Do people drink more coffee and tea today than they did a hundred years ago? When I researched this on the U.S. Department of Agriculture website, I was surprised to discover that in the U.S. people now consume only about two-thirds as much coffee as they did in 1923, but that they consume about the same amount of tea. Here are the details:
A Hundred Years Ago 
That is surprising.
I also was surpised. I might have guessed that consumption of coffee and tea would have increased over the past hundred years.
In old movies, they always had coffee after dinner. Maybe they drank it at every meal. My family drank tea with every meal, but it was iced after breakfast.
I recall my parents routinely serving coffee after dinner if we had people over. Indeed, what I remeber about “formal” dinners when I was a kid is that 1) alcohol was never served at them, even though nobody we knew was a teetotaler, any alcohol was ever served, it was a served in very limited amounts before dinner, and 2) coffee was always served, often during dinner, but also after.
My in laws, active ranchers, serve coffee at all three meals in the day.
Interesting topic. I haven’t thought about this for years.
Interesting. My family and extended family rarely drank alcohol and that was something new for me when I went out into the world.
I am truly surprised by this! Who’d of thought?
There was a random mention of how little tea Americans drank in a 1923 cookbook, and the next thing I knew I was researching it – and then when I found the data, and it looked interesting I decided to make the figure and table. It’s interesting how little things can get one started with a blog post.
Yoy know, thinking back even on my childhood. My mom made a pot of coffee at breakfast and on workdays made a second for dad’s thermos. Then it was pretty common at dinner time for her to perk another pot. I can’t think of the last time I made three pots of coffee in a day unless it was a dinner party.
Even when I’ve had dinner guests over, I haven’t made coffee in years. A while back it seemed like people just didn’t want coffee after dinner when I made it, so I just quit making it.
Really surprising. This isn’t what I would have anticipated at all.
I also would have guessed that tea and coffee consumption might have gone up across the years, but that’s sure not what the data shows.
Life is full of surprises 🙂
It sure is. 🙂
Surprising. I believe that here in the UK, coffee consumption has soared at the expense of tea. That’s partly down to me 😉
Interesting -I hadn’t realized that coffee has become popular in England. I so closely associate tea with England.
Not any longer. Tea’s still popular of course, but so is coffee.
My mother was Canadian and never drank coffee. But when I was a kid she consumed a lot of tea, a remnant of the English influence in Canada. She became very ill when I was in my early teens and just stopped drinking it entirely. I still have her tea sets.
That must be a special souvenir of your mother. What a shame she stopped enjoying tea though.
My father was not a coffee drinker – he always had tea at breakfast and at dinner. My mother was all about the coffee. She would make a pot in the morning and drink a cup before getting ready, another at breakfast and a final cup in the car on the way to work. She would drink coffee as soon as she got home and all evening. It was only after she was in her late 70s that her doctor told her to cut down on the coffee and switch to decaf! I think that big spike in coffee consumption was because she was newly in the workforce!!
🙂 There’s an upswing in coffee consumption during WWII, and then consumption continues to increase in the 1950’s. Maybe it did have something to do with more women working – though the employment rate for females may have trended down in the 50’s.
People have a lot more choices for caffeinated drinks nowadays.