Food Theory: Coffee, Science's MOST IMPORTANT Discovery!

Ross, we have bad news, more bad news, this really hasn't been my day, or my week, or my month, or even your year, Ross, we're kicking you out of the group of friends and replacing you with Sir Isaac Newton, we met him here in the cafeteria. and he's better than you in every way possible hello ross from your handshake i guess you're a paleontologist yeah how did you know that a soft handshake soft

science

could be better than ross hello internet welcome to

food

cinema wait uh? They always spell it wrong much better welcome to

food

theory

today we have prepared an episode about

coffee

.

I've heard about him. It is the only caffeinated beverage of choice in Western civilization. The world consumes approximately 2.25 billion cups of

coffee

every day. day, it's a hundred billion dollars a year, industry, I'm sorry if it's too early for you to pepper us with data about coffee, but what can I say? Coffee is so trendy right now. Where's my damn latte? It's not like it's a new phenomenon or anything. Coffee has been in fashion for centuries. since it began leaving Ethiopia in the 15th century via trade routes and this is where current

theory

comes into play in this timeline.

Here you will notice that coffee and coffee shops became popular in Europe just before the Enlightenment, the age of reason. It was when famous thinkers like Isaac Newton and John Locke embraced the notion that

science

and reason could generate happiness and progress. The Enlightenment gave us representative democracy, it gave us Newtonian physics, it gave us the separation of Church and State and what brought about this fundamental and defining era. of Western Civilization, well your history teacher will probably tell you that it is complicated after all, look back at all these movements and eras that laid the cultural and scientific foundations in Europe before the Enlightenment, you have the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution , but I'm not here to untangle the complex web that is Western civilization in a 15-minute YouTube video.

I'm here to suggest that for once, just once, it's not that complicated, all we have to do is follow the food, the coffee and the cafes caused enlightenment and, if you believe, a drink. can't change the very course of human history, buckle up because it can do a lot more than coffee and it's been changing our brains since its inception and with two and a half billion cups a day, you better believe you're changing a lot of brains in our world right now you have heard it before you are what you eat well, the same applies to twice what you drink before enlightenment, alcohol was the legal and readily available drug option of the Western civilization, alcohol was everywhere, like in college, except instead of getting an A on your astronomy paper on heliocentrism, you were judged a heretic and put under house arrest or, you know, burned in the bonfire and when I say that alcohol was the drug of choice I am not joking around here until the 18th century.

It wasn't uncommon for people to drink beer al

most

continuously all day, every day, people started the day with something called beer soup, skipped over wheat cereal, I think we found ourselves the real champions of breakfast. Some suggest that the reason. Because this was a question of water purity because water was highly contaminated in those days, distilled alcohol became the

most

reliable source of liquid refreshment. Now this water pollution theory is highly scrutinized as false, but whatever the reason, it is around this time that coffee took over. and Westerners' penchant for daytime drinking went the way of the dinosaurs and feudalism and this change in drinking had tremendous effects on Western society.

For centuries the drink of choice in Europe had been alcohol, a depressant, but then Coffee arrives and suddenly society is flooded with caffeine. a stimulant, but why did this gigantic shift from depressant to stimulant occur in the 17th century of all time? After all, coffee is a natural plant and humans have consumed alcohol since at least 7000 BC. They can easily understand why a society would prefer coffee. lifestyle to a beer soup lifestyle, but why didn't it happen sooner, like thousands and thousands of years before? The answer is surprisingly simple. It took humans a ridiculous amount of time to discover that coffee beans could be roasted in an embarrassingly long time.

We didn't discover how to roast coffee until the 1400's, I mean come on, humans figured out how to build rockets back in the 1200's, but we couldn't figure out how to roast a natural bean for another 200 years, oh and never mind the fact. It took us another century or three to figure out how to transport coffee beans over long distances without them spoiling, and it's

important

to keep that in mind because the Enlightenment started in Europe, but coffee doesn't grow near there, it only grows in specific areas. climates near the equator known as the grain belt, so coffee's journey from Ethiopia to Europe was not quick and certainly not easy as transportation methods slowly improved, although coffee was able to make its way through the Middle East in the 16th century, but the drink was banned and even criminalized in many of those nations when it first appeared on the scene, who knows, maybe Turkey could have been the epicenter of the enlightenment if the government hadn't punished repeat offenders who They made coffee by sewing them into leather bags and throwing them into the ocean.

Beware starbucks baristas, you are playing a dangerous game in the mid 17th century transportation methods finally reached a point where europe had access to all the caffeine it could handle now a change in beverage preference may not seem like a big deal. thing, but Depressants and stimulants affect our brains in very different ways and when an entire society undergoes a simultaneous change in their brains, that is when a cultural change occurs like never before. Basically, a depressant acts to slow down or depress the activities in your brain. Neuromedics often prescribe depressants to relieve anxiety or help with sleep problems.

