The sacrifice of human life for the sake of a cup of coffee is nothing new.
What is new, and new to the past two decades, is the huge rise in the quality of Anglo-American coffee represented by Starbucks et al, after decades of ersatz, instant and stewed coffee. For most of the twentieth century, British coffee wasn’t black gold; it was black dishwater. Coffee had been bad for a long time. The chunk of history which usually gets missed out from the story of coffee is the nineteenth century, the century par excellence of free trade and adulteration, which laid the groundwork for the willingness of the public to accept a pretty unpleasant beverage under the name of coffee.
... The average British consumer of coffee in 1850 was getting a terrible deal.
Now, we are still getting a terrible deal (two pounds for something that costs next to nothing to produce) but no one can claim they are being ripped off. If anything, the situation has become reversed. The consumer, assuming he or she has two pounds to burn, can buy themselves a cup of coffee which is wonderfully pure, pre-selected for taste by hundreds of nasal coffee-swillers, and brewed to perfection by a highly trained barista. Their two pounds will also buy them the use of a comfortable chair in a well-lit, air-conditioned room, for as long as they wish. We have moved from a nineteenth-century market in which the consumer was systematically ripped off to one where the consumer is king. If only the desires of this consumer could finally be made to collide with the needs of the coffee producers, we would be living in a kind of caffeinated paradise.
