It may be that some of the advantages of using caffeinated drinks became apparent only once society could no longer mark appointments by the sun and stars. During medieval times, schedules were lax, holidays many, and disorganization pervasive. Throughout this period in the West there was not a single accurate clock on the entire Continent.2 The exactness of timepieces was so limited that a single-handed clock face, indicating the quarter hours, sufficiently answered to their precision. This remained true until the uniformity of pendulum motion was discovered by Galileo in 1583, during his sophomore year at the University of Padua. Over the next hundred years, it came into general use in Europe as the basis for the first accurate clockwork mechanism. By around 1660 the minute hand, representing a fifteenfold increase in accuracy, became common in England.3 Larger-scale industrial and economic endeavors became possible only once the measurement of small units of time had become standardized and routine, allowing for coordinated efforts across time and space. This improvement in precision occurred in the same decades when caffeine use became general in Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, London, and across the Continent.4 Its date corresponds well with the opening of the first coffeehouses in London and the beginning of the vigorous coffeehouse culture as a center of the trades, the sciences, and the literary arts.5 Once this chronometric standardization occurred, the use of an analeptic became a virtual necessity to regulate the biological organism, allowing people to meet the demands of invariant scheduling. The only suitable analeptic, one easily available, well tolerated, safe, and effective, is caffeine. There is a sense, therefore, in which the combination of the clock and caffeine may have been essential to the development of modern civilization, and it may not be going too far to assert that the modern world, at least as we know it today, could neither have been envisioned nor built without this combination to make it possible.6
It also may be that another advantage of the caffeinated drinks, that they did not contain alcohol, could only be appreciated by peoples who, having been troubled by intemperate drinking, were no longer able to afford the resulting impairments. During medieval times, most heavy work was done by people who had been drinking alcohol since breakfast and who continued to drink it throughout the working day. In a besotted Europe, the caffeinated beverages were heralded as the great agents of sobriety, which could free men from the intoxication and distress of alcoholic drinks. It is a challenge to the twentieth-century imagination to conceive how medieval man designed and built the great cathedrals during a period when beer for breakfast was standard fare. The tour guides conducting visitors through European or English cathedrals frequently point out a site near the ceiling where some hapless person, often the architect or chief engineer, slipped off a scaffold to his death. Considering how much alcohol was being consumed, it is easy to envision how this mischance could have been so often repeated.
Brian Harrison, writing of the temperance movement in Victorian England, ably sums up both aspects of the relation of modern work to caffeine:
The effects of industrialization on drinking habits are complex…in some ways it made sobriety more feasible. The change in methods of production at last created a class with a direct interest in curbing drunkenness. Traditionally, work-rhythms had fluctuated both within the day and within the week: idleness on “Saint Monday” and even Tuesday was followed by frantic exertion and long hours at the end of the week.... Early industrialists needed to create a smooth working rhythm and to induce their employees to enter and leave their factories at specified times. Investment in complex and costly machinery placed the employee’s precise and continuous labor at a higher premium than the spasmodic exertion of his crude physical energy. Once this need had arisen, customary drinking patterns had to change.7
Caffeine, therefore, in the vehicles of coffee and tea, fostered the productivity gains that a newly competitive environment demanded, and did so in two important ways. First, caffeine helped large numbers of people to coordinate their work schedules by giving them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary and, in some cases, even increased the accuracy of their work. This meant that people could work longer hours and accomplish, proportionately, even more than they had before. Second, the caffeinated beverages, by displacing the heavy consumption of alcohol, markedly reduced one of the endemic impairments of medieval industry. Sober workers always produce more and better work than drunken ones.
