Table Talk

The morning coffee is an absolute staple of many people's lives. That first sip still feels like something of a miracle. The caffeine, the complexities of the aroma, the ritual of making it, and the associations and stories around it, all make for a special moment in the day. And across hundreds of years, those things have driven an industry to grow from nothing, to today's $460 billion market. It has been an incredible rise. More than that, it has created culture. There isn’t a part of the world that coffee has not reached and transformed.   To the point where there has even been an espresso machine used on the International Space Station. In this episode of the Food Matters Live podcast, we delve into the history of coffee and discover how it became one of the world's most popular drinks. The history of coffee is, of course, steeped in politics, not least through the evil of slavery. We look into that shameful part of coffee's story and how the impacts are still being felt today. There is intrigue to