Chapter One
Life Before Lattes
Nearly a century ago, mankind discovered the secrets of the perfect
cup of coffee.
These eternal truths revealed themselves not through ghostly
messages in the steam of a Wisconsin secretary's cup of Yuban, but
instead through a modern day prophet of foodstuffs: Samuel Cate
Prescott, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who, in
the first decades of the twentieth century, was one of the world's
top food scientists. Prescott liked to imagine a future in which
scientific analysis would make foods not just safer but ideal. A
contemporary
Boston Daily Advertiser story on him even predicted
that one day, thanks to his efforts, the "application of
growth producing rays will bring forth cows the size of brontosauri,
roosters the size of pterodactyls."
In 1920, Prescott's talents attracted the attention of the National
Coffee Roasters As ...
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