The story is the oft-related tale of Kaldi the goatherd. As the story goes, after Kaldi watched his flock jump excitedly around after eating berries from a certain bush, the goatherd decided to taste the beans for himself. As one version would have it, after crunching the berries in his mouth, the young man burst into song and poetry—behavior that likely sparked the interest of those around him. Whatever actually transpired, with that taste of berry, Kaldi is said to have plucked the coffee bean from obscurity, after centuries of anonymity. But the legend of Kaldi (which likely recounts events that took place much earlier in history), shrouds the fact that coffee was already a private pleasure for humans several centuries earlier.

Indeed, around 525 C.E., approximately 300 years before the date assigned to our goatherd, coffee plants journeyed out of Ethiopia with the armies of the Axumite Kingdom as they invaded the Himyarite Kingdom in Yemen, where they remained for the next 50 years. As it happened, the locale shared similar climate and geography to their own highlands. So, not surprisingly, members of the invading Akumites soon introduced coffee cultivation there, sowing the seeds of Yemen’s future dominance of the coffee trade.

This act of early colonialism brings an interesting challenge to the place of Kaldi and his friends as the world’s earliest coffee consumers. If the original story involved the chewing of the coffee cherries among those who lived in Ethiopia, it is a Yemeni myth that places the first coffee drinkers in this region of the Arabian Peninsula.

According to local Yemen lore, the first person to drink coffee was actually a priest who was banished to the mountains for unsuitable behavior toward the daughter of the king. Facing sure starvation, the young man supposedly discovered a plant with white flowers and survived by drinking a fluid he extracted from its beans. Having made it through his exile, the priest took the beans with him on a pilgrimage to Mecca, thus serving as the first exporter of one of today’s most important commodities.

To shore up its claim as the home of coffee drinking, Yemen offers up another legend—of a Sufi dervish named Hadji Omar, who was driven by his enemies out of Mocha into the desert where, also to ward off starvation, he tasted berries he found growing on a shrub. Finding them unacceptably bitter, the dervish first roasted them and then tried to soften them with water so they could be eaten more easily. The latter did little to improve their edibility, but the brown liquid that Sufi produced roused him from his lethargy and raised his spirits. When Omar returned to Mocha, his survival was considered a miracle, and the coffee drink he discovered achieved great popularity.

The folklore presented above offers far more than just a series of entertaining stories. It connects the human story to botanical truth. Archaeological evidence demonstrates the ancient coffee plant most likely came from what is today Ethiopia. Other scientific evidence suggests that coffee bean and plants ended up in Yemen in the second decade of the 6th century. In this version of events, Ethiopia and Yemen can each rightly claim a share in the origin story of the pleasures of coffee.

Legends are useful because they allow us to piece together what may have happened after the discovery was made that the beans, while bitter, were not poisonous. If the latter were the case there may well have been a lot of dead goats, and we would all be drinking some other stimulating beverage to get through a long afternoon.

Critically examining the historical forces that shape such legends also force us to reckon with some important contemporary issues—not the least of which is the equity historically denied to growers and harvesters.

The C. Arabica species of coffee that was first consumed in Ethiopia and Yemen remains the most prized, with those grown at higher altitudes still commanding the highest prices on the world market. Yemen, in fact, enjoyed a monopoly on the export of coffee beans that lasted throughout the Medieval and early modern periods, as the country exported the beans to an ever-expanding cadre of devotees across the globe. That only changed in the mid-17th century when, as yet another anecdote has it, a few plants were smuggled out of the Port of Mocha by a Portuguese merchant. With this theft, coffee became part of Europe’s colonial enterprises. And yet, despite the horrors of the conflict that currently ravages Yemen, it is still possible to obtain its coffee—allowing those of us fortunate enough to live in relative safety to support the livelihood of those farmers whose connections to coffee date back centuries.

Easier to acquire today, coffee continues to occupy a prominent place in the economy of Ethiopia, where significant efforts have been introduced to celebrate coffee’s rich past there, as well as ensure its viability well into the future. Since 2008, particular attention has been paid to sustainable practices that ensure a fair market price for the beans, guarantee equity for the small-scale farmers that produce 95 percent of Ethiopia’s agricultural output—of which coffee and sesame seeds are the leading products—and to the teaching of practices that prevent the degradation of the land.

