Here's a question for #coffeetwitter folks. 1) Did anyone listen to Michael Pollan's Caffeine? 2) Is it ONLY available as an audiobook through Audible? 3) Did anyone listen to his live talk at the Radcliffe Institute just now?

Because 1) I want to see the references (do audiobooks have printed references?) and 2) I want to clarify. Vietnam did NOT cause "market crashes". Even if it was a slip of tongue, a country named Vietnam didn't cause the early 2000s coffee crisis.

This assumption places unnecessary blame onto one fantastic actor that conflates Vietnamese farmers, Vietnamese traders, the State when in fact, it's a very complex picture that involves *many* global actors and multinational corporations and intl' organizations. And consumers.

What happens on a farm, how labor intensive coffee is? Yea, coffee scholars & industry experts have written about *all* of this at length. Coffee is socio-culturally significant? Um, yeah. I know the audiobook is about caffeine & not coffee...

But coffee seems to be the crux of this particular talk. I assume this is where the research came from? But Steven Topik ( @ucisocsci) literally wrote books on the industrialization of coffee, slavery, early commodity chains, and labor on plantations in Brazil.

Sarah Lyon (U. Kentucky) has written books about fair trade, gender and labor in coffee. Ted Fischer (Vanderbilt) has been thinking about coffee, quality and value for some time (also written books) AND engages with industry and the larger public about said topics.

In the sociology world, Daniel Jaffee (Portland State) has written extensively about fair trade coffee in Mexico.

Paige West (Columbia U.) wrote THE ethnography on coffee, based on extensive research in Papua New Guinea, spanning the global coffee imaginary and complexities of colonial history and contemporary commodity chains.

And Daniel Reichman (U. Rochester) has written about coffee and related migration in Honduras and more recently, makes a compelling argument about "big coffee" in Brazil. It's really informative for my own work rn.

This isn't even the tip of the iceberg. Everyone at the UC Davis Coffee Center and experts working across the industry have long been thinking about coffee, caffeine, and yes, climate change. Farmers in Vietnam have certainly been thinking about climate change longer than me.

Many of us write across academic-industry-public platforms. I occasionally write for @standartmag (see my piece about why the social sciences matter in industry) & @BARISTAMAGAZINE bc I believe...

...if someone in the industry is going to talk about Vietnam/commodity coffee/colonialism, they might as well have my informed perspective - 13 years of research in Southeast Asia, a deep understanding of place & careful attention to representation.

All of this is to say that I'm disappointed the talk privileged everyone else's expertise, research, & understanding of coffee instead of the "science behind caffeine" that I hope the audiobook emphasizes.

@coffeehistoryJM also wrote a book, "Coffee: A Global History," ... curious to hear your take on Caffeine!