(When did people start drinking coffee, anyway? I'm just thinking how long-lived a habit it would be if in
Star Trek's time, they're still doing it.)
Coffee's recorded being drunk in England as far back as 1637, and it hit the country in a big way in the late 17th century; it and tea consumption just kept on rising. Coffeehouses started appearing in major western cities between 1650 and 1700 (about a century behind Constantinople, for what that's worth).
There was a (fortunately) short-lived TV show called "Young Blades", a retelling of the Three Musketeers in 17th-century France. One episode featured coffee being introduced in Paris. I guess the timeline is about right. But the odd thing is that the eating establishment where it was introduced was
already referred to as a café. I guess the writers didn't know what the word means.
I had some MREs that they were giving away when we had bad extended power outages after a major storm a few years back. They're actually quite nifty. As I recall, each one came with:
Main course, in a pouch that could be cooked in the included water-activated heating sleeve--I never got them to heat very evenly, though. As noted, these could vary from things as diverse as pasta, chicken dishes, beef and noodles, beef stew, etc.;
A large cracker;
Peanut butter and cheese spreads;
Some sort of desert--varied between fig newtons and compressed pop tarts in the ones I got;
A powered drink mix--The ones I had alternated between Hawaiian Punch and something else, though I'm having trouble remembering what...might have been lemonade, Gatorade, or Tang...I know it wasn't lime;
Plastic fork;
Had to use my own water and knife...things any soldier would have on hand.
Also, the packaging tending to have nifty tips for soldiers regarding what you should eat first for energy and what to save for later, if you weren't able to eat it all in one sitting.
I was in the Army in the late 1980s. MREs at that time were okay, but didn't quite have the quality or diversity you're describing.
The main dish varied between "beef slice in BBQ sauce", "pork slice in BBQ sauce", "meatballs in BBQ sauce" and things like that, or a freeze-dried beef or pork patty that required boiling water ... and didn't tend to reconstitute well no matter what you did. They didn't have the self-heating packaging, but it probably wouldn't have helped. (The meatballs were pretty good, though.)
The crackers, peanut butter, jelly, and cheese spreads were pretty standard. There were other side dishes like normal applesauce, a freeze-dried potato patty, and freeze-dried fruit. Those weren't bad... actually it was pretty handy just to munch on the latter two while still dried.
There was usually a "miscellaneous" packet with coffee, creamer, cocoa, a wad of toilet paper, and some other things. I don't remember any powdered drink mixes. Very few contained name-brand products, except one variety that had Chiclets.
Most of them had a dessert referred to as a "nut cake" of one kind or another. Chocolate nut cake, maple nut cake, pineapple nut cake ... I don't remember how many there were and it didn't matter, because they were all awful. ("Uniformly" awful.
) I'm still not sure what they were a cake
of.
Regarding the freeze-dried beef patties: there was one time when we'd come back from the field and our commanding officer announced a cookout where we could hang out and relax. Attendance was mandatory because we were going to have some FUN, and doggone it that was an order, private!
The C.O. set up a grill in the field outside our barracks and started grilling. Guess what the "hamburgers" were?
At least he
tried to reconstitute them first.
I guess it was a creative way to claim morale-boosting, stay under budget, and burn off some unused MREs.
As if they were going to spoil.
