Food Chain Radio Show #1195

Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist

Crazed by Coffee

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Guest: Mark Pendergrast, Author, Uncommon Ground: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed the World

How did coffee transform the world? Well, I may as well admit it, I am addicted to coffee…

Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Crazed by Coffee – How did coffee transform the world?

I suppose it began way back when I was a reluctant college student hanging out in the Student Union while waiting for the military to carry me off me to Viet Nam. It did, but not until I picked up a craving for coffee.

And, there was no better place to have that craving than aboard a U.S. Navy ship on Yankee Station. Some aboard the ship, mostly those we boots called lifers, actually had a permanent crook in their finger from holding a coffee cup 24–7–365 for about 20 years in a row.

But, it was while studying Mandarin at UC Berkeley that my addiction to coffee really locked in. I had to learn how to read, speak and write hundreds of new Chinese characters every week, and to work them into sentences and stories. And, I had to do it in a class filled with Cantonese-speaking Chinese. I really needed help, and I found it in the triple espresso available at Alfred Peet’s Berkeley coffee shop.

I still start the day with a cup of coffee, and get downright grumpy if I can’t get one. And, I suspect many of you have the same habit. In fact, the real interesting story about coffee is not the one about you and I, it’s the story of how the brew has transformed the whole of human civilization with its caffeinated wakefulness. So, we ask…

Leave a comment below: Do you get your coffee at Starbucks, a local coffee-house or at home?

Tune in here, for the syndicated the Michael Olson Food Chain Radio Show #1195 July 27, 2019 Saturday 9AM Pacific