The Triumph of Seeds (24 page)

For decades, Garrison Keillor’s program
A Prairie Home Companion
has featured advertisements from “The Ketchup Advisory Board,” a fictional industry group promoting tomato ketchup for its “natural mellowing agents.” The skits feature bland characters whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic and impulsive without regular helpings of ketchup. They suddenly decide to run marathons, pierce their noses, write memoirs, or rob liquor stores. Adenosine is not ketchup—it’s one of the basic biochemicals that make the body function. But in terms of brain activity, the role of adenosine can’t be described any better. It’s a natural mellowing agent, slowing the neurons and triggering a whole chain of events that lead eventually to sleep. Coffee drinkers feel alert because caffeine gets in the way of that process, and even reverses it—replacing adenosine and tricking the brain into speeding up when it would otherwise be slowing down. Caffeine doesn’t actually give people energy; it just renders them less capable of feeling tired.

In Ketchup Advisory Board stories, mellowness always returns when the characters get their ketchup, just as brain chemistry and sleep always overwhelm the effects of caffeine in the end. But people seem to enjoy the sensation of tricking their brains into temporary liveliness, and, like bees, they seek it out again and again. And just as a few bees can lead their whole hive to caffeinated flowers, so, too, has the coffee habit altered the course of entire human societies. In the West, historians believe it helped pave the way for both the Age of Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution that followed. And it all started with a change in the morning meal.

A
dvertisers know the phrase “Breakfast of Champions” as an iconic slogan used by the Wheaties cereal brand for over eighty years. To students in fraternities and college dormitories, however, it’s not a “breakfast of champions” until the Wheaties are doused with a generous portion of beer. After a night of excess, this combination is promoted as a sort of hair-of-the-dog hangover cure, but the soggy result is something that few people try more than once. Bleary-eyed undergrads might be surprised to learn that people throughout central and northern Europe greeted
every day
with a version of this breakfast for more than nine centuries. Before the advent of coffee, “beer soup” was the morning staple. The standard recipe featured steaming-hot ale poured over bread or mush, with eggs, butter, cheese, or sugar added on special occasions. This concoction provided people of all ages with carbohydrates, calories, and, although the beer was usually weak, a modest buzz. In fact, the morning soup simply marked the first installment of a long, beery day. Alongside bread, home-brewed ales and other beers were part of every meal, making up a significant nutritional component of the medieval diet. As late as the seventeenth century, when coffee began to take hold, per capita beer consumption in northern Europe ranged from 156 to as much as 700 liters annually, with
300 to 400 liters considered average. Modern figures pale by comparison—Americans drink a paltry 78 liters per year, the British put away 74, and even the beer-loving Germans knock back only 107.

Into this environment of habitual tipsiness, coffee arrived as what social historians have dubbed “the Great Soberer.” Instead of the mental fog brought on by beer (or wine, which was the staple in southern Europe), drinking coffee made people alert, energetic, and arguably more productive. The college-student analogy works here, too: anyone hoping to graduate figures out pretty quickly that drinking beer before classes produces a much different outcome than drinking coffee. Both are seed products, but replacing the fermented one with the stimulant has profound effects on more than just a grade point average. In Europe, the coffee transition occurred on the
heels of the Reformation, and its promise of sobriety and productivity fit neatly into the era’s emerging philosophy. As one scholar put it, coffee “achieved chemically and pharmacologically what rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to
fulfill spiritually and ideologically.” In practice, coffee prepared both body and mind for the kinds of indoor work becoming common in towns and cities—the jobs of governance, commerce, and manufacturing. It’s no coincidence that the modern definitions and spellings for “coffee,” “factory,” and “working class” all entered the English language in the eighteenth century. The beverage became especially popular with workers in urban areas, and London once boasted as many as 3,000 coffeehouses, one for every 200 inhabitants.

