1911 the Swedish MP Carl Lindhagen, introduced a bill to the second chamber in which he demanded an investigation into the question about the Swedish coffee abuse (kaffemissbruk). The issue was up for debate on several occasions and in 1929 the parliament demanded, for the second time, an investigation into feasible measures against the misuse of coffee. This essay investigates the coffee abuse debate in the Swedish daily press between 1910 and 1940 with the purpose to, through the coffee abuse issue, highlight the times values about health- and societal issues. The theoretical starting point of the essay is the discourse theory as it is described in Ernesto Laclaus och Chantal Mouffes book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. The main result of the investigation is that few voices questioned the existence of the Swedish coffee abuse, although the suggested solutions varied between the different positions. The debate was not absent in the sobriety movement and both proponents and sceptics concerning the involvement in the coffee abuse issue was represented. The sobriety movement also felt the need to defend itself from the accusation that it was them, that had spread the coffee abuse through their campaigns against the use of alcohol. Instead, they argued that it was the use of alcohol that also gave birth to an excessive coffee consumption. The injuries that the coffee abuse was described as causing were firstly stomach ailments and nerve damages. Secondly, coffee abuse was invoked as a fiscal problem where the import of coffee beans was viewed as damaging to the national economy, which I see as a mercantilistic viewpoint. Both the physical and fiscal worries were used in the advertisement for domestic produced coffee substitutes, especially in the defence issue 1914. I argue that the worries about coffee abuse can not only be seen as a critique of the evolving modern industrial society and the longing back to a premodern Gemeinschaft. The opposite standpoint was also present in the debate, that the resolution to the problem was to be find through the modern food industry and natural sciences. To conclude. The debate about the coffee abuse shows, in my opinion, how the health issue became all compassing where every passion that was deemed as unhealthy also was viewed as sinful. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has pointed out how this issue is prevalent in today’s western society where, for example, cigarette smokers are viewed with disdain.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-57216 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Eklund, Magne |
| Publisher | Jönköping University, Högskolan för lärande och kommunikation |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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