black coffee

I really enjoy learning about the history of what we eat and drink and why and how we do it.

Much Depends on Dinner a book by Margaret Visser

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“takes us on an amazing excursion through the history and mythology of an ordinary meal. Corn, chicken, lettuce, ice cream, and other familiar foods become far from ordinary in an account that is sometimes hilarious or frightening but always enlightening and entertaining.”

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Now – sipping my OMFG so good Grizzly Claw coffee, I type this…

I watched the first part of three of the documentary Black Coffee on TVO The View from Here last night. I recommend it!

Want to know more about the history of that liquid gold? Take a peak at the facts from the doc...

• Coffee is the world's most widely taken legal drug.
  
• Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.
  
• Coffee helped foster the slave trade.
  
• Coffee is the second most traded legal commodity on earth.
  
• In various times, coffee has been considered both an aphrodisiac and a sex inhibitor.
  
• 500 billion cups of coffee a years are consumer around the world, half of them at breakfast.
  
• Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people; 100 million more depend on it for survival.
  
• Coffee is a green bean hidden in the red cherry of the coffee tree.
  
• It is said the bean was discovered by the frisky goats of an Ethiopian goatherd called Kaldi.
  
• Coffee was roasted for the first time in the 1400s.
  
• Only the women of the house can roast the coffee beans in Ethiopia.
  
• Coffee traveled from Ethiopia to Arabia to Turkey and thence to Europe.
  
• The fertile seeds were smuggled to India, then Holland, then their colony Java.
  
• When Arabs tried to seize Vienna, a Pole warned the French who repulsed the Arabs, found the bags of coffee left behind, and the first European coffeehouse was opened.
  
• Coffee was perfected in Italy; even the Pope liked it.
  
• "The heart wants friend and coffee is only the excuse." –Turkish saying
  
• Cappuccinos name came from its resemblance to the colour and peak of the Capucin monk's cloak
  
• Espresso came from Neapolitan impatience; they couldn't wait for coffee to be brewed.
  
• Balzac is reputed to have drunk 40 cups of coffee a day.
  
• The first French café—Le Procope was opened in 1686 by Italians.
  
• Cafés stimulated not only nervous systems but political and social ferment.
  
• By 1700, the English were big coffee drinkers.
  
• The Tatler started as a coffeehouse broadsheet, along with the institution of TIPS for service.
  
• The French Revolution was planned in coffeehouses.
  
• By 1790, half of all the coffee in the world was grown in Haiti by African slaves.
  
• One of the French king's mistresses gave a coffee plant to a French lieutenant she'd slept with; on the ocean voyage to Martinique he protected the plant from storms and pirates. From the single Martinique plant almost all the coffee in Latin America descends.
  
• The French established the slave-run plantations in the colonized islands
  
• In 1791 the slaves of Haiti rose up and destroyed the coffee and sugar plantations; the revolt lasted 12 years and defeated Napoleon's troops.
  
• Only 10% of the rainforest in Sao Paolo remains, with coffee growing the dominant reason
  
• By 1816 there were 1 million slaves in Brazil, comprising 1/3 of the population, more than half of them working on coffee plantations from dawn to sunset, eating only once a day.
  
• The coffee crash in Brazil occurred only a few weeks before the 1929 economic crash.
  
• The scion of the Folger's coffee empire doesn't drink Folger's. He roasts and brews his own.
  
• The term "cup o' joe" originated in World War II.
  
• The coffee break was an advertising ploy to sell more coffee.
  
• Brazilian president Vargas committed suicide over coffee politics.
  
• It costs a full day's wages for most coffee farmers to buy a cappuccino.
  
• Many coffee workers are only marginally better off than their enslaved ancestors.
  
• Most coffee farmers have never tasted their own coffee.
  
• Barristas are the bartenders of the speciality coffee industry