Like any craze, the coffee phenomenon included no small amount of hype and hyperbole. Though it was legitimately prescribed as a stimulant, doctors and hucksters also recommended the beverage for any number of other ailments, from gout and tuberculosis to venereal disease. Some claims were contradictory (headache cause vs. headache cure), and most proved false (aphrodisiac, increased intelligence), but others remain subjects of medical inquiry (antidepressant, prevention of tooth decay, appetite suppressant, hypertension remedy). The continued research interest in coffee should come as no surprise. Coffee beans contain at least 800 other compounds in addition to caffeine—making that daily cup, by some accounts, the most chemically complex food in the human diet. Most of coffee’s components have never been studied, so their health effects remain mysterious. Researchers generally agree that coffee drinkers enjoy a reduced risk of type II diabetes, liver cancer, and, for men at least, Parkinson’s disease. But nobody has any clear idea why.

Drinking too much coffee can lead to restless nights and the kind of nervous jitters that Johann Sebastian Bach satirized in the title of his so-called “Coffee Cantata:”
Schweigt Stille, Plaudert Nicht
—“Be Still, Stop Chattering.” Bach himself was a famous coffee lover and hosted regular performances of his work at Café Zimmermann, the finest coffeehouse in Leipzig. Such gatherings exemplify the role that
coffee had begun to play socially and culturally in the eighteenth century. Because it stimulates thought and conversation in a much different way than alcohol, coffee brought people together not for revelry, but for serious conversations, meetings, and cultural events. A trip to a coffeehouse was (and still is) quite different from visiting a tavern. People not only met friends there, but also gathered to study, hear the news, play chess, and even conduct business. The shipping underwriters that frequented Edward Lloyd’s establishment in London went on to form the largest insurance marketplace in the world, which still goes by the name of its coffee-vending founder. Nor is Lloyd’s of London the only famous example. The Bank of New York was organized at Merchant’s Coffee House; the London Stock Exchange got its start in a shop called Jonathan’s; and the public sales held at coffeehouses—for everything from artwork and books to carriages, ships, real estate, and
“things seized as the goods of pirates”—led to the founding of the world’s two great auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

To philosophers, writers, and other intellectuals, coffeehouses quickly became indispensable hubs for articulating and sharing ideas. People called them “penny universities,” claiming you could get a good education by simply listening in on all the highbrow conversations. Voltaire reportedly drank fifty cups of coffee every day; he spent so much time in Paris’s Café de Procope that his writing desk remains there, enshrined in a corner. Rousseau frequented the Procope as well, where he reportedly practiced his chess game against the great encyclopedist Denis Diderot. The luminaries of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club met for coffee at the Turk’s Head in Soho for nearly twenty years, and Jonathan Swift was so dedicated to the St. James Coffeehouse that he had his mail delivered there. Scientists liked coffee, too, and although stories of Sir Isaac
Newton dissecting a dolphin at The Grecian Coffeehouse are false, he did spend a lot of his evenings there. It was a popular destination after meetings at the nearby Royal Society (which, incidentally, began life as the Oxford Coffee Club).

Political thinkers flocked to the coffeehouses, too. Robespierre and other key figures of the French Revolution often met at Café Procope, and a young Napoleon Bonaparte once had to leave his hat there as collateral when he couldn’t pay a bill. Benjamin
Franklin dropped by whenever he was in town, and in London, his coffeehouse friends, “The Club of Honest Whigs,” included the radical liberal Richard Price. Price’s ideas had a strong effect on Franklin and other leaders of the American Revolution, proving that Charles II had been right, decades earlier, in railing against coffeehouses as centers of sedition. To imply that drinking coffee
caused
revolutions would be going too far, but it’s no exaggeration to say that it caused revolutionary thinking. As a drug and a social rallying point, coffee played a role in transforming the ideals of the Enlightenment into political reality.

In putting coffee at the center of cultural and political events, Europeans had adopted more than an Arab beverage: they’d taken on an Arab way of life. For centuries before coffeehouses became fashionable in Paris and London, they had served as community gathering places throughout the Near East and North Africa. (Legend traces the origin of coffee to an Ethiopian goatherd who noticed his flock dancing on their hind legs after feeding on the beans.) As a social, nonalcoholic indulgence, coffee was well suited both to the tenets of Islam and to what scholars consider one of the world’s most deeply conversational societies. The influence of coffeehouses waned in the West during the nineteenth century, but places like Cairo’s Al-Fishawy cafe haven’t closed their doors in over 260 years. One needn’t look farther than the title of a recent academic paper to see the continuing importance of coffee in the Arab world: “Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004–2011.” Throughout the “Twitter Revolutions” of the Arab Spring, coffeehouses served as essential physical meeting points—planning centers, places of refuge, and even makeshift hospitals. In Egypt and across the region, those are roles they’ve played during virtually every popular uprising for the past five centuries.

