It wasn't until the 1950s that the modern concept of the coffee break-free coffee plus paid time in which to enjoy it‐was fully established as a legally recognized institution in the American workplace. This happened at a neckware company in Denver called Los Wigwam Weavers. (The story is told in the 2020 book Coffeeland, by historian Augustine Sedgewick.)  When Wigwam owner Phil Greinetz lost its best young workers to the war effort, he hired older men to operate the looms. Because of the intricacy of the designs and the number of colors in the necktie, the work was exacting and exhausting, and the older men failed to meet the company's quality standards. Greinetz then tried hiring middle-aged women to operate the looms. The women had the necessary dexterity but lacked the endurance to work a full shift. At a company-wide meeting to discuss the problem, employees proposed that they be given two-fifteen minute breaks-one in the morning, one in the afternoon-and that they be provided with coffee. Greinetz took their suggestion, establishing a break room and supplying it with coffee and tea. Very soon he "noticed a change in his workers, " Sedgewick writes. "Four women who had been among the worst workers were now among the best. Altogether the middle-aged women began to do as much work in six and a half hours as the older men had done in eight hours. Encouraged, Greinetz made the break compulsory."    Yet Greinetz felt he shouldn't have to pay the workers for what he regarded as time off, so he docked them for the thirty minutes of break time. Deducting this time from the employees' paychecks caused their wages to fall below the federal minimum, however, prompting a suit against the company from the U.S. Department of Labor. "In court," Sedgewick writes, "Greinetz testified to the extrordinary changes he had observed in his employees" since instituting the coffee breaks, but because the breaks weren't work time, he argued, he wasn't obliged to pay his workers for it.  The company ultimately lost in Federal Court. The court ruled that though the breaks certainly benifited the workers, they were at least "equally beneficial to the employer in that they promote more efficiency and result in greater output, and this increased production is one of the primary factors, if not the prime factors which leads the employer to institute such break periods."  The judge also pointed out, rightly, that coffee breaks bore "a close relationship" to work and thereby must be compensated as such. The decision enshrined the paid coffee break in American life. As Sedgewick pointed out, "the principle that physiologists and bosses had already discovered in practice-that coffee adds something to the working power of the human body independent of the processes and timescales of eating and digestion, something beyond what the science of energy and laws of thermodynamics say is impossible-became itself a kind of law."     -from the book "This Is Your Mind On Plants"  by  Michael Pollan, writing teacher at Harvard U iversity and U. of California, Berkley. MICHAELPOLLAN.COM