A dark, bitter truth: Mridula Ramesh spills the beans on coffee

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

About a thousand years ago, in the mountains of Ethiopia, a shepherd boy named Kaldi saw his goats acting strangely. The next day, he followed and saw them eat red berries growing in clumps on a short tree with waxy, dark-green leaves, sheltered by the rainforest canopy. Coffee cherries dry in the sun, post-harvest. (Shutterstock)
He plucked a berry and popped it into his mouth. Its meagre flesh was sweet, encasing twin seeds. He bit into these too and found them hard and bitter, but within 15 minutes, he had a spring in his step and was hopping along with his goats.
This is coffee's origin tale, told in the highlands of the Kaffa region. The berry spread from these cool and wet climes around the world, but this is the climate that still suits coffee best.
Back then, as word spread of this bean and its effects, priests began to chew on it to help them stay awake through long rituals. It took hundreds of years, journalist Mark Pendergrast writes in his book Uncommon Grounds (1999), for coffee beans to be roasted and brewed.
Then, plantations came up in Yemen, and the port city of Mocha became the hub for global exports. The Ottoman Empire later inherited and reinforced this monopoly.
Venetian traders then popularised the brew in Europe, but they still relied for their supply on roasted beans from Arab traders, who tightly guarded live plants. By the 17th century, coffee houses had spread rapidly across Europe, with England, particularly London and Oxford, becoming renowned for their vibrant 'penny universities', where people from across social backgrounds engaged in lively discussion, news-sharing and intellectual debate.
Unlike taverns, these venues promoted the exchange of ideas and served as breeding grounds for Enlightenment-era thought. Several major British institutions originated in coffee houses: the Lloyd's insurance company began at Edward Lloyd's coffee house; the London Stock Exchange grew out of trades made at a café called Jonathan's. Members of the Royal Society frequently met in coffee houses. The coffee house catalysed Britain's intellectual transformation.
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In rainforests such as the Amazon, trees are levelled and the debris set ablaze, to make room for the lucrative plantations. (Shutterstock)
Caffeine lay at the heart of this. It is structurally similar to adenosine, a naturally occurring neurochemical that builds up in the brain over the day and signals, by evening, that it is time for the body to rest.
Caffeine resembles adenosine closely enough to bind to its receptors in the brain, but unlike adenosine, it does not activate them. These receptors, when activated, promote calm and sleep and regulate mood and motivation. By occupying these receptors without triggering them, caffeine blocks adenosine's calming effect, leading to increased neuronal activity and the enhanced effectiveness of dopamine pathways. Ingesting caffeine makes one feel less sleepy, more alert, improves reflexes and makes one more energised. In short, it made people more industrious.
As demand grew, Europe's merchants began to ask themselves: Can we not grow this bean ourselves? The Dutch were the first to break the Arab monopoly by acquiring live coffee plants — historical accounts differ as to whether this was through smuggling or a gift — and cultivating them first in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and then in Java (Indonesia), in the 17th century. The French then obtained a plant from the Dutch botanical gardens in Amsterdam, which they successfully cultivated on Reunion Island and then in the Caribbean.
Incidentally, another origin tale has it that Baba Budan, a 17th-century Sufi saint, smuggled seven seeds to India, hidden in his beard, to set up the country's first coffee plantation, in Karnataka.
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Cultivation of this crop is time- and labour-intensive, requiring several steps that must each be executed with precision. First, seeds must be selected and nursed into seedlings. These must be transplanted and tended to (with regular weeding, pruning, pest and disease control, and irrigation). At harvest, the cherries must be hand-picked, often selectively and over several phases, since they ripen unevenly. Post-harvest, the cherries must be processed, dried, hulled, sorted, graded and roasted, each step involving at least a certain degree of skilled manual labour.
In a coffee plantation that I recently visited in Tamil Nadu, harvest coincides with the winter rains and the manager must cajole workers to stand in the downpour, braving leeches, to pick the cherries. Wages exceed ₹1,000 a day, with bonuses for productivity, but still, plantation ownerShakerNagarajan says, labour is not easy to come by.
Incidentally, in one of the world's most expensive coffees, the Kopi Luwak, much of this process is outsourced to Asian palm civet cats, who eat and pass the bean, their stomach enzymes enhancing the flavour. Someone still has to collect the scat, extract the beans, clean, dry and roast them.