I
f Gabriel-Mathieu de Clieu crossed the Atlantic today, he would find the production and processing of coffee well established in the Caribbean and throughout Central and South America. But if he wanted to know about
drinking
coffee, people would probably send him to a place not far from my home, a city that has been called the coffee “Mecca” of North America. When Howard Schultz installed the first espresso machine at Seattle’s Starbucks Coffee in 1983, he helped spark what can only be called a coffeehouse renaissance. The coffee bean hadn’t seen such a boom in North America and Europe since the eighteenth century, and Starbucks alone now boasts over 20,000 stores in sixty-two countries. This rise hasn’t occurred in a cultural vacuum. It’s not surprising that Starbucks got started in the same urban center that gave the world Microsoft, Amazon, Expedia, RealNetworks, and a host of other technology companies. Coffee may have been a good match for the Age of Enlightenment, but it’s an even better fuel for the Information Age—and the tech-driven, intensely indoor lifestyle it fosters. In the words of one expert, the caffeine delivered by coffee has become “the drug that makes the modern world possible.”

The Internet, texting, social media, and other digital innovations have created longer workdays and an expectation of constant connectivity, a perfect environment for the stimulating effects of coffee. The popular technology magazine and website
Wired
takes its name from an insider term with overlapping meanings: fluent in the digital world, and buzzing from stimulants. The caffeinated habits of the old “computer geek” stereotype have gone mainstream, proliferating right alongside the screens we stare at, from our desktops to our laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Tea sales are up, too, and caffeine (often extracted from coffee beans) is now a popular additive to energy drinks, sodas, pain relievers, bottled water, breath mints, and—in a peculiar botanical twist—“energized” sunflower seeds. Where office workers used to expect lukewarm dregs from a percolator by the copy machine, employees at companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook now enjoy the benefit of full-scale coffeehouses
on their corporate campuses, free of charge. But perhaps nothing underscores the relationship between coffee, technology, and the New Economy more than shops like the Surf Café in Seattle, or San Francisco’s The Summit, where patrons actually rent desk space to work on their start-up ideas and meet with venture capitalists. This combination of coffee bar and cubicle is like a modern echo of the old Lloyd’s, where insurance brokers started at the counter, moved on to tables and booths, and now occupy a fourteen-story, triple-tower skyscraper in downtown London. Coffee is helping shape the tech-driven economy in the same way. New ideas are created under its influence, and meetings in coffeehouses help bring those products to market.

To rediscover the seed at the heart of all this, I decided to visit a Seattle coffeehouse. (Like buying Almond Joy candy bars, drinking coffee as a business expense sounded like another career milestone.) But how does one choose where to go in a city with thousands of establishments licensed to brew and sell hot beverages? I talked to a friend in the coffee business, and then called around asking the following question: Where do people who work at coffee shops in Seattle go for a good cup of coffee?

Soon afterward I found myself crossing the threshold of Slate, recently crowned the Best Coffeehouse in America at the annual Coffee Fest trade show. Slate occupies a former barber shop on a side street in Ballard, one of Seattle’s trendiest neighborhoods. (Coincidentally, it’s just down the hill from where my Norwegian great aunts Olga and Regina once lived, in an era when Ballard was a Scandinavian enclave better known for pickled herring than espresso.) The ambiance inside was conspicuously spartan. A vintage record player in the corner hummed with jazz, but otherwise there were no distractions. Spare gray walls, a tidy counter, and simple bar stools put all the emphasis on the coffee. In the wrong hands, this setup might have seemed contrived, but the people at Slate overwhelmed any hint of pretension with friendliness, and with an enthusiasm for coffee as unadorned as the walls.