The Dark Truth Behind Coffee

I am addicted to coffee. While some fortunate people can spring out of bed ready to seize the day, when I wake up, the first thing that comes to mind is Buddha's first Noble Truth: life is suffering. Or, as the German existentialist Martin Heidegger suggested, we are thrown into this world. We don't choose all the suffering, frustrations, and demands of our existence. They are arbitrary. Our stress is never more evident than when we wake up and become aware of our responsibilities for the day.

If you're like me, then you can't tolerate being in this state for very long, especially when there's a remedy waiting right in the kitchen: a stimulating beverage that can be taken hot or cold, black or creamy, sweet or bitter, that promises energy and clarity in a life with a little less suffering. It's why around 63% of Americans and 71% of Canadians drink coffee every single day. In Brazil, it's a staggering 97%, and globally, 400 billion cups of coffee are consumed yearly. It's one of the world's top 10 most traded commodities, up there with sugar and oil. Coffee is everywhere. Unless you live in a remote region, you probably have quick access to some hot brew.

If you're not going to large chains like Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, or Krispy Kreme, you're probably getting your fill at independent cafes with fancy third-wave coffee. Coffee has become an essential part of most of our lives, so much so that it's difficult to imagine life without it. But how did this happen? To figure it out, I read a ton of scientific papers, history books, and spoke with a biologist and barista. Although I found out many interesting things about coffee's past, what I found about its future is quite worrying.

The story of coffee began a long time ago, even before humans evolved from Homo erectus. The most common coffee plant, Coffea arabica, is believed to be 600,000 years old. It came from the crossbreeding of two other coffee species: Coffea robusta, which is also common today, and Coffea eugenioides. The human discovery of coffee has a mythical origin in Ethiopia. The story goes that a goat herder in the 9th century discovered that his animals would stay up all night after eating the berries of a tropical shrub: the infamous Coffea arabica.

To understand how coffee does this, our producer, Emika, spoke with Thomas Meritt, a biology professor in the School of Natural Sciences at Laurentian University, who studies the genetics of stress. "There are a lot of different ways that we can answer that question. The simplest answer is it wakes you up, right?" A lot of people, in fact, in North America, like 80% of adults, start their day with a cup of coffee. So, coffee drinking, that cup of coffee, wakes you up. The question then is how does it wake you up? It wakes you up because of a chemical called caffeine.

It's a molecule called caffeine. Those plants that produce caffeine include coffee and tea. Not coincidentally, coffee and tea are the two most consumed beverages on the entire planet. Depending on how you do the math, people drink more coffee and tea than they drink water, which is ridiculous. Caffeine is an organic compound; it's a couple of rings. It looks like an unbalanced pair of glasses. If you can imagine a pair of glasses where you've got a small ring and a big ring, that's what caffeine looks like. We don't produce caffeine; plants produce caffeine.

It looks a lot like a naturally occurring molecule called adenosine, which is a neurotransmitter. It looks enough like adenosine that it actually binds to the normal receptors for that neurotransmitter. One of the roles of adenosine is to keep us asleep. It binds through a receptor, and when it's bound to that receptor, it triggers what we call an adenosine tonic, which is just a fancy way of saying it keeps you drowsy. What happens with caffeine is it displaces that neurotransmitter and stops or breaks that tonic, waking you up.

Adenosine does at least half a dozen different things in the body; it's involved with energy, it's involved with neurotransmitters, it's involved with DNA and RNA. So, it's this multifaceted molecule. In part, because adenosine does so many different things, caffeine also does a number of different things. So, it wakes you up, but it also gives you that sort of euphoric feeling. You have a cup of coffee, and you're a little bit more alert, but it triggers this whole what we call a cascade of molecules that leads to a little bit of euphoria.

It is literally the same pathway as cocaine and sex. We think of caffeine as being a relatively benign drug, but it's overlapping with things as fundamental as sex response and as extreme as cocaine. Today, we know all of these amazing things that coffee does because of the research that has gone into studying the drug. But it wasn't always the case. In fact, the potential of the coffee plant wasn't unlocked until Ethiopian beans arrived in Yemen in the 15th century. Yemenis discovered that the seed of the coffee cherry could be roasted, ground, and brewed into a stimulating concoction.

Once they discovered this, they began importing coffee plants to grow the beans themselves. It quickly became popular among Sufi saints in Yemen, who used it to help them stay awake all night out of religious devotion. Sufism is a form of Islamic belief that suggests you can know Divine truth via a direct experience with God. It focuses on an inward search for God while shunning materialism. The Yemen port city of Mocha became a Red Sea coffee trade hub. From there, coffee spread further, becoming popular in Mecca and other cities such as Damascus and Cairo.

