A story I heard was that it was the poor indigenous farmers who were forced to cultivate coffee for the Dutch. They weren’t allowed any of the beans they grew, but were able to collect it from the dung of civets that prowled around near the plantation. Of course, once the colonizers learned that it tasted “good”, it was commoditized too.
Might be apocryphal.
flicker@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I bet it was more like, “Here’s coffee you can only give from shit. I bet a stupid rich person would pay a fortune for it.”