The long road of coffee
The story everyone tells is Kaldi's, an Ethiopian goatherd whose goats turned oddly lively after eating red berries. True or not, coffee really does come from the Ethiopian highlands, where it still grows wild.
It reached Europe through Venice in the 1500s, distrusted at first as 'the bitter drink of the devil'. What stuck with me: Yemen guarded fertile seeds for centuries, until a pilgrim named Baba Budan smuggled seven of them out. Seven seeds went around the world.
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