Status Updates From Coffeeland: One Man's Dark ...

The “money doctor”prescribing these loans for “sick nations “ was Princeton economist Edwin Kemmerer who had studied at Wesleyan where W.O. Atwater conducted the calorimeter experiments (the record-setting one Kemmerer witnessed) and where U.S. PMG William L. Wilson inspiring visiting lecture on public service. K then developed the logic of the calorimeter into a system of inter’l financial governance.

“Controlled loans” - issued by American banks and backed by the federal government (State Dept + SCOTUS) were “the American cure” for Latin American & Caribbean countries willing to take cash packaged with obligatory oversight and reforms from Washington.

In 1909 USDA case vs Coca Cola, court ruled that caffeine was not an additive because it was part of the original recipe and thus essential to the nature of the beverage. Suit dismissed. Research conducted at Columbia in run up to court case demonstrated that caffeine had a “drug effect” on both motors skills and cognitive skills.

Coffee as corporate welfare. Free coffee at “Coffee Kitchen” of W.S. Tyler Co. in Cleveland

“Caffeine” - from the German for coffee + “ine”, Latin for of the nature of, by Friedlieb Runge who was charged by Goethe to figure out what made coffee work.

Youmans took gospel of energy from individual to society. Individuals worked for food, so if not working hard enough they had too much food (!), and you needed to cut back allowances. Similarly, societies could have too much food just as they could have too little.
Energy provided a new way of thinking about persons as things and how to work them, just as slavery was dying out.

Ch 13 - The Glass Cage
Nineteenth century idea of measuring intake and outflow, of quantifying the relationship between food+ and energy, leading to creation of modern “calorie”.
Editor Edward Youmans, the founder of Popular Science, promoted the idea of the “gospel of energy.” How America turned energy into work.

If the women complained about painfully peeling hands and feet from spreading lime, make their children do this work.

Ch 10 - Love in the Time of Coffee

Hill’s notion, expressed earlier in the book, that love (think: family, friend, as well as romantic) inhibited productivity and profit, when the signs of it (sharing food, relocating, runaway fruit trees etc) were indigenous people’s motivators.

okay so thermodynamics actually ruined everything

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