Coffee first appeared in Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, in 1475 AD. At the time, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. By the 1600s, coffee houses and shops soon became the standard in every Ottoman city and village. According to historians at the time, some coffee houses were so large that they could accommodate 8,000 customers at once. Coffee became the drink of choice for the majority of the population. It was also stunning to look at, drawing attention to itself. The coffee grinds were not filtered out, leaving an oily layer resembling jewel tones on the surface.

Coffee spurred intellectual discourse in coffee houses where artists, craftsmen, poets, merchants, and others from varying backgrounds engaged in conversation. They also challenged one another with board games, read poetry, told stories, and played music. Socialization was alive and well in a way we often wish was still present today. People with different societal roles, who were separated by geography and didn't have a reason to engage with one another, now had a place where they could interact.

Coffee houses became a place for people from these varying backgrounds to talk about the ruling class. They became hotbeds for political exchange. It became such an important tool for political reform that authorities attempted to shut down these conversations that challenged the system, but were unsuccessful. In Europe, coffee and cafés similarly provided societal hubs for creative and intellectual discourse. It's where philosophers and scientists, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Isaac Newton, could meet and discuss their work with great enthusiasm.

It's famously where Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus discussed their existentialist ideas together in the 20th century. Today, we have the life-changing philosophies of existentialism and absurdism because of this drink called coffee. There's a theory that says that most of the advancements in modern human civilization can be traced back to when society switched from drinking alcohol, a depressant, to coffee, a stimulant.

And while there isn't any historical or scientific proof to back up this claim, there is no doubt that having a place where intellectuals could gather without the adverse effects of alcohol did a lot of good for society. Coffee became a beer replacement for socializing and consuming on workplace breaks. Big ideas float easier for minds sharpened with a hot brew. As many of us can attest, alcohol doesn't inspire the same clarity of thought associated with pushing civilization forward towards enlightenment.

Not to mention that alcoholic drinks were fine for basic manual labor, but as machines became more common, business owners wanted their employees to be sharper. There are a lot of studies looking at the effect of coffee or caffeine on performance in a number of different ways. We can think of things in a physical way, but we can also think of things in a mental way. If you think of caffeine, those two things make sense. Moderate amounts of coffee consumption can make you more alert and can make you better able to respond to things. It depends on the kind of work.

If you're doing physical labor, there's actually a lot of study on the effect of caffeine on physical labor, and just like everything else, there are mixed results. So, caffeine is one of the few drugs that you can consume legally in athletics. It's regulated in some way; it's not an unregulated substance. But if you're a high-performance athlete, you can have caffeine in your system legally. There are a lot of studies that have shown that caffeine positively impacts athletic performance, so you could extrapolate that into the workplace.

If you're a manual laborer, having a couple of cups of coffee over the course of the day could make you more apt to do a good job. Workers were far more productive when they had coffee instead of alcohol, and as a result, it was encouraged on the job. It's where the concept of coffee breaks originated. Even today, coffee is an excellent alternative to alcohol for people who prefer a sharper mind. Dates often take place at cafes rather than bars, especially as you get older.

And while most of us aren't planning our evolution, coffee has this funny knack of making you feel like you can do anything for the duration of your buzz. The ritual of making coffee is also great; it makes us feel more organized and capable. We get up in the morning and carefully brew a cup of coffee or pull a perfectly timed shot of espresso. It reliably propels us into the day. Without it, we're at the mercy of the quality of sleep we just had, and that's not always great.

Many of us struggle with insomnia, making coffee an essential tool for functioning like everyone else. But one thing that is often overlooked is that caffeine is a drug. Caffeine moves into your system, and that wakes you up, but it leads to these other things, including changes in blood pressure, changes in heart rate. So you know what an aphrodisiac is, right? It's something you consume to make you more interested in sex. It ends up that coffee is actually a super legitimate aphrodisiac.

All right, so there's a reason why we go on coffee dates, right? But that same change in blood pressure and heart rate that makes it an aphrodisiac is tied to anxiety. So we can scientifically document that caffeine is connected to anxiety. We don't exactly know why, and that's super cool; this is an unknown. The biochemistry of waking you up makes a lot of sense; the biochemistry of making you anxious is less straightforward.

One of the theories is all the things that are associated with consuming caffeine are similar to sort of a fight-or-flight kind of response. If you're in a position where you need to run away—so, in my case, in Northern Ontario, maybe you need to run away from a black bear—it's not going to happen. But you know you're in a situation where you legitimately need to get away from something; then you expect your heart rate to go up. If you have a cup of coffee, this is not a fight-or-flight situation. If your heart rate starts to go up when you've had that cup of coffee, that can lead to anxiety.

