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From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. We're just out of my bed, strong cup of job about the size of my head. Roughly 85 % of us use some kind of caffeine to get us kick -started in the morning. Not to mention those little pick -me -ups throughout the day. Which makes caffeine the most popular drug by far in the U .S. And what delivery mechanism do most of us choose to transport our drug of choice? Coffee. This hour, we'll explore the influence coffee's had on culture from its Ottoman Empire trading routes to the slave plantations in Brazil and even revolutionary America. But I actually found John Adams writing to Abigail saying, I'm going to have to get used to drinking coffee now because it's unpatriotic to drink tea. Also debunking the myths that caffeine's bad for
you. A thousand -year -old Turkish tradition, coffee divining and the Starbucks debate. Is the Starbucks entry into a place like Thailand, a cultural, agemony, or cultural imperialism coming from the United States? Or is it just making the world safer for coffee makers like me? I want a strong cup of job about the size of my head. But first, we're joined by coffee -efficientado Timothy Castle. I have celebrated what a great cup of pure black coffee can be. In his cookbooks, celebrated chef Charlie Trotter claims that the reader must make certain assumptions about the ingredients in his recipes. For example, all cream is heavy. All pepper is freshly ground. All herbs are fresh and the olive oil is extra virgin. So what should we assume about coffee? The coffee has to be fresh. It's nice to have one of those valve bags. If you have to be away from a coffee roaster for a period of weeks, or
if you're in an inaccessible location, but nothing beats having coffee that's roasted within a week, a week to 10 days. And after that, it really isn't. It doesn't have the life and the dynamism and the flavor and the complete freedom of spoilage and oxidation. Yes, it's the same model as extra virgin olive oil. You can't fake that or replace that with some other thing. Packaging coffee, no matter what you do, you lose the vitality. I guess is the best word for it. How much difference does the roasting process make? I mean, if you start with great beans, does it matter who cooks it for you? Well, I've compared that to winemakers. And winemaking, they have to buy good grapes. And coffee roasting, they have to buy good coffee. But the winemaker and the coffee roaster have a very big impact on what that coffee will taste like. And they have some interpretive leeway. And brewing, are you a drip grind
or an espresso brew? Do you have a favorite? My favorite is brewing a very strong cup of coffee through a paper filter, a rinsed paper filter. You rinse it first with boiling hot water. Run the water through it, like a pot of water through it. And you can run hot water and through the filter into just a thermos craft and then empty that all out and put the grounds in to the wet but drained filter in the funnel. And then just brew the coffee with boiling water off the stove. Let it cool down for a few seconds and then brew your coffee that way. And I use about four ounces of coffee for about a 50 ounce pot. I suppose I should also ask you if you should store coffee at home. I mean, you go buy a pound of beans. It was recommended to me at one point that you put them in the freezer. Is that still true? Well, you know, if you're going to keep your coffee around for a long time for some reason, but I don't know why
you would. Because if you're using a good amount of coffee and making a pot of it every morning you'll go through that coffee in less than a week. Think of it as freshly baked bread. You know, you wouldn't normally want to freeze your bread. Well, you know, unless you're going away or you only use one slice a day and you don't want it to get stale. Yeah, then maybe you put it in your freezer. But otherwise, you leave it on the counter. You leave it in a cool, dry place, preferably out of the sunlight. And you use it up quickly and then you get more. Coffee has an immediacy to it. It's used it immediately after it's roasted. You want to drink it immediately after it's brewed. There's an urgency to it. And you need to respect that if you want a great tasting cup of coffee. You know, one of the things that's really popular these days is flavored coffees and lattes, the steamed milk that's added. What do you think? Is flavored coffee worth drinking? Well, flavored coffee is very popular in this country. I think 50 % of all the whole bean coffee that Americans buy today is flavored,
you know, with hazelnut or raspberry or vanilla or cinnamon or something. It got at start in the early 70s when the market went up. I think it was due to a frost. And roasters wanted to start using cheaper coffee. And someone got the bright idea of flavoring it to give this cheaper coffee an edge in the market. And it became very popular. But it's not, you know, I don't consider it. And nobody in the roasting business, they a lot of them sell it because it's popular and they want to make money. But it's not considered a great thing because it doesn't, you know, it's like flavored wine. And if you can put it in that context, I think you start understanding pretty quick what it's all about. What about the coffee that I think awful lot of people now buy coffee with milk in it? Does that change coffee in good ways? Some people, even some people in the coffee business have the, you know, like milk in their coffee. I drink it in the morning when I'm in a hurry because I don't burn my mouth with a hot cup of
coffee. I cool it down. There's certain coffees that I think go better with milk than others. I like the full -bodied low -acid coffees with milk. Some people in the coffee business have told me that milk neutralizes some of the acidity in the higher acid coffees. But I tend not to like milk in a great Costa Rica or Guatemala and coffee. But some of the full -bodied coffees, Brazilian coffees, can do very well. It's a matter of choice, I think. I think milk has become very popular because it's a friendlier drink. It's not as challenging you can adapt to that flavor, especially when the coffee's brewed strong. So it's more accessible to people that aren't died in the wool coffee lovers. More like drinking a wine cooler than a fine wine. Well, I wouldn't go that far. That's more like coffee -flavored coffee realm. But it's sort of somewhere in between. Everyone in the coffee business, I was talking to someone that's a chairman of a very well -respected West Coast coffee company, the other evening. And he's shyly admitted that he was drinking a cappuccino the other morning, instead of espresso. I won't say who it was.
