Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by
Mark Pendergrast
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
I bought this book sometime in 2013 and have read it in fits and starts since then, but only in earnest since last year. Thus is the fate of books in my Kindle app, sometimes. But it is to the book's credit that I bought it for a specific reason--some context on the Coffee Cantata by J.S. Bach for a documentary project I was involved in--but I wound up reading the entire book because it was so exhaustive and fascinating. Indeed, from the Ottoman Empire to Starbucks, Pendergrast traces the commodification and history of the beverage itself, the drinkers, the farmers, the roasters, the purveyors, and some folks in between. If you need a fairly deep dive into the intimate relationship between coffee and world politics, this is a good one.
From myths of goatherds, to 18th-c feminist fights for coffee via Abigail Adams, onward to the U.S.'s dangerous dancing with Brazil, as well as domestic coffee wars, there are few stones left unturned here. At times the information felt a bit overwhelming, with some zooming in on economic minutiae that some readers might appreciate, but might disrupt the energy of the narrative for others. It is the kind of book, however, that makes you glad you learned more than you had set out to, and while it lays bare a lot of the unsavory practices and issues surrounding coffee, Prendergrast ultimately reminds us that it is part of a "matrix" and says:
Compared with many other products developed countries demand in cheap quantity, however, coffee is relatively benign. Laboring on banana, sugar, or cotton plantations or sweating in gold and diamond mines and oil refineries is far worse.
Whether that dose of relativism brings one solace or not is an individual experience, but regardless,
Uncommon Grounds is an informative and multifaceted report that may make you take that morning cup of joe a bit less for granted.
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