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Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us
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About Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, And
Product Description [ Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us Carpenter, Murray ( Author ) ] Hardcover 2014 Review "In his quest to understand our unique relationship with caffeine, Murray Carpenter leads us on a romp through history and tours of Colombian coffee fields, Chinese tea lounges, and a factory that pumps out synthetic caffeine for soft drinks." Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones "Carpenter's entertaining narrative dissects caffeine's circuitous route into consumer culture and its tenacious hold on the human mind and body." Kirkus Reviews "The book is anything but preachy, yet along with acknowledging caffeine's benefits, Carpenter bluntly addresses its dangers, which can include anxiety, panic attacks, disrupted sleep and, if taken in large doses, even death. Caffeinated highlights not just the physiological downsides of caffeine but the problems that regulators face in trying to curb what he calls 'an industry running wild.'" Rachel Feltman, Scientific American "A tenaciously researched look into the physiology, psychology and commerce of caffeine."--the New York Post "As Murray Carpenter makes clear in his methodical review, our society's metrics are no match for this substance's nuances, whether among athletes, teenagers, experimental subjects or the average dependent Joe." Abigail Zuger, M.D., The New York Times About the Author MURRAY CARPENTER has reported caffeine-related stories for the New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, NPR, and PRI’s The World. He has also written for the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor and other media outlets. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Colorado and an MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, and has worked as a medical lab assistant in Ohio, a cowboy in Colombia, a farmhand in Virginia, and an oil-exploring “juggie” in Wyoming. He lives in Belfast, Maine. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The Cradle of Caffeine Culture The pyramids at izapa were not as spectacular as I had expected. They are low, stone- sided mounds of earth rising beside the main highway to Mexico City, a dozen miles outside of Tapachula, Chiapas. Diesel-spewing buses passed, stirring the plastic detritus at the roadside. A few sad roadhouses tried to capitalize on the location, but business was slow. A local family served as caretakers, selling Cokes and postcards from their porch and charging a small fee to wander the ruins. Roosters crowed from the nearby houses, pigs ambled down a dirt road, and as evening fell, the surrounding woods were full of bird- song. Called the Soconusco region, this low, flat coastal plain along the Pacific Ocean is torrid—sweltering and rainy. The Soconusco is the birthplace of chocolate culture. The shaded lower tier of the woods that envelop the clearing, which is no more than five acres, is full of cacao trees, just as it has been for much of the past three thousand years. The people who built these pyramids came after the Olmec and before the Maya. They were so unique that their culture is called Iza- pan, after this, the best known of their sites. In addition to ancient ball courts and public plazas—like the one at the center of this site—they left behind this tradition of cacao (pronounced kuh-cow). Farmers have been planting and nurturing cacao trees here ever since. This is the tree that grows the bean that gives us chocolate. An archaeological dig at the nearby Paso de la Amada turned up traces of chocolate more than thirty-five hundred years old. This is the earliest evidence of the human use of chocolate, which in itself is kind of cool, but it’s more than that. It is also the earliest documented human use of caffeine. So far, no place on the planet can claim longer continuous caffeine use. It is tempting to think of chocolate as a modern luxury, an indul- gence of self- proclaimed chocoholics. But even the most devoted of today’s chocolate