Today, an estimated 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed each day by people around the world with a sworn love for it. The place of coffee in our daily lives and imaginations, however, is all the richer if we take a moment to appreciate the history of how it got here today. Food and drink, after all, have the power to connect us, across time and distance, to strangers who in another age might have been our friends. Through a combination of curiosity, experimentation, and some distant highlands, hundreds of years ago, this curious bean was first found to be suitable for drinking. Its origin story is a potent brew—and appreciating it makes that first bitter sip of a new coffee drinker today just a bit sweeter.

The post Your Coffee Is Much Older and More Legendary Than It Seems appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The grower was taking me to visit a coffee farm. Riding shotgun, I noticed the well-worn butt of a handgun sticking up next to my hip, between the seat and the center console. There was another on the driver’s side, just in case he and I might have to fight our way out of a scene like that last desperate stand in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But these were bigger guns than those wielded by Newman and Redford—cartoonishly large Smith & Wesson revolvers.

These days, coffee is frequently advertised with an image that has become cliché—a smiling farmer whose work-hardened hands are cupping ripe coffee beans. But it’s not all smiles on the farm. The reality is that the soothing elixir we crave daily is often produced in tense places where guns abound, conspicuous emblems of lingering social and political instability.

Spend any time in Latin American coffee country, and you get used to seeing guns around. In much of the region, the state is weak, corrupt, or both, encouraging landowners to fend for themselves. At the same time, wealthy landowners and their private security forces are maintaining a centuries-old tradition of social inequality. And this social inequality has fueled long-running civil conflicts, like Colombia’s guerrilla war.

It’s not just handguns. Always present, too, are the 12-gauge shotguns hanging from security guards’ shoulders by frayed webbing straps or lengths of rope, all the bluing worn from the barrels by daily handling. These, too, are often grotesquely lethal looking. Especially the pistol-grip, short-barrel shotguns—aka riot guns—popular among urban security guards in Guatemala City, Panama City, and Bogotá. They look like something wielded by one of Quentin Tarantino’s villains.

Also impressive are the Mini-Uzis. These little Israeli-made machine guns are designed for close-quarters combat. I once asked a security guard about his, as he patrolled near the Casa de Nariño, the presidential palace in Colombia. He said it was just the thing for the local conditions—narrow streets, bounded by walls.

One day I wound up on a coffee plantation, riding around in a pair of ATVs with several other people. As we zipped over the dirt roads, I became aware of a man 20 yards behind on a motocross bike, and I wondered if we should pull over and let the bike pass. Then I noticed the shotgun the motorcyclist wore slung over his back and realized he was there to protect us, even inside the walls of the farm.

Late in the day, as the sun dipped over the ridge of the steep mountains, we found ourselves in a remote corner of the farm. The quickest way back to the hacienda involved a jump outside the walled confines of the plantation. So we passed though a gate and onto the cobbled street of a village. And there was the other Latin America. Tiny indigenous women stooping beneath tragic, towering bundles of green twigs for cooking. Tough men in cast-off American t-shirts and ball caps, returning from tedious days of clearing brush, riding on well-worn mountain bikes, machetes neatly bent into the frames. Uniformed school kids in white shirts, ambling home to corrugated tin hovels. All of them—the little old ladies, the macheteros, the school kids—angled toward the ditches as we floored it up the center of the narrow lane.

As we raced around the corner into a back entrance to the finca, we surprised two of the farm’s guards posted there. It was 20 yards from the street to the gate, and one of the guards, dressed in the olive-drab paramilitary style so popular among private security in coffee country, held the barrel of his shotgun to his chest with one hand and flat-out sprinted to get to the gate ahead of us, to open it so we could pass through unimpeded.

As he ran—head down, worn tennies pounding the cobbles—the plantation owner blithely kept the ATV floored, blasting along at top speed. It was as though the human running before us to smooth our passage simply did not exist.