Timothy James Castles, the author of The Perfect Cup, a coffee lovers guide to buying, brewing, and tasting. I like the coffee. I like the tea. I like the java. The java. It likes me. Coffee and tea. The java and me. Cuff, cuff, cuff, cuff, cuff, cuff, cuff. I would bring you your good morning coffee. Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world. It's dominated the economy's politics and social structures of entire nations. More often than not, leaving a sad saga of repression and poverty for the poor laborers who cultivated on tropical mountain sides. So what path did coffee take to arrive at its prominent place in world history? When he spoke with Steve Paulson, investigative journalist Mark Pendergast started at the beginning with the legends of the origins of coffee. My favorite story is of quality, the goat herd, who was an Ethiopian goat herd, who
saw his goats acting very bizarrely on the mountain side one day. They were jumping up on their hind legs and budding each other and acting very strange. So he looked carefully and he noticed that they were eating the berries and the leaves of this tree, rather short tree, that grows wild on the mountain sides there. And it turned out to be coffee. And so the story is that he tried the berries out and the leaves. And he started spouting poetry and running around and feeling all energized and low in behold that was how coffee was discovered. If you ever have seen wild goats in Ethiopia, it's not so wild of a story. And the leaves do contain caffeine. But it was the imams, the Sufi monks used coffee before anybody else to keep them awake for their midnight prayers. And coffee did actually originate in Ethiopia, right? Yes, it did. There's no question that coffee still grows wild in Ethiopia.
From there, it made the jump across the Red Sea to Yemen where they began to cultivate it. So the Arabs were the ones who first used coffee as a trade item. At first, it was taken as sort of a tea made with the leaves or with the dried husk of the berries. Nobody did anything with the seed until probably by accident somebody threw it in a fire and it smelled good and they decided to grind it up and put it with some hot water. That probably occurred sometime in the 1400s. And Yemen really controlled the world of coffee for a long time, didn't it? Yes, it did. They deliberately would make the beans infertile before they exported them. They would parboil them or something along those lines because they didn't want anyone else to be able to cultivate them. Eventually, the Dutch smuggled some fertile beans out and they began to grow coffee in the East Indies and Java and Salon and they broke the back of the monopoly. Tell me a little bit about this culture of
coffee in the Ottoman Empire when the Turks were occupying Yemen and the position that coffee held in that culture. Well, the Turks were the ones who really spread coffee all over the Ottoman Empire and when the first travelers from Western Europe went there which was in the late 1500s, early 1600s, they brought back reports of this very strange black bitter beverage that these people sat around drinking all day long which apparently was very good for their health and made them very loquacious but which tasted terrible as far as they could tell. Eventually, coffee did come to Europe in a big way around 1650 and for the next 50 years, it revolutionized Western Europe's culture beginning in England but very quickly taking over in France, Italy, Germany,
Austria and wherever it went, it had a remarkable effect. I would argue on Western civilization. Up until then, people were drunk a lot of the time. They began breakfast with beer soup and proceeded to drink a lot of alcohol during the rest of their day. So coffee actually started to replace alcohol at a certain point? Well, at a very specific point between 1650 and 1700. By 1700, there were 2000 coffee houses in London alone. It had a remarkable effect and arguably, you know, a lot of music was composed to the strains of coffee. If you want to put it that way, Bach and Beethoven were addicted to it. The French Revolution and the American Revolution were both planned in coffee houses over coffee and a lot of business began in coffee houses. Loids of London began in Lloyd's coffee house. In yet today, when we think of England, we think of tea not coffee. That's true. It's interesting. I think what
happened to England is that the coffee houses evolved into private men's clubs. They never did allow women into them. And beginning in the early 1700s, you had public tea gardens that were much more open to women and children. Also, tea is a lot easier to prepare without ruining it. Coffee is more delicate. And finally, you had the British East India Company pushing tea. We know that centuries ago, the Catholic Church had tremendous influence on all parts of life in Europe. Did the Church have strong feelings about coffee? Well, at the onset, there were a number of people who felt that the Pope should condemn coffee as a heathen beverage because, you know, here were these evil Arabs drinking it. And suddenly, instead, the Pope drank it and said that, oh, this is so good. We can't let this be called a Satan's drink. We shall bless it and make it Christian. So from the very beginning, it was accepted within Christian circles. Coffee today, of course, is grown all over the world.
