Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant

In this new book, Seth Garfield demonstrates his vast knowledge of Brazil, moving gracefully through the different political, environmental, and economic contexts that shaped the history of the guarana plant (Paullinia cupana) from the colonial period to recent times. In an engaging way, Garfield shows how guarana, the main ingredient in a popular Brazilian soft drink, became much more than a fruit with stimulating properties. It is also a vibrant ingredient in the country's complex historical relationship between people and the natural environment.Garfield's book highlights the interests of traders, techniques of scientists, stratagems of marketers, and the behaviors and tastes of consumers who popularized new forms and uses of the stimulant. The author, using a broad methodological framework, introduces the production of knowledge on, and the circulation of the fruit in, distinct historical periods and situations. To build his argument, Garfield examines an amalgam of primary sources, Indigenous myths, photos, maps, advertisements, legislation, newspapers, academic journals, and many other sources. The vast bibliography that he consults enables our understanding of how knowledge, goods, and power have materialized and circulated through the fruit and its uses.Garfield complements his research by consulting a wide range of fields of knowledge. He looks, for example, to studies of the plant itself and its properties to discover what has encouraged its use among different social groups and how knowledge of its nutritional properties has stimulated interest in the berry or its processed forms. Guarana, the most caffeine-rich plant on earth, is a species of flowering shrubs that belongs to the Sapindaceae, or soapberry, family, and it is native only to the Mawés region of the lower Amazon and the Orinoco River of Venezuela. This region has been occupied by the Sateré-Mawé peoples, who were responsible for the plant's domestication. Despite scant sources—due largely to the fact that Brazilian Indigenous cultures were exclusively oral—Garfield effectively explores the different meanings and roles that these groups gave to the plant. Beyond the fruit's role in diet, it was woven into legend and sacred meaning. Today, they recognize the plant as a form of resistance. Guarana extraction, and its sustainable cultivation, has become part of their struggle to preserve traditional knowledge.Garfield's book also covers the role of advertising and commercial interests in expanding the cultivation and consumption of guarana. There is a long list of products that have undergone consumption booms, coming onstage through complex relations to historical opportunities or to material scarcity. Yet changes in eating habits are not always positive and have even been at the root of both eating and environmental disorders. In advanced industrial nations, the expansion of the food system was based on incorporating new markets for commodities and applying technologies to improve agriculture for mass production. Garfield employs this perspective when he considers issues of gender, race, class, and age and their connection to the popularization of the Guaraná soft drink in Brazil. Amid Brazil's expanding urban centers, industrial development, and changing family patterns, an Amazonian berry reinvented as an industrial flavor became an emblem of modern life.The guarana plant has made its way through different worlds, and Garfield's book casts light on its pathways. His approach lines up with other recent scholarship in global environmental history, applying microscopic and macroscopic lenses to map the plant's route over the course of the centuries from Indigenous cultivation to colonial era missionary concerns and, later, as a commodity for international trade. Garfield shows how, not unlike other endemic species in Brazil, guarana went from object of Western scientific study and classification to Anglo-American pharmaceutical novelty. In Brazil, the berry has served as a contribution to Brazilian development and national identity.Of undeniable theoretical and methodological importance, this book guarantees a thought-provoking and pleasurable read. It will undoubtedly become a widely cited source, welcomed by scholars from many different fields.