Adjectives that come to mind include relaxed, sedated, the word motivated, I don't see it that way. If depressives were a person, they'd basically be the Big Lebowski guy, well, you know. that's like, your opinion man, meanwhile, stimulants do the exact opposite of depressants, they speed up stimulated activities in the body, this means greater alertness, concentration, more energy, if stimulants were a person, they would be this guy, coffee time, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, generally speaking. The effects of stimulants mean greater productivity, of course, tea can also contain a good amount of caffeine and tea became available in Europe around the same time as coffee, so why aren't we talking about tea?

It is because tea was very expensive at the time it was prohibitively expensive, as a result only the upper layer of society consumed it, but not coffee, coffee was a people's drink and that is a big reason why the Coffee caused enlightenment, because it wasn't just about Europe getting stimulants, it was about getting stimulants. In the hands of the right people, people like a young Isaac Newton see before they put the lord before his name. Newton was just a twenty-something who frequented a certain coffee shop with his friends. Okay, not that coffee shop and not these friends, Isaac.

Newton's friends at Oxford were a little more intellectual. Newton was studying at Oxford when the coffeehouse fad first hit England. Now an enlightened mind would never attribute anything to fate, but it seems that Newton was the right person in the right place. At the right time, in 1655, Newton and his friends formed the Oxford Coffee Club. The first participants in the club were sir edmund haley, the great astronomer who named haley's comet after han sloan, founder of the british museum and, of course, sir isaac newton, who is possibly the inventor of calculus and is indisputably a of the most notable scientific minds of all time, so this incredible group of people would meet at the Tillyards coffee shop to share ideas, even dissecting a dolphin at a coffee shop table during Newton's tenure as president of the organization. and over the years, the club evolved and grew to become the royal society of london, considered today the most prolific and prestigious scientific academy in the world.

Members of the royal society include albert einstein, charles darwin, stephen hawking, benjamin franklin, in almost every great scientific leap. made in the last four centuries can be traced back to real society and the coffee shop that started it all, but there was another reason why Oxford students were so attracted to coffee houses in the beginning, almost all coffee shops were located on the Oxford campus. Oxford because the king was strictly opposed to having the influence of caffeine, that's right, coffee and caffeine had a difficult time gaining acceptance in Europe, just as in the Middle East coffee shops or invisible universities, as they are often called, King Charles II believed that coffee shops helped people share anti-establishment ideas and that might seem a bit exaggerated, but the point is that Charles II couldn't have been more right after all coffee shops allow sharing. all kind of things. of ideas, not just mathematics and science, often the ideas were political in nature, it was the age of reason and the notion that monarchies divinely derived their power from god was not exactly a good reason, the French revolution was often considered the culmination of the enlightenment. planned in coffee shops the american revolution was planned in coffee shops coffee even became a symbol of American patriotism after the Boston Tea Party and it is

important

to remember that the exchange of ideas and the questioning of traditional authority is perhaps the defining characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment: Sure there are many scientific discoveries during this time, just as there were during the scientific revolution that preceded the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment wasn't just about science and invention like the scientific revolution.

The Enlightenment is considered an independent and distinct period. Western civilization because it was an intellectual and philosophical movement that changed the way humans thought about the world. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke Voltaire Thomas Jefferson believed that science and reason could be used to ensure the individual rights of the common man improve systems of government the Enlightenment occurred because ideas were shared, caffeine helped with ideas, coffee shops helped absolutely with the exchange, so as you can see, a society's drug of choice has a massive impact for hundreds of years, Western civilization literally had a depressant flowing through its veins, the manifestation of that was the dark ages, perhaps the most unproductive period in human history, once the West switched to coffee, there was a new focus on reason and free thought, democratic ideals spread throughout the Western world and globalization had taken productivity to another level , so it begs the question of what comes next, will caffeine continue to dominate our culture for centuries or will the pendulum inevitably swing back to alcohol or will another drug be on the horizon?

Well, here's the thing, what if I told you there was another drug on the horizon? Coffee is a hundred billion dollar a year industry, so what if I told you that this drug on the horizon is already a hundred billion dollar a year industry, only right now it's largely clandestine because it is currently illegal in much of the world? However, it is changing because not only is this drug becoming more and more legal in countries around the world with each passing year, but also young people have more permissive views on this drug than older generations, just as we saw with coffee just before the Enlightenment.