The dueño passed through the gate without even a nod to the guard. The gate closed behind us, and we were soon back to the quiet hacienda. All protected by guns from the noisy world beyond the walls.

Yes, you get used to seeing the guns around in Latin American coffee country. This is something American coffee drinkers are insulated from. But I sometimes detect a faint metallic flavor in my coffee.

The post Do You Take Your Coffee With Sugar, Milk, or Guns? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In conjunction with our annual book prize, we honor the writer of a poem that best evokes a connection to place. In 2012, Jody Zordrager won our inaugural prize for “Coming Back, It Comes Back,” a poem about returning home to Massachusetts; our 2013 prize went to Jia-Rui Cook—prior to her joining the Zócalo staff as editor—for “Fault,” a poem about the shifting ground on which Southern Californians live. Last year’s prize went to Amy Glynn for “Shoreline,” about a place where we can sit back and watch the tide roll out and come in.

This year, 350 poets submitted about 700 poems to our contest. They brought us to all sorts of places: from the Bronx and Finland to what we imagine heaven is like.

Ultimately, Zócalo poetry editor Stephanie Brown and the Zócalo editorial staff chose to honor a poem about a place here in California. We’re delighted to award the $500 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize to Gillian Wegener, who works on teacher training and curriculum development for the Oakdale Joint Unified School District and serves as the poet laureate of Modesto, Calif. Her winning poem about a small-town diner evokes the intimacy of its staff and regulars, and accepts the inevitability of change:

The Old Mill Café

Everyone knew where to sit.
Everyone knew what time the men from the dairy plant came in after the night shift.
Everyone knew when the all-night drunks would come looking for breakfast.
Everyone knew when Sandy’s girl ran away and why.
Everyone knew the size of the pancakes.
Everyone knew the windmill might really work, but then again, who could be sure.
Everyone knew when the junior college let out for summer.
Everyone knew when the talk was that the highway would be decommissioned.
Everyone knew when the hometown boy made good.
Everyone knew when the waitress was home sick and that she wasn’t sick at all.
Everyone knew and everyone commented when something wasn’t right.
Some folks commented with words and more words and some just nodded
and some didn’t nod.
Everyone knew that team didn’t deserve to win that championship game.
Everyone knew the goddamned hippies weren’t welcome.
Everyone knew the smell of fresh coffee and the little clanks of the creamer lids.
Everyone left that stool empty for a long time after Charlie passed.
Everyone clutched their coffee cups when the train passed through—could have
touched the train as it squeezed by—the truth then, but not now.
Everyone heard about the accident and then everyone knew or thought they knew.
Everyone knew wind from the west meant a little rain.
No one knew what happened to that kid who used to bus tables.
Everyone knew when the price of almonds just about dropped through the floor.
Everyone knew the overpass was coming and that the Old Mill would be razed.
Everyone knew the café would reopen way down the street and no one was happy
about it.
Everyone knew they would keep going to the new place, which they did
even though it wasn’t the same—eggs tasted different, couldn’t put a finger on it.
Everyone knew that things don’t stay the same and there’s no use in whining about
any of it.

We spoke on the phone to the winner, who wrote a piece for Zócalo last year about Modesto’s poetry scene—to tell her the good news and ask her some questions:

Q. Was the “The Old Mill Café” inspired by an actual café—and, if so, where is it?

A. The Old Mill Café is in downtown Modesto. It had a certain kind of mystique. I actually never went inside—but I used to go past it all time. It was on the Old Highway 99.

When I wrote the poem, I was imagining its history over the course of time—how the same people went there day after day, year after year. It was close to a dairy, so I imagined shift workers going there—people who’ve been at the heart of Modesto as a town over the years.

[In 2001], the city built an overpass and knocked down the old restaurant. The Old Mill was moved down street and it doesn’t have a windmill anymore. It’s a regular old diner now, but the same people still go: farmers, ranchers, and the occasional person passing through.

Q. What’s been especially rewarding about being the poet laureate of Modesto?

A. So many community groups have asked me to write poems for their events. No one needs to include a poem in an event, but people feel that a poem gives a sense of gravity to a situation. I’ve been honored to meet that need.

