This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Not everyone in seventeenth-century England approved of coffee or of the coffeehouse. Medical men debated the beverage’s healthfulness in fevered tracts, and women strenuously objected to the amount of time men were spending in coffeehouses. In a pamphlet titled “The Women’s Petition Against Coffee” published in 1674, the authors suggested that the “Enfeebling Liquor” robbed men of their sexual energies, making them “as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.” The unsubtle subtitle of the pamphlet—“Humble Petition and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want”—did not mince words: men were spending so much time in coffeehouses, and drinking so much coffee, that they arrived home with “nothing stiffe but their joints.” The men replied with their own pamphlet, claiming that the “Harmless and healing liquor . . . makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, [and] adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme.” Any problem in this department the pamphleteers wrote off to the “Husband’s natural infirmity” or possibly “your own perpetual Pumping him, not drinking coffee.”