking for another job, but I did raise quite a few eyebrows and, hopefully, someone’s consciousness.

Name Withheld
September 12, 1982

Even in Ms., the constant tension between editorial integrity and advertising didn’t fail to rear its head — though it could be argued that, today, similar impossible ideals have permeated the editorial ranks and are being peddled by opinion-packages like Lean In rather than advertisers alone:

Why do advertisers persist in selling the image of the beautiful, shapely woman executive who keeps the same perfectly made-up face and styled hair, even after a hard day of earning a six-figure salary, dining in expensive restaurants, having a brisk game of tennis at the club, and a late night of discotheque hopping? It’s no surprise that real women are tempted to wonder what they’re doing wrong.

Deborah K. Smith
Brookline, Massachusetts
July 1980 Issue

In language, too, the little victories were celebrated as beacons of big change to come:

This may not sound like much, but my boss just asked me a question that made my day and that I am dying to share with someone. He was in a meeting when he called out my name. I thought I was going to have to make copies or do some other chore, but he asked a question: “Dianne, who is the new girl … lady … woman over at Mud Island?” Hooray, he’s thinking! I felt wonderful. I don’t know if he kept correcting himself for my benefit or not, but his awareness is all that matters!

Dee Butler
Memphis, Tennessee
September 1983 Issue

It’s often said that editing is an invisible art, and Thom certainly tried to embody that by deliberately stepping away from the limelight and operating behind the scenes. The irony, of course, is that the snippets of strife and progress captured in Letters to Ms., 1972-1987 make plainly visible the enormous gift Thom and Ms. gave those of us who often forget all the indignities we need not suffer because of these women’s righteous, courageous indignation and fight for awareness.

Thank you, Mary, for everything.

Join me in supporting the Women’s Media Center, where Thom was editor-in-chief, in the remarkable work they do to etch Thom’s legacy into the bedrock of society.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month ♥ $3 / month ♥ $10 / month ♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.