In the sixteenth century, an an additional factor made the drinks in which caffeine was served desirable and perhaps indispensable, even apart from their value in conveying a stimulant.8 Beginning at this time, a mini-ice age gradually overtook Europe, bringing with it famine, hard winters, and cold summers. The Swiss scholar H.J.Zumbühl searched drawings, paintings, and photographs in museums and private collections throughout the Continent, amassing more than three hundred visual representations of the Lower Grindelwald glacier between 1640 and 1900. When Zumbühl systematically dated the pictures and made suitable adjustments for each artist’s viewpoint, he was amazed to note these images proved the ice had been in overall advance since the start of that period, and in overall retreat since about 1850. Detailed histories of the Mont Blanc region of the Alps confirm the advance of the glacier, which apparently began around 1550.
Extensive seventeenth-century French accounts of the “impetuosity of a great horrible glacier” were confirmed in the early 1970s by climatologist and cultural historian E.Le Roy Ladurie. Some of the stories that survive tell a chilling tale of how, in 1690, poor peasants from Chamonix paid the travel expenses for the bishop of Geneva, in the hopes he would exorcise the juggernaut of ice from their farmlands and meadows. His prayers were apparently answered when the ice withdrew. Unfortunately, it resumed an inexorable return a few years later.9
The chill deepened over the decades. Famine claimed many lives in Finland, Estonia, Norway, and Scotland in the winter of 1695, the coldest winter of a cold decade. In 1771, famine struck again, after a long sequence of snowy summers in central Europe, and the beginning of a rapid spurt forward by the Swiss glaciers.10 Possible causes of the mini-ice age include the earth shifting on her axis, increasing sunspots that reduced the amount of solar heat, or exploding volcanic activity that spewed light-filtering dust into the atmosphere. Whatever brought on the chill, this long freeze may have prompted Europeans to resort to the caffeinated drinks for their value in staving of hunger and keeping warm and may well have been the initial impetus for the adoption of the caffeinated beverages and the spread of caffeine as the most popular drug on earth.
PART 3
the culture of caffeine
Introduction
Coffee and tea have given rise to a great duality: two major, largely divergent streams in the cultural history of caffeine. Coffee has become associated with all things masculine and with the the artist, the nonconformist or political dissident, the bohemian, even the hobo, as well as the outdoorsman. Its use is often considered a vice, its consumption linked with frenetic physical and mental activity, intense conversation, and with other indulgences that threaten health and mental balance, such as tobacco, alcohol, and late nights of hard partying or excessive work. Tea, in contrast, is associated with the feminine and with the drawing room, quiet social interaction, spirituality, and tranquillity and is regarded as the drink of the elite, the meditative, the temperate, and the elderly. These differences between coffee and tea are easily seen by comparing the ancient, worldwide, socially inclusive, and rough and ready institution of the coffeehouse with the decorous traditions of the Japanese tea ceremony and the English afternoon tea. An acknowledgment of these differences must underlie the fact that, although coffee has been the subject of many bans and opposed by many temperance movements, tea has rarely, if ever, appeared on anyone’s list as a substance that ought to be put beyond the pale of law or morality.
The more it is pondered, the more paradoxical this duality within the culture of caffeine appears. After all, both coffee and tea are a
romatic infusions of vegetable matter, served hot or cold in similar quantities; both are often mixed with cream or sugar; both are universally available in virtually any grocery or restaurant in civilized society; and both contain the identical psychoactive alkaloid stimulant, caffeine. It is true that coffee is generally brewed to a caffeine strength over twice that of a typical cup of tea, yet, because more than one cup of each beverage is commonly consumed, there is no doubt that you can get a full dose of caffeine from either one.
So the question remains: Why has the duality between the culture of coffee and the culture of tea become so universally and so sharply delineated? For example, why did tea become the center of a proper, conventionalized, intimate social gathering in both England and Japan, while coffee failed to do so anywhere? And again, why did coffee become the stimulant of gossip, business, and political and intellectual banter in medieval Turkey, in London in the seventeenth century, and in dozens of American cities at the end of the twentieth century, while tea failed to do so anywhere?