And various countries are famous for their coffees. Jamaica, Indonesia, Hawaii, Brazil. How did coffee reach some of these far -flung places? There was a French lieutenant named Matthew de Clue, who became obsessed with bringing coffee to Martinique. And there's a very dramatic story of him guarding his coffee plant from thieves who ripped off one of the stems of it. And he had to give it half of his water during a drought. And there was a major storm, and pirates came aboard the boat. Finally, he got his precious coffee plant over to Martinique, and he grew it. And it propagated, and it did very well. This is a very romantic story. Unfortunately, what happened in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the New World was that most of the coffee was grown by black slaves who were brought over from Africa. They were already working in the sugar plantations. Now they started working in the coffee plantations. So by
1790, half of the world's coffee was being grown on one small island called San Domingo, which is now called Haiti. And the next year, they rose up in the only major successful slave rebellion in history. And they burned all of the plantations, and they destroyed their economy, which is one of the reasons why Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere today. So coffee is really central to the history of slavery in this part of the world. Yes, it is. As a matter of fact, the Brazilians kept slavery until 1888, strictly because of coffee, making them the last country to ban slavery in this hemisphere. And now Brazil is one of the major coffee producers in the world. Yeah, by the late 1800s, Brazil was growing 80 % of all the world's coffee. And Brazil is still the world's largest producer of coffee, although certainly not that percentage. Again, let me point out that this was not altogether a good thing. It produced
some very, very wealthy plantation owners who had huge spreads built on the back of impoverished first slaves and then other laborers who weren't paid very much called colonos. Also, because Brazil really relied on what amounted to a monoculture, they stopped growing even subsistence crops. And when the price of coffee went down, which it did at the beginning of the 20th century, they were faced with a devastating consequence. There was almost a revolution. And what they ended up doing was keeping back part of their harvest, trying to raise the price. What happened in the United States was that we acted as if our birthright was to have very cheap coffee. And throughout American history, whenever the price of coffee has spiked up quickly, there have been government investigations. I can't think of another product aside
from perhaps oil, where that might be the case. So coffee in a sense becomes a tool of foreign policy? There's no question at all that Americans have become involved in a lot of foreign policy, specifically because of coffee. During the Cold War period, we actually tried to keep the price of coffee up, at least to some sort of reasonable level, where people wouldn't completely starve to death. And we didn't do that out of humanitarian concerns. We did it because we were afraid that if the price of coffee went too low, Africa and Asia and Latin America would all go communist. We backed out of that agreement in 1989 when the Cold War was ending. And the price of coffee has been terrible ever since, pretty much. When did people in the United States actually start drinking coffee? When did it really catch on in this country? Well, the Boston Tea Party, believe it or not, really did have a lot to do with it. I thought that was a myth when I started doing my research, but
I actually found John Adams writing to Abigail saying, I'm going to have to get used to drinking coffee now because it's unpatriotic to drink tea. And that became sort of a patriotic symbol. And it's always interesting to speculate on why a certain culture gravitates to coffee rather than say tea. Well, it's funny also how a different drink will get a different image. Somebody who drinks coffee is, you know, there are certain American qualities associated with it. So that coffee is for sort of the wild west and somebody who's strong and aggressive and, you know, really going to go out there and get them. Tea has this image of being more gentle and a feat. Now, for much of the 20th century, coffee was the kind of thing that you'd find in diners. I guess that's where we really associated those free refills of folders. And then at some point, it suddenly turned into something very shishii, very gourmet. You went to
get your double mocha, skim latte as it's Starbucks. How did it make that jump from diner to fancy coffee shop? Well, you have to go back even further and look at exactly what happened and the nature of coffee. Coffee by its very nature is a very delicate product that can be ruined almost anywhere along the line. But once you roast it, it begins to go stale within a week or so if you allow oxygen to get to it. So the coffee that we were getting in cans by the time of World War II, it wasn't bad but it wasn't really very good. But it certainly wasn't fresh roasted, fresh ground coffee. Then, after World War II, you began to have instant coffee, along with this craze for everything instant. And because that was so bad, they began to put more and more poor quality robusta beans not only into the instant coffee but into the regular blends. I mentioned before that every time the price of coffee goes up, we go crazy in America. Well, that happened in 1950
and in 1954. And we had congressional hearings, but also as a result of that, the major roasters, the Maxwell House and the Folgers, began to put worse and worse coffee and to try to cut costs. And they essentially ruined coffee. By the 70s, when you went and had a cup of coffee, it was weak, it tasted horrible, and it was just something that you had the cheapest way that you could get. And so the time was ripe for a rediscovery of what coffee could really be. And so these little hippie roasters began to pop up in the 60s and 70s and Starbucks was one of them. Starbucks began in 1971. And they were just basically people who were rediscovering the joys of decent coffee. It turned into what you've just described, which is sort of an aft snobbery where people are paying a whole lot of money for good coffee. But hey, at least we're getting decent coffee now. Mark Pendergast is the author of Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how it transformed our world.
