The Moral, and Marital, Dimensions of Coffee
I recently read this characterization of the global coffee trade:"The gigantic extent to which the production and consumption of coffee has been carried of late years, the vast number of hands employed in its cultivation and preparation for market, including the great quantity of shipping necessary for its transportation, and the enormous amount of capital invested in its production and trade, naturally invest the commodity, not only from a commercial but also from a moral and social standpoint, with great importance, creating as it does an industry of almost fabulous proportions and capital, rendering it second to no other article of food or drink in the world."
As true today as the day it was published... in 1894.
Joseph Walsh's Coffee: Its History, Classification, and Description sweeps through the coffee universe in 300 pages, gifting us a brief history of the bean according to a century-old perspective. Replete with savory trivia, Coffee reports that residents of 16th-century Constantinople were subject to an unusual law, written shortly after the city's first coffeehouses opened: refusal to supply one's wife with a specified amount of coffee per day was a valid cause for divorce. No mention of the exact quantity, however, nor any clauses about quality. Pictured: Sorting (top) and drying coffee circa 1894. Photos are possibly from Brazil, judging from the text, though Walsh does not say.
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