So, there may be a biochemical trigger that makes you more anxious, or it may be that what's happening is we're responding to the physiological change that we expect from or that we're getting from a cup of coffee that we don't expect from a cup of coffee. That's not a simple answer because as much as it seems like there should be a simple connection between caffeine and anxiety, there really isn't. With some experimentation, most of us can figure out the ideal amount of coffee for our bodies and lifestyles.

So far, no reliable connection has been established between average coffee consumption and negative long-term health effects. On the contrary, there is evidence to suggest that it may lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, although those are more correlative studies, not causative. It's why people with heart disease or who are currently pregnant are still advised to lower their caffeine intake. However, coffee's journey from an unknown plant to a popular drink wasn't without struggle.

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Back to our story. There was plenty of backlash against caffeine's drug-like effect in the 16th century. Muslim clerics likened it to cannabis and alcohol, but more liberal voices managed to sway opinion, setting its lack of mention in the Quran. During the Ottoman Empire, coffee advocates were able to convince Sultan Murad III of its beneficial components and successfully warded off moral condemnation. Before coffee became popular in Europe, European travelers unfairly derided it. The drink was considered devious and described as "Mohammedan."

When the drink took off in England, France, and the Netherlands in the 16th century, there was also blowback and resistance. Like in the Ottoman Empire, the lively socializing it encouraged worried the monarchies in Europe. Revolutionaries often met at cafes, leading kings and queens to create strict rules around these establishments. The rules never lasted very long, though; coffee is just that good.

Now, all of this was amazing to learn, but for as great of an impact coffee has had on civilization, its production has a dark, profit-driven underbelly that we must do something about before the drink is lost forever. The European powers who tried to stop coffee consumption quickly realized that the drink had become too popular to ban. They also realized the incredible amount of profit that could be made by controlling the supply of the drink. They successfully transplanted coffee plants to their colonies in South India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Caribbean.

They then used peasants and slave labor to run their farms and effectively took over the coffee trade, with their beans named after locations in colonies such as Java and Martinique. French colonies dominated the coffee trade in the 18th century, with most exports coming from Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti. This dominance lasted for much of the century but waned quickly as more French colonies rebelled, coinciding with the French Revolution. Enslaved Africans in Haiti revolted and gained independence from France.

Former enslaved people had little interest in returning to the coffee plantations. As a result, coffee production fell, and the cost of coffee rose greatly worldwide. The country went from exporting 40,000 tons in 1789 to 9,000 tons by 1818. In the 19th century, the colonies lost their control of the global coffee market while consumption was exploding in Europe and the United States. Brazil quickly rose to become the world's top coffee producer. Its climate and soil were ideal for coffee plantations, and slave labor kept costs low.

But the biggest impact on their growth was the locomotive. Railroad tracks were built through much of Brazil, enabling coffee beans to be shuttled across the country relatively quickly. Trains could travel through mountain passes, where traditional mule transportation would have been held up. The beans also arrived at their destination in much better shape, thanks to rail transport. Brazil maintained its dominance even after slavery was abolished in 1888 and is still the number one coffee-producing nation today.

As slavery was almost completely phased out globally and colonies freed themselves from the colonizers, entrepreneurs looked for new ways to produce coffee cheaply. In 1888, 18-year-old James Hill, a textile merchant from Manchester, England, sailed to Central America to seek his fame and fortune, with a definite focus on fortune. Hill married a local woman whose family were coffee producers and he eventually took over the business. His first priority was a simple one: find cheap labor to become more competitive in the global marketplace.

The rural people of El Salvador were mostly indigenous to the region. They formed communal land and had little need for paid work. This posed a problem for James Hill. He needed workers, and he needed access to the land. That's when James Hill and other coffee planters pressured the Salvadoran government to privatize the land. This move forced the indigenous to either live elsewhere or find work at the new coffee plantations. The mountainous region used to grow a variety of foods but was transformed to exclusively produce coffee.

The people who used to live off the land now had to work for poor wages, which gave Hill Brothers Coffee surplus profits. Coffee production was very profitable for several more decades, but that all changed around the middle of the 20th century. During World War II, European markets were closed off, leading to a sharp decline in coffee prices. The United States was worried that this decrease in the value of coffee would lead countries in Latin America to embrace relations with Nazi Germany or pursue communism.

