Every era has its addictive substance. What they don’t teach you in history is that Napoleon was hooked on snuff, Byron on gin-and-water, and Newton on tobacco. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, Mark Pendergrast tells us, it is coffee that remains “the world’s most widely taken psychoactive drug”.
Gershom Scholem reports Walter Benjamin as saying: “A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.” Pendergrast forsakes soothsaying and makes no attempt at philosophy, but he dutifully grinds through the old myths and stories: about the discovery of coffee by the Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi and his dancing goats, about colonialism and commodification. He tells the tales of the pickers and the packers, the exporters and importers, the roasters and traders who at various times have prescribed a nice cup of coffee as an “aphrodisiac, enema, nerve tonic, or life-extender”. It is a book both rich and thick; it is almost Turkish.
Yet for all its exotic locations and excursions, for all the potted histories of Guatemala and Costa Rica, Pendergrast’s coffee all ends up in the United States. It is an American story that he is telling, about 19th-century entrepreneurs and enthusiasts such as Joel Cheek, founder of Maxwell House; and C W Post, inventor of the popular coffee substitute Postum (“Is your yellow streak the coffee habit? Does it reduce your work time, kill your energy, push you into the big crowd of mongrels, deaden what thoroughbred blood you may have, and neutralise all your efforts to make money and fame?”). Ultimately, of course, it is a book about Starbucks.
The way Pendergrast tells it, the Starbucks story is a classic illustration of the business cycle: the small start-up by men with beards and big ideas; the takeover by a plastics salesman with determination and know-how; then success and market domination, followed by the inevitable backlashes, downturns and complaints about bully-boy tactics and the loss of quality.
What Pendergrast does not point out is that Starbucks is the apotheosis of modern consumer society and its management of the pleasure principle. In 1971 three men set up a shop called Starbucks in Seattle, selling a wide range of fresh-roasted whole beans to local customers — a celebration of a simple pleasure. Thirty years later Starbucks is a form of anti-pleasure, social conditioning in which coffee has become another learned reward in a dreary shopping experience. Balzac, the coffee drinker’s coffee drinker, would not pause mid-sentence to piss in a grande latte.
“How do we judge coffee quality?” asks Pendergrast. “Coffee experts talk about four basic components that blend to create the perfect cup: aroma, body, acidity and flavour. The aroma is familiar and obvious enough — that fragrance that often promises more than the taste delivers. Body is a more subjective quality, and refers to the feel or ‘weight’ of the coffee in the mouth, how it rolls around the tongue and fills the throat on the way down. Acidity does not refer literally to a pH level but to a sparkle, a brightness, a tang that adds zest to the cup. Finally, flavour is the evanescent, subtle taste that explodes in the mouth, then lingers as a gustatory memory.” Mention that to your “barista” next time they dish up your daily cup of froth. And remember, it is not really coffee they are serving you: it is the memory of your mother’s milk.