The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Book Review – Caffeinated: How our daily habit helps, hurts, and hooks us Posted: 18 May 2014 06:13 PM PDT Caffeine is perhaps the world's favourite drug today. Take coffee, one of its more popular forms, for example. It is the world's second most valuable traded commodity, just behind petroleum. Not bad for a beverage believed to be discovered by a 9th-century Ethiopian shepherd when he noticed how excited his goats became after eating the beans from a coffee plant. Murray Carpenter tells of the caffeinated world we live in through a complex lens where the bitter white powder plays different roles for different people. "Caffeinated: How our daily habit helps, hurts, and hooks us" is built on the premise that caffeine deserves more respect and consumers deserve better regulation and more information. It's an addict's investigation into a field so overlooked that many just don't have a good vocabulary for it. In his foreword, Carpenter talks about how we discuss our caffeine habits and how we measure caffeine intake, so much so that the freelance journo who had a stint with The New York Times invents a measuring unit called SCAD, or Standard Caffeine Dose. The message is that you can no longer benchmark the caffeine levels in a can of Red Bull or Coca Cola against a cup of Starbucks coffee. Everything has to be measured in its own right. Readers are given dense facts about the layers of our caffeinated world. Carpenter starts off with items close to home: chocolate, coffee and tea. He talks about the majors who are ripping off farmers and consumers, including adding little extras, synthetic caffeine in particular, to meet worldwide demand – that "the industry is opaque, and the little information that is publicly available is not reassuring." He unapologetically continues to spill the beans and doesn't withhold any punches, to the point of saying that "not only are most of us naïve about how caffeine is produced; we know little about how it is blended into consumer products". His book shares similarities with other food writer-activists such as Philip Lymbery ("Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat") and Gary L. Francione ("Eat like you care"). It's typical investigative, informative journalism that seeks to question our assumptions about what we daily consume. Carpenter weaves what he knows about caffeine – browse his blog and there's a healthy number of articles on the subject – and blends his arguments with cases, history and interviews. He is an old hand, so the book – just like its title – promises to deliver an interesting read. One can't help but notice that Murray employs a storytelling device where the last few lines of a chapter serve as the prologue to the next one. Yet easy reading doesn't mean light reading: especially on cases where he probes into the effects of caffeine on American GIs, athletes, insomniacs and introverts and extroverts, readers will find a swathe of technical jargon and experiments that can, at times, be mind-boggling and a burden to read – this here being the only criticism, as those uninitiated into the world of chemistry and food science will find it hard to keep up. Aside from that, the other glaring aspect of "Caffeinated" is that the book is mainly focused on happenings in the US. No way should this be an issue to readers, because the discussion and the ubiquity of caffeine make it relatively easy for addicts to relate to Carpenter's expose. It would however be a tad better if it had dealt with caffeine on a global scale. Murray Carpenter's "Caffeinated: How our daily habit helps, hurts, and hooks us" is priced at RM89.95 and published by Hudson Street Press. Hardcover is the book's current form and it is available at any major bookstore. – May 19, 2014. |
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