RSSThe Swiss are among the world’s biggest drinkers of coffee, and many, it seems, do regard it as “essential.” Faced with such a public response, the government said it would reconsider.
The East German government tried to reintroduce ersatz coffee in the 1970s on the reasoning that it would save hundreds of millions of dollars in hard currency that was better spent on essential infrastructure like copper for telephone wires.
Pretty soon they were advised by their eavesdroppers that the population without its morning coffee was getting dangerously, seditiously, grumpy, starting to wonder aloud how their westcousins could just walk into Aldi and buy kilos of the stuff without having to ask permission.
So the government took a different approach of encouraging coffee growing in communist allies like Cuba, Angola, and Vietnam (where coffee growing was started from scratch in the early 1980s, but the first harvest didn’t arrive until around 1990 when it was too late for East Germany).