What if I told you that this drug has Its use has increased by 60 percent worldwide over the last decade and is by far the most abused drug in the world. What if I told you that this drug is neither a stimulant nor a depressant? Loyal theorists I propose to you that the next big drug movement of choice for society at large is cannabis, okay before you start calling me matpot in the comments below, listen to me here, there is every reason to believe that cannabis, which includes marijuana, hemp, variety of other plants, could eventually become the world's next. drug of choice and I am aware that there are currently a large number of cannabis products that are considered illegal in many places, but remember that both caffeine and alcohol have also been illegal.

Caffeine has been banned numerous times over the last few centuries around the world. Eastern Europerussia let's not forget that coffee shops started in europe as invisible universities, people were sewn into leather bags and thrown into the sea because of their violations related to coffee and as for alcohol, it is still completely banned in dozens of countries and not Let's forget that alcohol was declared illegal in the United States just a hundred years ago during prohibition; There are still dry counties scattered across the country to this day, so the path to becoming widely accepted is not easy for any new illicit substance, but alcohol and caffeine managed to do it. to weather the storm and today enjoy widespread use and legalization, and it sure feels like the wind is blowing in the same direction for cannabis.

Currently, Uruguay also decriminalized the recreational use of marijuana in 2016 and Canada followed suit shortly thereafter since then. South Africa, Luxembourg and certain United States. States have also started allowing recreational use of marijuana and more nations like New Zealand and Mexico are expected to follow suit and that's just recreational use. Medical cannabis, often a nation's first step toward decriminalizing recreational use, is exploding around the world right now, so if we're discussing what the world's next drug of choice will be, it could be that Cannabis has to be in the discussion. The markets for medicinal and recreational cannabis products are on an upward trend.

Cannabis sold legally in the US, for example, is expected to triple by 2023, so let's pretend for a moment that I'm right and say that cannabis indeed does. will one day become Western civilization's drug of choice, what would that mean for society? Would society begin to resemble the Middle Ages because cannabis is not as easy to classify as alcohol or caffeine? Cannabis is a broad term that encompasses a large number of derived products. from many different parts of many different plants, as a result, it does not fit into a singular classification. It can act as a depressant in certain ways.

It can act as a stimulant in other ways. It can also act as an opioid. Opioids affect the body by binding proteins to opioid receptors in the brain, effectively blocking a person's perception of pain. Opioids can make you feel relaxed, even euphoric; if opioids were represented by a person, they would be frozen. Hello everyone, I'm Olaf and I like warm hugs, I mean the boy is never happy, he doesn't feel pain and he's definitely calm, but could society really go in that direction? Could we become more like Olaf? Hi, let's really think about this before the Enlightenment, society was all about alcohol.

For centuries and centuries the whole world was under a depressive effect and in the grand scheme of things not much changed during that time, monarchies and the church were essentially permanent fixtures of the time, but science and understanding advanced slowly, without However, we discovered that the earth was not. literally the center of the universe, we discovered new continents when it arrived in the mid 17th century, Europe was ready for a new way of thinking and experiencing the world and coffee arrived just in time, so what about today? Cannabis, just in time, is simply marijuana. what the doctor ordered for everything that ails contemporary society, let me put my hat back on for a moment and tell you that yes, we could very well be at another social juncture in the history of humanity because collectively the world is, in quotes , more stressed, worried, sad. and in more pain today than we have ever seen, think about it for the last three centuries, society has been obsessed with productivity and technological advancement, we have had an industrial revolution and globalization has essentially swept everyone away and believe it or not, We've become even more obsessed with caffeine than ever today.

Tea is the most consumed beverage in the world, but coffee is close on its heels with the number two caffeinated energy drinks and caffeinated soft drinks are also among the top eight drinks. and where is all that caffeine? has helped us despite all the technological advances in modern conveniences, the world is more stressed and sad than ever, perhaps a global increase in cannabis consumption is the indication that society is finally ready to relax a little and framing the world in another new way, but hey, that's just a theory, a food theory and speaking of framing your view of the world in a new way, that's the goal of this channel, food theory, each episode is to make you question your assumptions about the foods everyone consumes. every day, did you know that carrots are actually not that good for your eyes?

It's actually a big part of a propaganda campaign, but that's an episode for another day that you have to subscribe to watch, so hit the red button. you see below this video, so anyway thank you very much for your subscription, it helps show that this is a channel that interests you and that you are excited about this type of content. I really enjoy working on this channel. I am learning. a lot about a whole new category of things. Also, if you're a fan of game theory and film theory, this channel can actually cover a lot of new topics that we've never covered anywhere because it covers a lot of chemistry and we haven't been able to touch on many chemistry topics in those other two. channels just by the nature of what they cover, while food is all chemistry, it's really cool stuff, so anyway thank you very much for your subscription to food theory and we'll always be back next week with more theory food goodness about the teeth about the gums care the stomach here it comes