Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World

Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan - whose number-one New York Times best sellers include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind - offers his latest, provocative look into the profound ways what we eat affects how we live. In Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World, Pollan calls caffeine “the most-used drug in the world” - one we give our children in the addictive form of soda, and consume ourselves in multiple daily doses of a cup of tea or coffee. By one estimate, more than 150 million adult Americans drink coffee daily. He takes us on a journey through the history of the drug - first discovered in a small part of East Africa, and within a century and an addiction affecting most of the human species.

Caffeine, it turns out, has changed the course of human history: Pollan’s reporting reveals how caffeine has won and lost wars, changed politics, and dominated economies; he asserts, with the support of voluminous research, that the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without it. The science behind our caffeine addiction forms the fascinating backdrop to this definitive look at an insidious drug that hides in plain sight.

With his wide-ranging talents to entertain, inform and perform, Michael Pollan’s Caffeine is essential listening in a world where an estimated two billion cups of coffee are consumed every day.

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