Coffee Is Not Forever

“Exhaustively researched and accessibly written, McCook offers a timely contribution with this forward-looking book, which asks us to consider what social and ecological resilience look like as we advance into an uncertain future. Though formally a work of agricultural history, it will be of use as a detailed reference for researchers outside the discipline, as well as to the particularly curious coffee afcionado.” — Agriculture and Human Values

“McCook makes crucial contributions to a number of related fields that usually don’t intersect: history of science, global history, and commodity studies. His decision to focus on the science of plant disease and the politics and institutions related results in a welcome challenge to the anthropocentrism that too often dominates the study of history. With stunning breadth of research and inquiry, this is a rich and original work.”

“Coffee Is Not Forever is top-notch scholarship that provides a rare pan-tropical analysis of the interactions of people, plants, and pathogens in the coffee regions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This book will be of immense value to readers interested not only in coffee, but also environmental and commodity histories more broadly. Like all great transnational histories, it is both connected and comparative. And for the latte generation, this book may forever change the way they think about robusta coffee.”

“There is an urgent need for books like [this]. Even as people are more attuned than ever before to the grim realities of a pandemic amidst the constant, rapid ricochet of human bodies around the planet, many remain unaware of the epidemics that rage among our most essential companion species—that is, among domesticated crops and livestock. It is possible that zoonotic diseases will garner greater attention thanks to desperate curiosity about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile, plant diseases will go on multiplying, with their sustained discussion unlikely outside agroindustry and agronomy. McCook’s timely study makes clear the consequences of collective blindness to these ever-present epidemics in his globe-spanning, 150-year history of Hemileia vastatrix. That is the fungus responsible for coffee leaf rust, a disease for which there is no cure. The measures that have been, and still are being, taken to keep your morning coffee affordable and palatable in light of the rust might provide as much of a jolt as the java itself.” — Environmental History