The most challenging poem I’ve written was for the Community Hospice, for the dedication of the Children’s Memorial Garden. I was writing for families who’ve lost a child, so I wanted to honor their experience without assuming that I knew what they were feeling. Having that kind of trust from them was an honor. It was challenging to write and also meaningful, hopefully.

Q. What do you do when you’re not writing poetry?

A. I taught 8th grade English for 22 years. I’m out of the classroom now and working on curriculum and training teachers.

Q. What subject do you find yourself returning to?

A. Sense of place. I moved around a lot growing up and didn’t have a home place. I moved to Modesto and got a teaching job. At first, I wanted to teach and then move somewhere more exciting. Then this became my home, almost in spite of myself. I’m fascinated by how home gets created around us, even when we’re not looking for it.

Q. Which English-language poet do you find especially inspiring?

A. Lorine Niedecker. She has an amazing sense of place in her work, and an amazing sense of history. She’s my go-to poet when I’m stuck, when I feel like I’m caught in little bit of a rut and need to go in a new direction. Sometimes reading her work generates ideas that have nothing to do with what’s in her poems. It’s always a pleasure to read her work and see what happens.

The post Announcing Zócalo’s Fourth Annual Poetry Prize Winner appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The coffee, as I recall, was no great shakes. It likely came in thick, bone-white mugs, the rims pitted and slightly stained from years of use. We were just becoming aware of gourmet coffee in those days. And, sure, if you’d asked if we wanted the diner joe or a cup of Sumatra Mandheling like they served at Brillig Works in Boulder, we’d all have opted for the latter. But we weren’t in Boulder, the gourmet coffee was not available, and yet we had a blast drinking the bitter diner java, joking around, and, finally, too jacked up to sit still, rolling down the road.

These days, gourmet coffee is everywhere. And we’ve got a million new ways to prepare it. In addition to cold-pressed coffee, we’ve got the Japanese siphon process, a plethora of pod brewers, and coffee that comes from fancy machines like the Roasting Plant’s Javabot. And then there are concoctions like the flat white—an espresso and steamed milk blend—that suddenly become trendy when the Starbucks marketers put them in heavy rotation.

But it is easy to overlook an enduring truth amidst the gourmet coffee shuffle: Most coffee we drink in the U.S. is not the type favored by coffee connoisseurs. Folgers and Maxwell House remain the nation’s most popular coffee brands by a long shot. Despite the gourmet coffee boom, in this golden age of fine coffee, it’s primarily the mass-market blends that keep America caffeinated, and those diner cups full.

Once, hitchhiking through Wyoming in a snow squall, I caught a ride from a young couple. They were vagabonds who had made a tidy little home in their pickup with a camper shell. We pulled off at a truck stop in Rawlins. And I remember how that coffee—plain old truck-stop coffee—warmed us up, strangers waiting out a blizzard. When I got dropped off in Cheyenne a couple of hours later, I felt I was leaving old friends.

Over the years, how many late night or early morning road trips, outdoors adventures with friends and family, or travels to remote job sites have been undergirded by diner coffee? Too many to count.

Is it just nostalgia that makes me appreciate—not crave, but appreciate—the coffee so often dissed as inferior? Probably. Who can deny the deep emotions triggered by a late night cup of joe, reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”: adrift in midnight America, the clatter of the dishes, the warm cup of diner coffee. You don’t get that feeling at Starbucks.

So, partly, it’s a matter of nostalgia, but partly it’s a matter of caffeine.

Ounce per ounce, Folgers and Maxwell House coffees are more caffeinated than most specialty coffees. And there are two reasons for this. First, they tend to be lightly roasted. A light roasted coffee has slightly more caffeine per bean than a dark roasted coffee. Second, they typically include blends of arabica and robusta beans. Arabica, the mountain-grown coffee beloved by coffee connoisseurs, tends to taste smooth. Robusta, the cheaper, hardier, easier-to-grow coffee, often has a bitter tang (one coffee expert says it tastes like burnt rubber). But here’s the catch—robusta has much more caffeine than arabica, often twice as much.