He spoke with Steve Paulson. Way down among resilience, coffee beans grow by the billions. So they've got to find those extra cups to fill. They've got enough for a lot of coffee in Brazil. Just ahead, the battle over Starbucks and Flagstaff, Arizona. Starbucks is really sterile. I'm not going to go into Starbucks and see a whole widespread slice of this community. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. 30 years ago, Starbucks was a locally
owned store in Seattle's Pike Place Market, cherished by residents for its commitment to high -quality coffee. In the 1980s, Howard Schultz came on board and transformed the Quint Seattle Roaster into a company that now epitomizes the coffee store chain. For many communities, Starbucks is the neighborhood coffee shop. There are still cities, however, where locally owned coffee shops continue to dominate, towns such as Flagstaff, Arizona, whose vibrant coffee community held off Starbucks until recently. Now, you see, friends don't let friends drink Starbucks bumper stickers around town. There also fears that big corporations will soon drive out all of Flagstaff's unique places, and turn its residents into citizens of any town USA and peppermint reports. Ray Oldenburg believes in hanging out. For over 20 years, the sociologist has studied the informal gathering places where people come together to spend leisurely hours with friends and neighbors. They're not home, they're not work. Oldenburg calls them third places,
places like local taverns, bookstores, and coffee shops, which Oldenburg notes became fewer and further between with the development of suburban culture after World War II. Whereas our grandparents probably spent a lazy hour in the tavern, we spend five minutes in Starbucks. Oldenburg believes the disappearance of America's third places is bad for both communities and individuals. He says a vital public life is essential. It's the tonic you need, it's your connection to community. I often say that I never have a bad day when I started with friends over coffee. In Flagstaff, Arizona, that's the way a lot of people start their day, at Macy's coffee shop. Macy's, named after owner Tim Macy, sits near the railroad tracks just a few blocks south of downtown. There, a group of local men gathers every morning around a wooden table while the scent of freshly roasted coffee beans fills the air. Frank Dickens explains what's drawn him and his buddies to Macy's for the past 20 years. It just kind of kick starts the morning, it's a little bit of a social time to catch
up. Tim and I were to City Council meeting last night so we'll catch up a little bit on what went on there and Gene will give us a little psychological advice and Frank and I will argue about conservation issues versus growth issues and it just kind of gets the start off. When the group started, they were men with new marriages, young children and burgeoning careers. Now, their lawyers, tenured professors, psychologists, men whose children are now the same age as they were when they first went to Macy's. Things like the furniture hold a lot of memories. Dickens identifies an old dining room table he gave to Macy's by the Marx's children left on it years ago. The pencil marks are there, I haven't been able to find the teeth marks but if you find the pencil marks you can pretty much see where the teeth marks are. Last June, the local coffee culture ran up against something new, Starbucks. The coffee chain opened its first area store along Route 66. Local resident Roxanne George thinks that's
exactly the right place. People are going to pass through and recognize the chain that it's Starbucks or it's McDonald's or it's any other plastic corporate chain that you can easily access from a large roadway, get what you need to get and be on your way. Roxanne is the director of the Flagstaff activist network. She helped organize a community protest when the Flagstaff Starbucks opened. Roxanne says what she objects to the most is the coffee chain's cookie cutter atmosphere. Starbucks is really sterile. I'm not going to go into Starbucks and see a whole widespread slice of this community hanging out in their exchanging information. What I'm going to see is a bunch of people drinking food, food coffee drinks out of disposable cups and that's it. Behind the counter, Starbucks manager Melissa Bridges disagrees with the notion that her store does nothing for
the Flagstaff community. In fact, she says in the six months her store has been open, she and her employees have gone out of their way to be a part of it. We did the Cancer Walk, all my employees did the Cancer Walk. We donated all our pastries to Sunshine Rescue Mission. We adopted a local family for Christmas, raised $400 for them, they donated all their tips for two weeks. Bridges admits she was worried about how Flagstaff would react when Starbucks opened. She went to college here and knows how the town feels about corporations. I do understand them not promoting development because they want to stay a small town. I understand that. But you know, it took us five years to get here and the only reason we're here is because of demand. The demand came from people like Joe Sanchez. Sanchez owns a bed and breakfast and has lived in Flagstaff for 19 years. Tonight, he and his wife are lounging in two of Starbucks plush arm chairs enjoying an after dinner coffee. For them, having Starbucks in Flagstaff is a sign of progress. When we finally got one, I was very happy, just
