The History of Coffee w/ Mark Pendergrast
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2021
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most Americans drink coffee. Our love for coffee ties us to people and countries around the world, and to those who lived long before us. In this episode of The Road to Now, we speak with Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee & How It Changed the World and Beyond Fair Trade to find out coffee's origins, its effects on global trade, and how a small cherry that originated on the other side of the planet became part of our daily life.
This is a rebroadcast of RTN #81, which originally aired on December 11, 2017.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:09.4 | Today's episode is a rebroadcast of an episode we recorded back in 2017. |
| 0:16.2 | It's The History of Coffee with Mark Pendergrast. |
| 0:19.3 | Mark wrote an outstanding book called Uncommon Grounds, The History of Coffee and How Pendergrast. Mark wrote an outstanding book called Uncommon |
| 0:21.8 | Grounds, The History of Coffee and How It Transform the World. I listened to this episode for |
| 0:27.0 | the first time since it probably came out just this week when I was trying to think about |
| 0:31.7 | what to re-air. And it's one of these episodes that we record that sounds like it could have |
| 0:36.7 | been recorded today. |
| 0:38.0 | There's so many important things and unanswered questions, I think, in the history of coffee |
| 0:43.0 | and also questions about how we ourselves relate to the market. And on the other end of that |
| 0:49.1 | are the people who actually grow the beans. And I just thought for Labor Day, it'd be good to do something that |
| 0:56.1 | recognizes working people. When you look at coffee and that relationship between the consumer |
| 1:01.7 | and the grower, it's so far divorced. It's hard to know where it's coming from sometimes. |
| 1:06.8 | One of the cool things to see is that a lot of coffee shops have worked to establish direct relationships. |
| 1:12.8 | One of those, as you guys know, is Lacosacea, which sponsors us. |
| 1:16.1 | And this isn't even part of the ad right now. |
| 1:18.2 | It's just amazing because this book spoke a lot about the way that the people who make the coffee are really left out of the benefits that have come from the market. When we recorded |
| 1:28.9 | this and we were talking to Jamie at Lacostecha, we said, well, why don't we kick off with an episode on |
| 1:34.8 | the history of coffee? And we found Mark Pendergrass and Jamie said, that's the book that I read when |
| 1:41.0 | I started my coffee shop. So I think that you'll see why we love Laco Sacha when you understand the greater history of this. |
| 1:48.0 | It also, Mark does an incredible job of going back to the very beginning, like, where does coffee come from? |
| 1:52.9 | How did it become this phenomenon? |
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