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(This appeared in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of Coffee House. We loved it and thought it was a great feature... but a screw-up meant that the last few paragraphs got missed out from the printed version, so we're re-printing it in full here!) * The book of genesis might have to be re-written, if we go along with Antony Wild, whose book Coffee - a Dark History, has just been re-published in paperback. This excellent, opinionated and occasionally very humorous book is different from other coffee histories. It doesn’t concern itself with pictures of beans and explanations of processing, but concentrates on the sociology of coffee in a way which keeps the most non-political reader fascinated. How does coffee come to be involved with the rise of man? “In 1974, at Hadar in Northern Ethiopia, palaeontologists unearthed the fossil remains of a group of mankind’s oldest-known ancestor,” writes Wild. ”Genetic research suggests that all modern humans are descended from a group who lived in the Ethiopian Highlands 120,000 years ago. Even the missing link may have been found there, for the recent discovery of a fossiled toe offers the first tentative evidence of our species’ separation from the chimpanzee, six million years ago.” But where does coffee come in? “One of the mysteries of anthropology is the so-called brain explosion about 500,000 years ago… man’s brain expanded, allowing him to communicate concepts which had previously been unthinkable. “It is tempting to wonder whether the proliferation of wild coffee trees in the same Ethiopian highland forests could have had a hand in the process… coffee has always been associated with speed of cognition and expression, and the sudden dawn of self-awareness in Genesis is something which could have been prompted by a psychoactive substance such as caffeine. “To place a bright red coffee cherry centre-stage in the story of the Fall is altogether a far more inspired piece of casting than a lowly Golden Delicious…” (It doesn’t end there – Wild argues that the Tree of Life described in the ‘lost’ Book of Enoch could be a coffee tree – and the ‘lost’ book was finally re-discovered in, of all places, Ethiopia!) Elsewhere, this is a challenging book for anyone who believes in ‘coffee with a conscience’. The writer is opinionated (like so many people in the coffee trade – Ed) and his extremely detailed account of the history of slavery leads him to uncomfortable conclusions: “Without the massive influx of slaves, its widespread cultivation could not have been contemplated. The continuing importance of the western hemisphere in the world of coffee today is derived from the former colonial plantation economies, based on slavery… the harsh reality is that the world’s greatest coffee economy, Brazil, was founded on the continuation of slavery long after it had been banned elsewhere.” Slavery, he adds, provided not just the labour force but the first major distribution, along slave routes such as the one from Harar in Ethiopa. Antony Wild only describes himself as someone who worked for thirteen years buying coffee. The clue comes from the surname – we recently reviewed Jonathan Wild’s history of his famous company Bettys and Taylors, in Yorkshire, and it is the same family. Readers with a political interest will love the twenty or so pages devoted to the politics of coffee-producing countries. His chapter on fair trade is includes an almost pantomime plot concerning the waitress Fair Trade, who works in Ahab’s coffee house. Ahab’s customers complain about the way he treats his staff – he agrees, and says he can’t do anything about it, because putting staff wages up means putting prices up, and then he will lose all his customers, so his staff will be out of work. However, he employs one well-treated peasant waitress, Fair Trade (“her parents were unreconstructed hippies”) and shows her off to admiring satisfied customers while the rest of his staff starve. “Every time we buy coffee from a place that sells Fair Trade alongside other kinds, we connive at underlying injustice” claims Wild. He is scathing about America’s role in the rise of Vietnamese robusta. “Having massively defoliated the nation with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, the USA promoted, through the World Bank in which is has a controlling stake, the refoliation of Vietnam with low-grade robusta bushes, with a devastating effect on other third-world economies dependant upon coffee. The situation was sufficiently serious for the usually-conservative coffee-trade magazines to produce hand-wringing editorials – ‘Vietnam is the number two producer of coffee, plenty of robusta for all. Yet the roasters claim there’s little if any robusta in their blends – so who’s buying it, then, the man in the moon?’ “Junk retailers sold junk coffee to junk consumers at the lowest price point. The USA remained unrepentant – ‘in general, we consider it a huge success’, said a principal economist at the World Bank.” This writer has the most superb line in gently acid observations. Several institutions come under his gaze, including no less than Dr Ernesto Illy. He has a terrific go at the various laboratories purporting to produce scientific reports on coffee, and indeed branded research supporting products, and tells us that the Sleep Research department at Loughborough University was funded by Red Bull, and later produced a report saying that a can of a caffeinated drink could counter the problem of falling asleep at the wheel!. . “Coffee science is quietly falling victim to the interests of corporations -… it is increasingly difficult for a reasonably sceptical non-scientist to take seriously the quality of science which is being put forward. “ And of course Starbucks, whose heavy-handedness in business compared with its created image of folksiness is witheringly described as “the iron corporate fist beneath the Peruvian yak-wool glove” There is more than meets the eye to an extremely detailed account of Napoleon’s exile on St Helena, and for some time, the reader wonders why Wild is going into it in such detail. The answer comes in his final chapter, when he returns to his personal enthusiasm for the island, ‘this tiny, tired remnant of the Empire’ and the coffee which is grown there, the unique green-tipped bourbon Arabica. The island’s minimal coffee business (‘industry’ is probably an exaggeration) is entirely in the hands of David Henry, who has spent ten years organising its cultivation into what is now probably the most expensive coffee in the world – typically, in the UK, the Bean Shop in Perth sells it at £35/250gm! This is a terrific book for those involved in coffee. Coffee – a Dark History, by Antony Wild. Now republished in paperback as Black Gold: The Dark History of Coffee. Fourth estate, ISBN 1-84115-649-3
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