like Home Depot. I was ecstatic when they opened up Home Depot. I was the first one in line to get into Home Depot and a lot of my friends were all, you know, we should shop local and they said, well, everybody there works here is local. The same Sanchez says is true for this local Starbucks. He points to an employee who's headed out the door after his shift. The one kid that just walked out, his dad works with my wife. These are local people that work here. I don't see any difference. Well, yeah, maybe the sole owner and proprietor of this specific Starbucks may not live here. What if this workers live here and spend right here? Starbucks is also a place where the couple feels comfortable hanging out. An atmosphere far different from Macy's where the Sanchez is used to buy their coffee. It's a totally different crowd. Maybe it's a younger crowd, very eclectic crowd. But something that we would just go in and grab our coffee and then leave. I mean, I don't have a ring in my nose or on my tongue or anything, so that's probably where I don't fit in. Taking the
intimidation out of the coffee house says coffee analyst Greg Deacom is the main reason behind Starbucks success. Historically, coffee shops were for those who go against the American mainstream. They often had a counterculture edge to them. They had local folk music. They had coffee shops often had political things going on in them. When Starbucks has done an effect, it's taken many of the elements of these cafes that grow out of this period and remove the edge and made it a safe corporate space where you know exactly what you're going to get. And you know exactly what's going to happen to you when you go in there. And that appeals to a certain kind of consumer. And in the United States, that means a lot of customers. At the end of 2001, Starbucks had more than 4700 stores. Flagstaff was one of 175 stores that opened in North America in three months. That's two new Starbucks a day. Starbucks is also in the overseas market. Today, you can order your skinny vanilla latte in England, Israel, Qatar, even Thailand, where Deacom says
Starbucks has changed the culture. Thailand is traditionally not a coffee -drinking country. Starbucks came in there in the last few years. And because they were selling these coffee drinks, they were able to create demand for it to the extent that other local coffee companies were able to establish themselves there. Which Greg Deacom says raises an important question. Is the Starbucks entry into a place like Thailand? Is that a cultural, a Germany or cultural imperialism coming from the United States? Or is it just making the world safer for coffee drinkers like me? This is the heart of the Starbucks controversy. Is it about coffee or corporate colonization? To date, there are six locally owned coffee houses in Flagstaff and only one Starbucks. For now, the chain is looking to open another store. This one closer to the university. Dave Dobgins, who owns late for the train, another local coffee shop, says he'd like to
expand within the Flagstaff market. But Starbucks' aggressive leasing strategies and deeper pockets makes it difficult for places like his to compete. They won't go find their own market niche sometime. They'll capture lease opportunities that I could not because of their size. And because of that, that's the scary part. That's the scary part. It's just simply they can do things because they have the money. Back at Macy's, the guys in the morning coffee club say their business ain't going nowhere. After two decades at beat -up wooden tables, they don't plan on moving. How much plastic and formica do you see? Zip? None. Good point. I mean, this is not plastic cookie cutter Starbucks. This is real. For to the best of our knowledge, I'm Ann Heperman in Flagstaff, Arizona. So let's have
another cup of coffee and let's have another piece of pie. Troubles like a bubble and the clouds will soon roll by. So let's have another cup of coffee and let's have another piece of pie and let us smile. But what if he gets? What if you don't like coffee? What's different about this day? What is it that smells so clean and delicious? I got it. No coffee. I know, I know, it's a sacrilege. I could be perceived as subhuman, but I hate coffee. It's not easy being one or three or four people on the planet who do not indulge. Sorry, Mrs. Olson. Sorry, Juan Valdez. I would rather lick the fetid drippings off the boots of a thousand stormtroopers. Rather gargled dirt than drink the miserable bitter broon, owned as coffee. I guess, like everything else, it started when I was a child. Every morning, I would wake to the gurgling asmatic wheeze of the percolator. Yeah, the percolator sounds like some 13th century torture device. Throw them in the
percolator. After I became used to the plick, plick, plick, plick, a plick of said device, my nose would be assaulted and most definitely insulted by the smell. I, yes, the smell, the only smell that could cover up the stink of the dead. Lord, Lord, what's wrong with me? I hate coffee and I can't stand tea. It's not only life out there if you don't like the stuff. Just ask those other three or four people if you can find them. They're probably asleep somewhere. It's like this. A friend calls up and says, hey, you want to get a cup of coffee somewhere? And I say, uh, no thanks. I got to pull out my fingernails with the pliers, but thanks for asking. So I rant and I rave and I sing, Lord, Lord, what's wrong with me? I hate coffee and I can't stand tea. I'm a bad vendor, with the rant I hate coffee by the urban shocker, also known as Dale Seamiller.
