It's not just a cup of coffee

Like most things in the world, coffee is not exempt from politics, as the film Black Coffee showed. Before you savor that 60-100 peso cup of coffee at one of your favorite coffee joints or even at home, remember these interesting factoids. It certainly changed how I look at coffee!

About the ones who put the coffee on our tables:

• Only one cent of the price of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower.


• Coffee helped foster the slave trade.


• Coffee provides a livelihood for 25 million people; 100 million more depend on it for survival.


• It costs a full day's wages for most coffee farmers to buys a cappuccino.


• Many coffee workers are only marginally better off than their enslaved ancestors.


• Most coffee farmers have never tasted their own coffee.

Coffee stimulating social and political ferment:

• The French Revolution was planned in coffeehouses.


• By 1790, half of the coffee in the world was grown in Haiti by African slaves.


• One of the French king's mistresses gave a coffee plant to a French lieutenant she'd slept with; on the ocean voyage to Martinique he protected the plant from storms and pirates. From the single Martinique plant almost all the coffee in Latin America descends.


• The French established the slave-run plantations in the colonized islands.


• In 1971, the slaves of Haiti rose up and destroyed the coffee and sugar plantations; the revolt lasted 12 years and defeated Napoleon's troops.


• Only 10% of the rainforest in Sao Paolo remains, with coffee-growing the dominant reason.


• By 1816 there were 1 million slaves in Brazil, comprising 1/3 of the population, more than half of them working on coffee plantations from dawn to sunset, eating only once a day.


• The coffee crash in Brazil occurred only a few weeks before the 1929 economic crash.


• Brazilian president Vargas committed suicide over coffee politics.

Oh, and maybe we have something to learn from the scion of the Folgers coffee empire doesn't drink Folgers ... he roasts and brews his own.

Sourced here, as exerpted from the film. We caught it the Discovery channel (maybe it'll be replayed) or get your own DVD copy.