The Dark History of Coffee

Coffee's most famous origin story is a legend about an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi, who supposedly noticed his goats becoming energetic after eating berries from a wild coffee shrub sometime around the 9th century.

There is no reliable written evidence for the Kaldi story; it's a folk tale that wasn't recorded until centuries later, though wild coffee plants are genuinely native to the Kaffa region of Ethiopia.

The earliest credible evidence of people actually brewing and drinking coffee comes from Sufi monasteries in 15th-century Yemen, where monks used it to stay alert during nighttime prayers.

From Yemen, coffee spread through the Middle East to cities like Mecca, Cairo, and Istanbul, where the first coffeehouses opened in the 1500s.

Coffee reached Europe in the 17th century and quickly became controversial; some clergy in Venice reportedly urged Pope Clement VIII to ban it as a "Muslim drink" before he tried it and approved it instead.

European coffeehouses became known as "penny universities" because for the price of a cup of coffee, anyone could sit in on lively debates about politics, science, and philosophy.

The Dutch East India Company planted coffee seedlings obtained from Yemen on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) starting in 1616, launching large-scale coffee cultivation in Asia.

The Dutch later combined Java coffee with Arabian coffee to create one of the world's first named coffee blends, Mocha Java.

Coffee arrived in the Americas in the early 18th century; a French naval officer named Gabriel de Clieu is credited with bringing a coffee plant to the Caribbean island of Martinique around 1720, from which much of the Americas' coffee descended.

Brazil became the world's dominant coffee producer starting in the 1800s and remains the single largest producer of coffee beans today.

Coffeehouses in London and Paris in the 17th and 18th centuries served as meeting places for Enlightenment thinkers, and some historians credit them with helping incubate ideas behind scientific societies and even the French Revolution.

Much of coffee's dark history comes from its production: for centuries, coffee was grown on plantations that relied on enslaved and forced labor, particularly in the Caribbean and Brazil.

Today, coffee farming still faces serious labor issues in many producing countries, including low pay for smallholder farmers and, in some regions, child labor on farms.

Coffee cultivation has driven deforestation in tropical regions, since sun-grown coffee often requires clearing forest, while shade-grown methods are less damaging but less common at industrial scale.

Processing coffee cherries also produces large amounts of wastewater; if untreated, it can pollute rivers and streams near coffee-growing regions.

The modern fair trade coffee movement took root in the late 1980s, with the Max Havelaar label launching in the Netherlands in 1988 as one of the first certifications guaranteeing farmers a minimum price.

Fair trade and direct trade certifications aim to guarantee farmers a minimum price and better working conditions, though they cover only a fraction of global coffee production.

Coffee is one of the most valuable agricultural commodities traded internationally, supporting the livelihoods of an estimated 25 million farming families worldwide.