The Great Duality Between the Cultures of Coffee and Tea
Coffee Aspect Tea Aspect
Male Female
Boisterous Decorous
Bohemian Conventional
Obvious Subtle
Sordid Beautiful
Discord Harmony
Common Refined
Indulgence Temperance
Coffee Aspect Tea Aspect
Vice Virtue
Excess Moderation
Passion, Earthiness Spirituality, Mysticism
Down-to-Earth Elevated
Coffee Aspect Tea Aspect
Mornings, Late Nights Afternoons
American English
Occidental Oriental
Casual Formal, Ceremonial
Demimonde Society
Full-blooded Effete
Vivacious, Extroverted Shy, Introverted
Loquacious Reticent
Aggressive Lordotic
Yang Yin
Hardheaded Romantic
Promiscuous Pure
Work Contemplation
Individualism Conformity
Excitement Tranquillity
Tension Relaxation
Kinetic Energy Potential Energy
Spontaneity Deliberation
Topology Geometry
Heidegger Carnap
Beethoven Mozart
Outlaw Good Citizen
The Frontier The Drawing Room
Libertarian Statist
Balzac Proust
We cannot answer this question definitively, but can only observe that these disparate traditions are visible early in the history and development of caffeine culture as realized in the spreading consumption of coffee and tea. The duality is consistent enough that divergent examples, such as the Bedouin coffee ceremonies and Arab concentrated tea swilling emerge as exceptions to a rule.1 Cola beverages and other carbonated soft drinks containing caffeine do not have a long enough history to be as elaborately differentiated as coffee and tea: They do have distinctive associations, however, such as youth, high-energy, America, pop culture, and “good, clean fun.”
Among all the nations, the two that best exemplify both this unlogical duality and the avid and widespread influence of coffee and tea on art, literature, architecture, politics, commerce, manners, and society are Japan and England. In Japan, the ancient discipline and enjoyment of teaism is a perfect embodiment of the tea aspect of caffeine; while the coffeehouse in twentieth-century Japan, a place of fast-paced conversational, social, and business interactions, is an instance of the coffee aspect. In England, the boisterous male melange of the early coffeehouses ideally exemplifies the coffee aspect, while the refined, feminized afternoon tea, arriving two centuries later, manifests the tea aspect. And finally, in both Japan and England, the old and the new abide together, so that coffee and tea are used in both traditional and contemporary ways. Thus, a presentation of the culture of caffeine in Japan and England offers a uniquely comprehensive view of caffeine’s dual and powerful agencies.
9
islands of caffeine (1)
Japan: The Tradition of Tea, the Novelty of Coffee
The taste of ch’an [Zen] and the taste of ch’a [tea] are the same.
—Old Buddhist saying
Tea was brought to Japan from China by Buddhist monks more than a thousand years ago. As a result of the Japanese adaptation and codification of the Zen tea ceremony about six hundred years later, the preparation, service, and imbibing of tea became a mirror of a national aesthetic, moral, social, and metaphysical ideal. In the Japanese tea ceremony, taking tea was said to be an earthly finger that “pointed to the moon” of enlightenment, the awakening to which all Buddhists aspired. In modern Japan, with its Western scientific, educational, industrial, and commercial models, the frenzied ethos of the rat race has created a largely urban Japanese market for a new drink to fuel their work and play. As a consequence, while tea use and tea ceremonies abide, coffee has achieved a powerful and growing presence there. In Japan today, the coffeehouse plays the important part it played in Arab countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serving as a place in which people can meet and mingle with others outside of their families or circle of close friends. Because Japanese living quarters are so small, people flee from their confinement to enjoy the pleasant social respite of the coffeehouse, and this resort is even more important to them than to the average American or European.
Of course, old Japan and new Japan exist together, intertwined and inseparable, two aspects of a nation that is in many cultural aspects different from anything European. Yet in the Japanese love of both tea and coffee, we find a twin affection familiar to the West. Tea and coffee, emblematic of the traditional and the new, are enjoyed side by side, there as here.
