D. Courtwright, Forces of Habit
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Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate
Cigarettes were very popular, but the drug in them, nicotine, is not the most used drug in the world. It is actually in third place. Alcohol is second. The number one most used drug in the world is caffeine.
Around the world, the average person uses about 70 milligrams of caffeine a day. In some countries, like Sweden and Britain, people use over 400 milligrams a day.
That is about four cups of coffee. An expert once pointed out that the names of the four main caffeine plants—coffee, tea, cacao (for chocolate), and kola—are some of the most common words in almost every language.
Coffee: From the Highlands to the World
For a long time, coffee was the most important of these plants. By the late 1900s, it was the second most traded product in the world, right after oil. It became a kind of fuel for modern life.
Coffee started in the highlands of Ethiopia, where people used to chew the beans for energy instead of drinking them.
Later, people in Yemen were the first to drink it, sometime before 1470. From there, it spread to holy cities like Mecca and Medina, then to Cairo, and then to Istanbul. It reached Europe in the 1600s.
While people in the Islamic world drank coffee, it was the Europeans who made it a drink for everyone. In the 1600s, coffee houses opened all over Europe.
They became places where men gathered to talk, do business, and share ideas. Famous writers and thinkers, like Voltaire, loved coffee. These coffee houses became so important for sharing new ideas that some rulers tried to close them because they feared the conversations, not the coffee itself.
Many coffee houses also sold other drinks, like wine and liquor, but Islamic coffee houses did not serve alcohol. They did allow smoking.
This was actually good for coffee sales because smokers break down caffeine faster than non-smokers, so they need to drink more coffee to feel its effects.
In the 1700s, coffee drinking in Europe grew very fast. It became cheaper and more common, so even servants and cooks started drinking it every morning.
This happened because Europeans began growing coffee in their own colonies instead of buying it from Yemen. The Dutch started growing coffee in Java, and soon they controlled most of the world’s coffee.
The French grew it in Haiti, and the Portuguese grew it in Brazil. The Spanish grew it in Central and South America. Today, almost half of the farmland in northern Latin America is used for coffee.
America has always been one of the biggest coffee-drinking countries. A popular story says Americans chose coffee over tea to protest British taxes in the 1700s. But the real reason coffee became so popular was that it was cheap.
The United States is close to coffee-growing countries like Brazil, and the government kept taxes on coffee very low. For most of the 1800s, coffee cost just a few pennies a pound. By 1859, the average American was using eight pounds of coffee a year.
In the 1900s, coffee stayed cheap. Stores sold it at very low prices to get customers in the door. One store in Colorado sold a cup of coffee for three cents in 1969. When they raised the price to four cents, half their customers left.
For a long time, coffee was almost free. It was easy to find at soup kitchens, fairs, and picnics. The simple truth is that when a habit-forming drug is cheap, easy to find, and well advertised, it becomes very popular.
Must End
The main drug in these soft drinks is still caffeine, whether it comes from kola, tea, or another plant. The same is true for coffee and tea. These drinks are more than just drugs.
They have deep cultural meanings. People in Warsaw cheered when the first Coca-Cola trucks arrived.
But none of these drinks would have become so popular around the world without caffeine. As Dr. Wiley said, without caffeine, there would be no Coca-Cola. Caffeine was the fuel that launched these drinks into the world, and clever marketing kept them there.
Tea: From Ancient Medicine to Everyday Drink
Tea comes from the area where India and China meet. A Chinese book from the year 350 mentioned tea as a medicine. By the late 700s, it was so common that the government started taxing it. The Japanese learned to drink tea from Buddhist priests, who brought seeds from China. Over time, the tea ceremony became a very important part of Japanese culture.
The Dutch brought tea to Europe in 1610, but it was very expensive. That changed when the British East India Company started trading directly with China in 1713. Tea became more available, and in 1784 the British government lowered the taxes on it.
This made tea much cheaper, and people drank more of it. By the end of the 1700s, a pound of tea cost only a quarter of what it cost in the 1720s.
For a while, China was the only place that grew tea. But in the mid-1800s, Europeans started growing it in their own colonies. The Dutch grew tea in Java, and the British grew it in India and Sri Lanka. In 1887, Britain imported more tea from India and Sri Lanka than from China for the first time.
Chinese tea cost more because of taxes and because it was grown less efficiently. A businessman named Thomas Lipton bought tea directly from India and sold it very cheaply, so even the poorest families could afford it.
Later, tea farming spread to Africa. By 1952, there were thousands of acres of tea plants in Africa. Tea was also grown in South America, but it never became as popular there as coffee or yerba-maté, another caffeinated drink enjoyed by millions of people.
Chocolate: From Royal Treat to Everyday Candy
Cacao, the plant used to make chocolate, started in the American tropics. The Olmec people grew it as early as 1500 BC. Later, the Maya and Aztecs made a bitter, cold drink from cacao beans and spices. Only nobles and elites drank it.
The Spanish brought cacao to Europe, and it became popular among rich people in Spain, Italy, and France. They drank it warm and sweet. The Marquis de Sade, a French nobleman, loved chocolate so much that he begged his wife to send him chocolate treats while he was in prison.
In the 1800s, chocolate became a drink for everyone. A Dutch chemist named Coenraad Van Houten invented a way to remove most of the fat from chocolate. This made it easy to mix with water and created cocoa, a cheap drink that became popular with children. Chocolate candy also became a common gift.
The Portuguese brought cacao to Africa, first to an island off the coast and later to the mainland. By the 1900s, West Africa was the center of the world’s cacao production. In 1991, Africa supplied 55 percent of the world’s cacao, while Mexico, where it first came from, supplied only 1.5 percent.
Kola and the Rise of Soft Drinks
Kola nuts come from West Africa. They have more caffeine than coffee beans. People used to chew them for energy and to feel happier. But kola nuts dry out quickly and are hard to ship, so they were mostly traded locally.
Kola nuts did not become a global product until they were used in soft drinks. In the 1860s, a drink called Vin Mariani, made from wine and coca leaves, became very popular. This led to other drinks made with alcohol and stimulants. The most famous new drink was Coca-Cola.
It was first made with wine and coca leaves, but the inventor removed the wine to make it a temperance drink. Later, the company removed the coca leaves because the drug in them became controversial. They replaced it with a caffeine powder to keep the energy boost.
In 1911, a doctor named Harvey Wiley took Coca-Cola to court. He said caffeine was a dangerous drug, especially for children. After a long court fight, the company reduced the caffeine in the drink.
By 1910, Coca-Cola was sold all over the United States. But it did not become a global drink until World War II. The head of the company promised that American soldiers could buy a Coke for five cents anywhere in the world. The government helped by not limiting sugar for Coca-Cola.
Soldiers introduced the drink to millions of people in Europe and Asia. After the war, bottling plants opened all over the world. By 1991, Coca-Cola was sold in 155 countries, and its rival, Pepsi, was sold in 151 countries.
Over time, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks stopped using real kola extract. They used cheaper sources of caffeine instead. As one historian joked, modern colas are actually "uncolas."