So that cup of java in the diner or truck stop, unless it is brewed weakly, will likely give you more of a jolt than a cup from an upscale café. And that caffeine is a big part of what pulls us off the two-lane road to a diner in the middle of nowhere, and brings us back to the downtown deli where the waitress endlessly refills our coffee cups.

Recently, I stopped at a country store at a crossroads in northern Maine on a frosty morning. I’d only planned to ask directions, but got into a conversation about fishing with a friendly local. So I had a cup of coffee while we talked. Unlike some New England convenience stores, this one did not have 15 flavors of Green Mountain coffee in vacuum pots, just two of the old Pyrex coffeepots on hot plates. It wasn’t the gourmet stuff, but it definitely hit the spot.

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Given our obsessive, even fetishistic, interest in coffee, it seems axiomatic that we are drinking more coffee than ever before. But that’s not just wrong. It’s entirely wrong. Our grandparents drank twice as much coffee as we do.

American coffee consumption peaked just after World War II. In that era, soldiers chugged it from tin cups, factory workers used it to brace for long shifts, and office break rooms were chock-a-block with coffee pots. Gum-popping waitresses refilled countless coffee cups lining the counters of all-night diners. Jukeboxes blared the Ink Spots’ melodic harmonizing, “I love the java jive and it loves me,” and Frank Sinatra singing, “They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.”

In 1946, American coffee consumption peaked at over 46 gallons per person annually. By 1995, it was less than half that amount.

So what happened to bring an end to coffee’s heyday? The short answer is that Coke took over.

Soft drinks displaced coffee in what the food industry calls “stomach share.” Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi were well-established brands back then, but not nearly as popular as they are today. When coffee’s popularity peaked, Americans drank just 11 gallons of soft drinks annually. But that changed in a hurry. Through the next few decades, soft drink consumption spiked as coffee consumption plummeted. The lines crossed around 1974, and the trends continued. By 2005, Americans drank 51 gallons of soft drinks and only 24 gallons of coffee. In less than 60 years we made this huge shift—from drinking five times as much coffee as soda to drinking half as much.

There are many reasons carbonated soft drinks gained the upper hand over time. Coca-Cola’s brilliant marketing during World War II—including the promise “to see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the company”—won a generation of loyal customers as the soldiers returned home. And the company promoted strong brand identity and uniformity. A Coke is always a Coke, and postwar consumers appreciated knowing exactly what they were in for, whether they bought “the real thing” from an Atlanta soda fountain, the Beverly Hills Hotel, or a dusty gas station on Route 66. Coffee—stronger here, weaker there—was less of a curated brand offering the same experience again and again (until recently). The genius of Howard Schultz wasn’t just to brew good coffee, but to brand Starbucks as if it was Coke.

Of course the reason we can talk interchangeably about soft drinks and coffee is because of what they have in common: caffeine. All of the five top-selling soft drinks, and eight of the top 10, are caffeinated. Although there is less caffeine in soft drinks than in coffee, even the mere 34 milligrams in a can of Coke is a psychoactive dose. And caffeine, even at low levels, just makes us feel good—energetic, alert, optimistic, even. The cola industry is so dependent on caffeine that it blends more than 10 million pounds of the bitter, white powder into beverages every year.

So Americans have not just been swapping a hot, slightly bitter beverage for a cold sweet one; we have been shifting the preferred sources of our favorite psychoactive drug (though coffee, with its higher caffeine levels, is still the top source of caffeine in the American diet). Some of us follow a sort of hybrid strategy, supplementing our morning coffee with afternoon soft drinks. Others drink soda in a pattern familiar to coffee drinkers—one can first thing in the morning, another a half hour later, one at mid-morning, and another in mid-afternoon. Adding insult to coffee’s injury, we now spend more than twice as much on soft drinks as we do on coffee, more than $75 billion annually. This despite the incessant jokes about $5 lattes.

But coffee is bouncing back: Consumption has climbed since its nadir in the 1990s, and we can credit this new era of tasty, widely accessible, and carefully branded java for that recent growth. Soft drink sales, meanwhile, have declined slightly in recent years, due to health concerns. And the trends continue to evolve. As soft drinks have lost some steam, other formulations of sugar and caffeine—bottled teas and energy drinks—have gained momentum.

