![]() ![]() It also illustrates how an entire industry can lose focus, allowing upstart micro-roasters to reclaim quality and profits. Its history provides a window through which to view broader themes of colonialism and culture clash, the rise of mass production, modern-day media and marketing, women’s issues, and international commodity schemes. Grown on tropical mountainsides by poor laborers, coffee beans travel half-way around the world to the coffee bars of the United States, Europe, and Japan, where cosmopolitan consumers pay half a day’s Third World wages for a good cup of coffee.Ĭoffee has been banned as a creator of revolutionary sedition, vilified as the worst health-destroyer on earth, and praised as the boon of mankind. Uncommon Grounds unfolds a panoramic story of epic proportions, a tale of how coffee trees came to girdle the globe between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Revolutions have been planned, romances sparked, business deals sealed, novels written, and friendships cemented over this potent brew. ![]() ![]() ![]() The second most valuable exported legal commodity on earth, coffee delivers the largest jolt of the world’s most widely taken psychoactive drug. From its discovery on an ancient Ethiopian hillside to its role as millennial elixir in the Age of Starbucks, coffee has dominated and molded the economies, politics, and social structures of entire countries. ![]()
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