I love coffee, I love tea. I love the job, a job and it loves me. Coffee and tea and the job and me. I love the job, I love the job, I love the job. Coming up later, divining the future with coffee grounds. Just ahead, 컬러�, I'm chim -flaming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. The dictionary says caffeine is
a vegetable alkaloid crystallizing in white silky needles to arrive from coffee tea and colonnuts and used as a stimulant and diuretic. Not very appealing in such clinical terms, but caffeine is appealing. No matter how you measure it, caffeine is by far the most popular drug in the world, beating out such formidable foes as nicotine and alcohol. For all its popularity, very little is known about its effects on the human body. What is commonly believed tends to be half -truths and old wives' tales. Benet Allen Weinberg, author of The World of Caffeine, talked with Andstrane Champs about our drug of choice. Caffeine is made out of carbon and oxygen and nitrogen. It actually evolved in the plant world as an insecticide and antimicrobial. And it's very peculiar that this substance that's used by plants to help kill bugs and keep them alive should have such remarkable effects in the human body. But it does. Exactly how it exerts as effects is still somewhat unclear. That was one of the remarkable things
to me in reading your book, is that scientists can't really explain how caffeine works, how it has the effects it has on us. It is difficult to explain all of its effects. You see, it has many different sorts of effects and they're not easily explained by one mechanism. The primary mechanism that's usually adduced to account for caffeine's primary stimulating or refreshing qualities is something called the adenosine blockade theory. Now there's a neurotransmitter in the body, one of many neurotransmitters, that causes us to become sleepy, groggy or tired. And caffeine attaches itself to adenosine receptors and blocks adenosine from being taken up by the body and in that way it prevents us from becoming fatigued or tired. That's fairly well understood. The problem comes in when you consider that caffeine doesn't just augment our faculties when we're sleepy or tired or prolonged our freshness. It also augments our faculties when we're completely well rested, which really should have nothing to do with the adenosine system at all. So there are a lot of things going along with
caffeine. It's also been found that it affects tissues locally in ways that don't have anything to do with the central nervous system. For example, it's an anti -inflammatory in muscles. It's a strong antioxidant, stronger than vitamin C. When athletes use it, it will protect them from muscle damage. These are things that really aren't readily explained with the adenosine theory. Wait, caffeine is an antioxidant? It does the same thing that vitamin C does. This makes it sound like it's really good for us. It is good for you, actually. It's good for you in many ways and may not be bad for you in too many ways at all. Yes, caffeine is a stronger antioxidant than vitamin C. It's about as strong as lutatheon, which is the body's natural antioxidant. And a caffeine, as a matter of fact, contains many antioxidants, not just caffeine, but caffeine is one of the stronger ones. And antioxidants is what we all think is protective against cancer, right? Yes, not only cancer, but supposedly within the body, groups of molecules called free radicals initiate chain reactions, which cause damage down the line to cell functions and cell structures.
And these deleterious changes are supposed to be a fundamental component of the aging process. So presumably, by forestalling these chains of destructive currencies, we can actually slow the aging process. And that's one of the reasons that people take antioxidants like vitamin E, vitamin C, vitamin A, because they hope to limit the free radical damage. Well, this is something that caffeine can accomplish very readily. It really makes you wonder why, if that's the case, we all think of it as this unhealthy substance. Yes, and we have wondered about that ourselves. You know, there is something in people that makes them somehow turn on easy, simple solutions and suspect them of harboring secret dangers to the soul, sort of a Calvinist streak that induces us to think that if we have an easy way out, somehow we're going to end up paying for it to our sorrow in the end. And you hear that in the news, sometimes people say, Americans are looking for the easy way out. Well, there is no easy way out. Well, when there is no easy way out, there is none. But when there is one, then you'll be foolish not to take it. In the case
of caffeine use, it is a very easy, safe way of getting a lot of benefits and it's foolish to avoid it. You can see how people would think of it as this evil substance because it's, I mean, this is radical. It's something that can make you feel better and there's no down, there's no side effect. Yes, there really doesn't seem to be much to worry about. In fact, it doesn't agree with you for some reason. If you, for example, if it keeps you from sleeping, well, then you have to cut down the amount you use or use it earlier in the day. If you're one of the people that's unusually sensitive to it, well, then you also have to minimize your use. But as far as general health impact, there really is no concern. I think of it as a pretty powerful antidepressant. That's why I drink it. Very, very important point that you're making. In fact, one of the really critical aspects of caffeine that's often neglected in a way are its mood effects. They really are profound and long -lasting and they can come from low doses. It's been found that the doses is low with 65 milligrams, which is the amount and maybe half a cup of coffee can produce
mood elevation for an entire day. And it really is one of the strongest inducements for using coffee and why when you walk by a coffee bar, you get a kind of good feeling and you feel like maybe going in is because caffeine is a euphoric. It really makes you feel good. It makes you feel confident, relaxed, tranquil, energetic, and just up. It makes you feel good. And there are not many things in life which can safely and easily make you feel good. And so it's a very strong motivator. So we paint a picture for me of what happens when somebody drinks a cup of coffee. What's happening in their body as the caffeine gets into their system? Well, in the first instance, it's interesting to note that caffeine has a distribution in the body that's really quite remarkable. You know, just a few minutes after ingesting caffeine, it's absorbed by almost every cell in your body. It's both water soluble and fat soluble. That means that it just becomes distributed throughout your body in a
