Coffee not essential for life, Swiss government says | Hacker News Reader

Coffee not essential for life, Swiss government says

bbc.com

8 pointse2e417 comments

If Sweden were cut off from the world and forced to defend itself, I would hope its defenders wouldn’t simultaneously be fighting caffeine withdrawal. There’s your strategic justification.

Of course, if Sweden were under serious attack, it would likely mean that Russia was moving against NATO, and the world would be on the brink of apocalyptic nuclear war. But you wouldn’t want two problems. :)

(Sweden != Switzerland)

Ack! >_<. Thinking about an “European country with a coffee habit,” I guess my brain was predisposed to think about Sweden.

> "Coffee contains almost no calories and therefore does not contribute, from the physiological perspective, to safeguarding nutrition," the Federal Office for National Economic Supply said (in German).

That's true: nobody needs coffee to survive and it doesn't provide nutritional value. But does that really mean that you can't keep a little on hand, given how many people enjoy it? This is coming from someone who doesn't drink coffee, FWIW.

This is meant to be an emergency stockpile to ward off mass starvation, in various disaster scenarios. I know it's hard for us to imagine in modern times, but during desperate situations like war, people literally die of starvation. When faced with a situation like that, you'll be very glad that the government elected to store 15,300 tonnes of additional food instead of coffee.

I'd still say it's a difficult decision to make: whether you'd like a significant portion of your country to suffer from caffeine withdrawal and not be able to function properly, or have some additional people starve 3 months from the start of the disaster, with would only happen if there was no additional help and at that point you’re probably not going to get more food anytime soon…

Caffeine withdrawal doesn’t last really long mate. You’ll get a headache 1 afternoon then you go to sleep and it’s gone.

There are many things not essential to life but add to the overall productivity, and fulfillment of tasks.

I'm counting on my coffee stockpile to be a critical barter item during the zombie apocalypse.

I would love to know what foodie countries like France and Italy are stockpiling.

For comparison, MREs have coffee.

false

#FakeNews

What's fake?

The BBC article links to the primary reference at https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei... .

> Kaffee-Pflichtlager in Frage gestellt

> Bern, 10.04.2019 - Der Bundesrat hat am 10. April 2019 die Vernehmlassung zur Änderung der Verordnung über die Pflichtlagerhaltung von Nahrungs- und Futtermitteln eröffnet. Vorgesehen ist die Aufhebung der Lagerpflicht beim Kaffee.

#Woosh

Can you elaborate?

Downvoted so hard.

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