6 ideas
Coffee spread through 17th-century bourgeois Europe because it did chemically what Puritan morality demanded: it produced sober alertness and suppressed the body's drowsiness. It replaced beer and wine, the old breakfast and workday drinks, and so turned the drinker into an efficient, rational working body.
Medieval Europeans prized pepper and other spices beyond their culinary use because they tasted of a distant, imagined Orient that stood in for paradise. Seasoning a dish gave it prestige and a sense of the exotic. This demand for taste-as-fantasy is what financed the voyages of exploration.
Read a stimulant as a signal of the social class whose bodily ideal it serves. Chocolate, thick and nourishing, suited the idle, Catholic, aristocratic body that lounged at its levée. Coffee suited the upright, productive bourgeois body. What a class drinks shows how it wants its body to feel and to look.
In the industrial era, cheap spirits replaced beer among workers because they intoxicated faster and more cheaply per unit. That fitted a life of long hours and little free time, where relief had to be compressed into moments. Gin epidemics and the rise of 'drinking to get drunk' followed from how industry rearranged time and wages, not from moral weakness.
In England, tea moved the stimulant out of the male public coffeehouse and into the family, the woman-centered home. The same stimulating function was given a different social space and gender.
London and Paris coffeehouses were places where men of different ranks read newspapers, argued and did business while sober. The stimulant's clarifying effect and the venue's openness together bred a culture of rational public debate. That culture fed commerce, journalism and political opposition.