way that few drugs are very quickly. And it's present 15 minutes after using it, it's present in virtually all of your tissues, your brain tissues, it's present in semen, it's present in breast milk. And this is one of the secrets to its activity, although as I say all the secrets of its activity are not well understood. After that, it does act to block the adenosine receptors and in this way to forestall the onset of fatigue and to increase freshness and to provide what seems to be the ability to sustain your energies. Beyond that, it affects the neurotransmitter systems in ways that are not well understood. Anybody who loves coffee knows that you drink one cup and it feels great and so you automatically want to drink a second cup and that feels great. And then maybe you think this feels terrific, I want to drink a third cup, but at a certain point you stop feeling so great. It's just like you can keep drinking cup after cup and it just doesn't seem to be giving you quite the same buzz anymore. Why is that? Well, there is a kind of natural ceiling to the effects of caffeine in many ways. A small amount of
caffeine will produce a small effect. The larger amount will produce a larger effect, but a really large amount will tend to produce less of an effect. So it sounds like part of the trick of using caffeine. It sounds more and more like it's a drug that we use, but part of the trick of it is figuring out what's the exact right dose for you and not going over that. That's right. It is really using it as more of an arthin science. It's a strong psychoactive addictive drug with a many effects. And if you have some principled objection to the use of an addictive drug, you shouldn't use caffeine because that's what it is. But if you're worried about safety profile, you probably don't have much to worry about. Nevertheless, you have to recognize that it is a strong drug. Any drug will have deleterious effects on some people. Any drug has certain caveats or attendancies. You mentioned that different amounts of caffeine affect people differently and that getting the right amount of caffeine for you is important. One of the things that is tricky about
getting our caffeine from coffee is that coffee, you point out, is a pretty unregulated source of caffeine. In that the amount of caffeine you may get in a cup of coffee can vary wildly depending on whether you went to Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks. Yes, it does vary wildly and there are a number of factors that contribute to the caffeine level. One is how much coffee is used in preparing the coffee and other is the method used, whether it's filtered drip or infusion, for example, whether it's instant coffee. Another is the type of coffee, whether it's arabica or robusta or robusta beans have twice the caffeine of arabica beans. Another is how long the coffee is steeped and finally there's the question of how large the cup is. What is a cup of coffee? A cup of coffee could be four or five ounces or it can be 12 or 14 ounces. So you run into just an incredible range of exposures when you consider that your cup of coffee might have 60 milligrams of caffeine or might have 500. It is tricky, it's hard to know, especially if you're not making the coffee yourself, it's hard to get a regular idea of what you're getting.
One of the ways to avoid that is if you consider using caffeine pills, where you really do know what you're getting. Those of us who love coffee, that's no substitute at all. Or you're right, you're right indeed. The other kind of alarming thing is to discover that the amounts of caffeine in decaf vary a great deal also. Yes, you really do risk some exposure to caffeine when you might not want it. The same thing to do with that is to buy the instant decafs like Sanca, for example, which are really decaffeinated and have virtually no caffeine in them. When you go to a coffee shop and you get their decaf, you're not really sure what they've done with that. So if I go to Starbucks or my local good coffee shop and I order a cup of decaf, am I really drinking some caffeine? I can't say that you are drinking caffeine, but I wouldn't be confident saying that you're not, because all I can say is that field studies that have been done of these coffees show that they contain varying amounts of caffeine, sometimes small amounts, sometimes modest amounts. That's why I say you're sort of taking a chance. It is a difficult matter and there's no easy
solution to it. Bennett Ellen Weinberg and co -author Bonnie Bealer wrote the world of caffeine, the science and culture of the world's most popular drug. He spoke within string chips. Whether you choose to believe in it or not, coffee divination, the act of reading the future in one's coffee grounds, has been a part of the ritual surrounding coffee since the Arabs began trading in it in the early 1400s. Though still common in the Middle East, coffee diviners are rare in the US. And string chips found one such person though, Barbara Moran. If you find the truth, you have to speak it or you'll be afraid of it. And we all ask ourselves the same questions. Why am I here? Where did I come from and
where am I going? Because we have to make sense of the universe. We have to put things in the past, present, and future. That makes coffee divination sound cosmic and mystical. Do people tend to use it on that level or do they use it for very practical things? Like, should I take the job or should I buy the car? It can be anywhere. Or what's my future husband going to look like? Or am I going to be rich someday? Actually, depending on who's reading, I noticed the air of women are really big on your love life and your sex life and how other people see you. The Turks tend to stay within the philosophical range and the Greeks into the range of the cosmos. So it depends on who you have, read your fortune, how it will be. But I try to stay away from people's sex lives. I don't know how well the customers know each other. I'm not sure what to share. Here's our coffee. It smells good. What's the inner Turkish coffee that makes it Turkish coffee? It's actually just coffee but very, very finely
