Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World
by Michael Pollan, Michael Pollan
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2022-07-02
A short, digestible audiobook about the history and science of coffee and tea, mixed with the author’s self-experiment of quitting caffeine for a while and then restarting it.
After reading this book, I’m convinced “spice” from Dune is inspired at least partly by caffeine.
Fun facts
- Golden ages in China, Arabia and Europe roughly coincided with the rise of coffee or tea there. Coffee, the industrial revolution, and the minute hand on clocks all arrived in Europe around the same time.
- European were stuck with dead roasted beans until a Dutch trader smuggled live coffee trees out of the Yemeni port of Mocha.
- England fought addiction with addiction. After its population got hooked on tea, it smuggled opium into China to balance its trade deficit.