The Origin of Tea in Japan
In the seventh century, Japanese monks discovered tea in China and introduced it to their homeland, where it was used by Zen practitioners in their communal ceremonies and as a curative drug. In the early ninth century in Hei-an-kyo, the national capital, during a long civil war, tea enjoyed a brief early vogue as a comestible. It was not until four hundred years later, however, that, the publication of a book made tea a nearly universal fixture of Japanese society.
At the end of the twelfth century,1 Yeisai (1141–1215), or Senko-Soshi, the leader of a Zen sect, planted tea seeds he had brought from China in a friend’s monastary and several other favorable spots around the country. Relying on what he had learned of tea in China and his own experience with its cultivation, Yeisai wrote Kitcha-Yojoki, or The Book of Tea Sanitation, the first Japanese book on tea. Yeisai’s work, which praised the plant as a powerful pharmaceutical, a “divine remedy and a supreme gift of heaven,”2 marked a watershed in the history of caffeine use in Japan. Before this book appeared, tea drinking had been confined to monks and aristocrats; after its publication, the practice spread to every stratum of society.
The great influence of Yeisai’s book came about in the following way. The shogun of the time, Minamoto Sanetomo (r. 1203–19), whom gluttony had severely sickened, called on Yeisai to pray for his recovery. But Yeisai did more than that. He sent to the temple for some of his homegrown tea crop and prepared and served the healing brew to Sanetomo. When the military leader promptly regained his health, he asked to learn more about the wonderful remedy. To satisfy Sanetomo’s curiosity, Yeisai copied his book by hand and presented it to the ruler. After reading it, Sanetomo became a tea enthusiast himself, and, from his example, the use of tea as a medicinal tonic rapidly spread from his court into general use across the nation.
Caffeine and Ceremony in the East: The Religion and Art of Chanoyu
“As to the Buddha, he never makes an equivocal statement.
Whatever he asserts is absolute truth.”
“What then is the Buddha’s statement?” asked Hofuku.
“Have a cup of tea, my brother monk.”
—An exchange between two
Zen masters,
Chokei (853–932), also called Ch’ang-ch’ing Hui-ling,
and Hofuku (d. 928), also called Pao-fu Ts’ung-chan,
adapted from Suzuki’s translation of a passage
from the Dentoroku, or Transmission of the Lamp3
Although Yeisai must have observed tea ceremonies during his visit to China, it was Dai-ō the National Teacher (1236– 1303), also a Zen monk, who in 1267 introduced the tea ceremony he had encountered in China’s Zen monastaries to the Zen monastaries of Japan. Following Dai-ō’s lead, succeeding generations of Zen monks continued to practice this ceremony within their own religious communities. Finally, in the fifteenth century, the monk Shukō (1422–1502) employed his artistic talents to adapt the ceremony to Japanese tastes and in so doing originated the first form of chanoyu, the distinctively Japanese tea ceremony that is still practiced today. The tea ceremony itself can be illuminated for western readers by comparing it with the dialectal method of Socrates. Through the grammar of this ceremony, the superficialities and illusions of everyday life and practical pursuits were to be broken down and transcended. The ultimate goal for any practitioner of the shared mundanities of the Zen tea ceremony was satori, the insight into the ultimate reality.4 Shukō taught chanoyu to Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1435–90), shogun and patron of the arts, who helped to establish it as a national tradition. As a result, during Ashikaga’s reign, the practice of the tea ceremony escaped the confines of the monasteries and was discovered by the lay population, especially by the warrior class, the samurai.5
Sen-no-Rikyu (1522–91), a tea merchant by trade, was in some ways the most important, and, by reputation, the best, in a long line of tea masters in Japan. It was Rikyu who systematically expounded the principles of chanoyu and designed the features of the modern tea ceremony and teahouse, and who became the progenitor of the three major tea schools flourishing in Japan today. In a country where the profession of tea master has been highly regarded for centuries, Rikyu remains the master of them all. It was largely as a result of Rikyu’s efforts that, from his time forward, tea became a symbol of the national culture.
The World of Caffeine Page 20