It’s a funny thing to ponder, as we choose our daily brew from a McCafé or Starbucks or Stumptown. There’s no doubt we live in coffee’s golden age, with better coffee more available than ever before. There’s just less of it than first appears.

The post Why Do Americans Drink Half as Much Coffee Today as They Did 60 Years Ago? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In Los Angeles, at least at 9 o’clock on weekend mornings, it’s the Starbucks at Santa Monica and Westmount Drive. I’ve been going here at least two days a week since around 1998. The baristas know me by my order. “Short drip?” they chirp before I approach the counter. Short coffee, I want to correct them.

You could say all Starbucks are the same: the same smell of burnt beans, ostentatious drinks whose names require practicing, racks of mugs nobody buys, Norah Jones. But more than 90 percent of the customers at my Starbucks are gay – more regular-guy-and-his-dog gay than six-pack abs gay – and they’ve made it into a genuine social center, even more so than a bar. I’m among that 90 percent, but I don’t socialize there. For me, it’s a place for cheap(ish) adequate coffee and bland music that won’t distract me from The New York Times, inviting but not comfortable enough to stay longer than it takes to read the Arts section and the editorials. If I time it right, I can score an already-read Times from the discard bin at the front door.

I could brew my own coffee, but making a whole pot is wasteful. I prefer to get out of the house first thing, and Starbucks is the perfect distance for a morning walk. The Coffee Bean is several more blocks away, with only five tables, louder music, and no Times. The smaller Starbucks next to the Coffee Bean has even less seating, so there’s no point. I could drive to an independent coffeehouse, but I hate driving, and indies are too homey. They almost shout, “What’s your rush? Play Scrabble.” And call me crazy, but I like being known by my drink order rather than “Larry.” Maybe I’ve lived in a big city too long.

They remodeled the gay Starbucks last year and they doubled the seating area. But as with freeways that become clogged a week after they’re widened, almost every seat is usually occupied. There’s a communal bench where you’re almost forced to chat up whoever is across from you. I don’t have the time to do that. Like I said, I’m there for coffee and the Times.

The place has shifting moods. Afternoons mean writing partners enthusiastically hammering out story lines (“The hooker is also a hedge fund manager!”). Evenings bring awkward first dates with guys who met online with high hopes. Late evenings are filled with the more somber whisper clicking of scripts being created on laptops (FADE IN: A stiletto-heeled hooker, with the steely resolve of a hedge fund manager). I rarely visit during those times.

On weekend mornings, though, everyone seems to know each other and is interested in getting to know everyone else. Even the occasional family who’s just checked out of the pink Ramada next door, carrying suitcases and scolding their children in German accents, will chat up a group of guys.

The place has been, for me, the perfect place to be among people, yet anonymous. But lately I’ve begun feeling like a short drip hermit.

I blame my mother. Twice in the last month she has told me how she can’t wait to come back to visit Los Angeles so she can go to “that nice Starbucks” and meet some more of those “nice gay men.” I assume she is willing to spend upwards of $450 on a plane ticket to see me as well, but she hasn’t said that in so many words. With every visit she eschews the usual tourist attractions. For her, the gay Starbucks is Los Angeles, and she acts like it’s her own AARP cotillion. In 20 minutes she will talk to more people there than I have since the Clinton presidency–this from a woman who usually views strangers with fear and a little loathing and carries her purse in a plastic CVS bag to deter muggers.

“You could be friendlier,” she said after the last time I took her there. I was indoors reading the Times Book Review while she was on the patio discussing dog training with a guy who had two Chihuahuas. It’s not a matter of being friendly, I try to tell her. I socialize, just not there. It’s hard to explain that I actually go to a Starbucks for the coffee.

She has no interest in going to a Starbucks in Akron. The weather is lousy, so no patios. Presumably gay men there brew their own. If she doesn’t make it out here this year, I might just send her a few Norah Jones CDs.

Larry Buhl is a Los Angeles-based freelance reporter and writer who covers medicine, technology, entertainment and politics.

*Photo by Larry Buhl.

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