The Inter-American Coffee Agreement was created in 1940 for this reason. The United States agreed to limit coffee imports while Latin American countries reduced production. This solution reversed the course of coffee bean pricing and led to a steady increase in prices. The price of coffee leveled off around 1955, but producers wanted to find a more permanent safety net to prevent further price drops. This led to the establishment of the International Coffee Agreement, or ICA, in 1963, which stabilized prices by charging quotas from producers based on whether coffee prices went above or below a certain threshold.

It helped ensure that coffee prices would remain level and that coffee producers would be paid reasonably. Unfortunately, the price of coffee plummeted in the 1980s when the ICA dissolved. The demand for milder, higher-quality coffee beans created a disagreement over exports. Brazil felt that it was unfairly losing its share of the coffee market, so it refused to lower its quotas. Brazil withdrew from the ICA, along with the United States, which was no longer worried about coffee-producing countries being lured by the Soviet Union. When the agreement dissolved, coffee production increased in Brazil and newer producing countries in Asia and Africa.

The price of coffee fell by 50%, leading to brutal conditions for coffee producers worldwide. Prices for most consumers began to rise again, while the welfare of the producers continued to decline. Most profits went to the processors, exporters, and large corporations. But there have been earnest attempts to stop the declining welfare of coffee farmers. The first fair trade label, Max Havar, was established in response to the struggles of Mexican coffee farmers when coffee prices plummeted in 1997. Fair Trade International was established as a global standard of fair trade certification.

The idea behind fair trade was to ensure that coffee farmers received a fair and stable price for the coffee they produced. Fair trade certification requires participation from various players, including producers, exporters, buyers, and sellers. It guarantees that the producer will be paid a set price for their beans, regardless of the circumstances that unfold afterward. The coffee producers don't just sit back and enjoy higher profits; they have to meet a set of requirements themselves. This includes meeting environmental standards that involve producers having to limit deforestation and pay employees a living wage.

While the initiative has helped many coffee producers improve their bottom line and the welfare of their workers, it hasn't worked out for everyone. Some coffee producers have gone out of business due to struggles related to fair trade restrictions. Fair trade prices have become a ceiling rather than a bottom for many coffee farmers. Specialty coffee is worth more than what Fair Trade demands per pound to sell higher quality coffee. A producer will make more selling it on the open market. The quality of Fair Trade coffee has also been an issue. Producers can only sell a certain amount of their coffee as fair trade, which is related to the demand.

They end up selling their lower-quality coffee as fair trade certified to get the fair price and the higher-end beans on the open market because they're worth more. Fair trade also hasn't improved the working conditions of migrant laborers as requirements don't yet apply to them. Some coffee roasters have started participating in direct trade, a process in which the local roaster has a direct line of communication with the coffee farmers. This effectively eliminates many of the middlemen who absorb potential profits. It also increases the working conditions for farmers while giving roasters more say in the quality of the beans.

This is a common practice among third-wave coffee roasters that allows them to produce flavorful coffee beans that they can justify selling at a higher price. Since this direct trade process isn't regulated, there's still room for exploitation. There are also problems with accountability when farmers aren't able to deliver on their promises due to shortages and poor bean quality. Regardless, these initiatives are significant steps towards improving the livelihoods of coffee farmers while benefiting the consumer. We've also never had this level of access to high-quality coffee before, and it's great for those who can afford it.

Even with these measures in place, coffee still has a dark side. A lot of it is acquired from producers who aren't able to provide a living wage due to low market prices. But it's also a globally raced beverage that's helped inspire big ideas and social movements. We get an alertness and pleasure from it that comes with few consequences to us as consumers. Coffee is all of these things, except coffee is at risk of disappearing altogether.

As climate change escalates, suitable locations for coffee plantations will dry up. By 2050, half of the land that is currently used for growing coffee will no longer be fertile. So, what are we going to do when climate change makes us unable to grow coffee? At the moment, because of climate change and increasing temperatures, we're having to grow coffee at higher and higher elevations. But we're going to run out of elevation. You can only go up so long before you can't go any further.

Climate hazards are already on the rise in the top 12 coffee-growing regions around the world. Growing seasons are frequently too hot, resulting in poor yields, which in turn raise prices. This will also make coffee production more precarious for farmers. Increasingly, entire growing seasons will be wiped out due to climate hazards. The only signs of relief for coffee fanatics are that so far, Southeastern Brazil and Southwestern Ethiopia aren't nearly as impacted by climate change.

Climate change is still bafflingly a divisive topic. There is one thing we can all agree on: losing coffee to climate hazards is on the very long list of negative impacts our planet is battling. Solutions to this crisis and many others tied in with it need the kind of big ideas collaboration that can only happen when coffee-fueled minds meet with others over a cup of really good coffee.