Back in the 17th century, the need for all this labour spurred coffee's cruellest avatar: that of a plantation-grown crop enabled by deforestation and slavery. And it was brutal. Haiti, in 1788, provided nearly half the world's coffee, but under conditions so inhuman that a slave's life expectancy was 21 years.
Then coffee began to eat into the rainforests of Brazil.
The story goes that the seeds entered Brazil, then a Portuguese colony, hidden in a bouquet given by the wife of the governor of French Guiana to her Portuguese lover. After the country broke free of Portuguese rule in 1822, coffee plantations grew swiftly, clearing enormous, almost unfathomable swathes of the Amazon in the process.
In his book With Broadax and Firebrand (1997), ecological historian Warren Dean describes how a crew of loggers would ascend a hillside, cutting through a swath of trees without felling them, until the foreman severed the 'master tree'. Its fall would trigger, like dominos, the entire hillside of timber to collapse in a 'tremendous explosion'.
The felled trees were later set ablaze, leaving the land looking like a battlefield, 'blackened, smouldering, and desolate'. The ash, writes Pendergrast, provided a boost for the coffee seedlings, and when the soil grew tired, the plantation owner moved on and burned a fresh patch of forest. The irony of destroying a forest to plant a shade-loving crop was lost on the farmers.
To meet soaring global demand, large swathes of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, particularly the upland slopes, were also cleared. Brazil became, and remains, the world's leading producer of the bean, but at a cost that is now coming due for us all.
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Meanwhile, Brazil's gigantic coffee harvest caused prices to fall enough to make this a mass-market drink. As it entered the home, a cultural revolution was unleashed.
Historian AR Venkatachalapathy writes that, in the early 20th century, families in Tamil Nadu drank neeragaram or kanji, essentially fermented rice water. Conservative commentators bemoaned the abandoning of this nutritional beverage for the amoral, probably unhealthy, new brew. In the US too, there was a raging battle over coffee's possible health impacts, with dubious arguments and counterarguments playing out in advertisements. But too many had grown accustomed to the alertness that the morning cuppa provided.
Then, in the 1950s, climate struck, with a frost decimating the Brazilian crop, causing coffee prices to skyrocket. From the ashes of this disaster, another variant rose like a phoenix: Instant coffee, where cost, convenience and nifty advertising combine to triumph over taste. Now, the hardier Coffea canephora aka Robusta rose to prominence, despite its harsher flavour. Native to Africa's lowlands, the higher-yielding crop marked a new era, with the plant now devastating new geographies in Brazil, Uganda and Vietnam. Separately, in the 1960s, scientists began to develop new strains of Arabica. These could grow under sunlight, but needed far more fertiliser. This became a double whammy for soil health.
Then, caffeine began to be packaged in new ways. A 350 ml can of Coca-Cola contains about 34 mg of the substance compared to the hefty 94 mg provided by a regular cup of coffee. The caffeine in soft drinks re-sculpted humanity's biochemistry once more.
Neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman calls caffeine a reinforcer. It does this by making the dopamine circuits more effective in brain areas that make you feel alert and good, encouraging you to indulge in behaviours that accompany that shot of the substance.
Studies have shown, for instance, that, particularly in older adolescents, caffeine consumption is strongly linked to reduced sleep time.
Now consider that many energy drinks today contain nearly as much caffeine as a cup of coffee, and are ingested by sleep-deprived teens while scrolling mindlessly through Reels, not by a young adult at the beginning of their day. Imagine the brain being re-sculpted, not towards enlightenment but towards the mindless consumption of content designed to make tech companies wealthier.
Meanwhile, climate is wreaking havoc on the plant. In many places, farmers are having to move to higher altitudes. Rising temperatures and humidity levels, meanwhile, tilt the balance in favour of pests such as the coffee bean borer and coffee leaf rust. In 2015, a study found that, based on current climate projections, about half the land currently used for coffee production would no longer be suitable for the crop, by the 2050s.
As though to prove them right, coffee harvests have suffered in recent years across Vietnam, Brazil and Colombia, leading to record prices. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly asking for fair-trade beans and sustainably produced brew. This may be just what the doctor, and the planet, ordered. And India is well-placed to benefit from such a trend.
Stay tuned for more on this, in the next Trade-Offs.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on [e-mail])