I posted this in another thread, but then discovered that this one might actually be a better place for it, since it's food-related. Anyhow, here it is.
For instance, in Feek61's photo, I am again reminded about those ubiquitous coffee cups...
Are they painted styrofoam, with a strip of black border tape around the top edge? That seems like an awful lot of work for a mere cup. And they did it consistently throughout the series, I believe.
Why not just a cup? I don't mean one with 'no coffee, no workee' on it or anything, but just plain, simple, handled cups?
I think
Wink of an Eye is the only episode in which the cups played a role in the plot.
Though … I want to say ``Where No Man Has Gone Before'' also shows cups close enough that you can faintly make out the UESPA logo. I'm sure that wasn't kept through the series but it's remarkable they went to such a slight detail in production. (I think ``The Cage'' did that too.)
(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).
(Some people, going a little far, I think, have credited the Enlightenment as being essentially the time when western intellectuals shifted their most commonly consumed drug from the depressant of alcohol --- in beer --- to the stimulant of caffeine --- in coffee, tea, and chocolate, all of which hit western Europe about that time --- which offers the prospect of an amusing alternate history where instead of bringing in tea and coffee the merchant venturers bring back opium instead. I don't buy it, though, since history isn't that simple and besides this is also the era when
gin really took off.)
Anyway, it's tougher to pin down just when coffee started since we get away from the very-well-documented western European intellectuals who wrote down all the stuff they were doing. Coffee was certainly being drunk in Egypt and the Arabian peninsula by 1511, when city officials in Mecca and Cairo issued bans on it. Coffeehouses seem to date to before 1500 in Mecca, but how much earlier I can't say and I don't know if anyone can.
(Tea can be traced back much longer, of course, since it had the good fortune to be noticed by Chinese aristocrats and so got written about at length.)