ground. But it's not the same as Italian espresso. Because isn't it made differently? It's not expressed. It's actually cooked in a chiseve, which is a little copper pot. And you fill it up to the bend in it with water and then stir in the coffee and whatever sugar. And you let it come to a boil. And then you take off the foam, the forms, and put it in the cup. I've gotten to the point where my coffee is very sludgy. Should I keep drinking the sludge? No, no, no. Put the sassar on top. On top. Yeah, that way. And it flips the whole thing over. I will lift up the cup. From this moment in time, your fortune will now be told. You can see that there are things that have appeared there in the cup. Yeah, it looks like a flame has scorched the bottom of the cup. It's got that
flame shape. And there's some sort of dark puddle of mud underneath it. The things that are towards the rim are things that are happening in the future. This is your destiny that lies in the bottom of the cup. That puddle of mud. Look at it clear and you can see that it's actually a big tree with a big canopy. It is, you're right. And it's sitting upon a very nice chunk of earth. The trunk of the tree is tipped a little to one side. That's exactly what it looks like. It's a tree standing on top of a hill. You have grown something from a seed that has become big enough to shelter. Those around you. It's something that is mature enough to produce a harvest. And it's something that, although it's a little more developed on one side than the other, has good balance. And that it's firmly rooted in the earth. That's an excellent symbol to say that you have a creative, productive life. That's lovely. There's some other things here. One is this symbol here. It shows two things that can interlock.
And what that means is that you can achieve what you can do because you have someone who supports you or things that support you. The other thing that's interesting is that this says that there may be a time in which you will discover that the only way that you can grow is by finding a higher hill to climb. And from that perspective, you'll be able to see things, things that you carry with you that are burdens in a whole new way. Which symbol show me which symbol says this? This is the path up the incline. Oh, so it looks like there's a little path going up the side of the cup up to a little kind of plateau. And what this means is that when you stand at the top and you see all of the things below, in perspective, looking back. That you'll be able to take off the burdens and set them there and leave them free of the things from the past. Barbara Moran is the owner of the Dardenells restaurant in Turkish coffee shop in Madison,
Wisconsin. Yes, there's an air about hot coffee that's hard to resist. Full -bodied refreshing hot coffee makes any time a pleasant interlude. Won't you have some now? It's to the best of our knowledge, engine flaming. You can buy a tape of this program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for coffee, program number 210 -A. If you'd like to comment on the show, you can write to us at to the best of our knowledge, 8 -21 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, 5 -3706. Or email us through our website at www .wpr .org -book.
Series
To The Best Of Our Knowledge
Episode
Coffee
Producing Organization
Wisconsin Public Radio
Contributing Organization
Wisconsin Public Radio (Madison, Wisconsin)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip-c55e8e9ce17
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Description
Episode Description
Whether black from a bottomless cup or as a Frappuccino mocha skim latte, it’s our culture’s elixir, coffee. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, java, joe, or a cup of mud. Most of us drink it everyday, but few of us know the effects it has on the world’s economy, or even on our own bodies. Also, how to brew the perfect cup. And, using grounds to divine the future. The world’s most popular pick-me-up, next time.
Episode Description
This record is part of the Arts and Culture section of the To The Best of Our Knowledge special collection.
Series Description
”To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning national public radio show that explores big ideas and beautiful questions. Deep interviews with philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, historians, and others help listeners find new sources of meaning, purpose, and wonder in daily life. Whether it’s about bees, poetry, skin, or psychedelics, every episode is an intimate, sound-rich journey into open-minded, open-hearted conversations. Warm and engaging, TTBOOK helps listeners feel less alone and more connected – to our common humanity and to the world we share. Each hour has a theme that is explored over the course of the hour, primarily through interviews, although the show also airs commentaries, performance pieces, and occasional reporter pieces. Topics vary widely, from contemporary politics, science, and "big ideas", to pop culture themes such as "Nerds" or "Apocalyptic Fiction".
Created Date
2002-02-10
Asset type
Episode
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:52:32.065
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Producing Organization: Wisconsin Public Radio
AAPB Contributor Holdings
Wisconsin Public Radio
Identifier: cpb-aacip-c38a3601790 (Filename)
Format: Zip drive
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Citations
Chicago: “To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Coffee,” 2002-02-10, Wisconsin Public Radio, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed August 23, 2025, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-c55e8e9ce17.
MLA: “To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Coffee.” 2002-02-10. Wisconsin Public Radio, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. August 23, 2025. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-c55e8e9ce17>.
APA: To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Coffee. Boston, MA: Wisconsin Public Radio, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-c55e8e9ce17