If you can take the “lost cause” seriously you might be within range of the levels of motivated reasoning required to believe in your coffee substitute. Still a stretch; but you’ve at least warmed up.
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Em. About 2 teragrams of coffee is grown commercially in North America every year.
Heck, there are over 100,000 commercial coffee plants grown in California. I’m fairly certain I can grow one in my yard where I live.
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Interesting! I I didn’t know that. I’d always read that coffee only grows in a pretty narrow band of the planet.
Edit: do you have a source on that? My searching all says variations of this:
In the United States, only Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and some areas in southern Florida have coffee farms and support commercial coffee growth.
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There’s a bunch of more recent articles mentioning they have started growing it in California now too. I couldn’t find anything on how much comes from there compared to those islands though. (I wouldn’t count Hawaii as North America, although I would count Mexico.)
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Hmm… did they ever explicitly state that people were drinking coffee and not, say, chicory (which is used as a coffee substitute and has long been cultivated as such in the American South)?
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Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Belize are all in North America and commercially grow coffee.
If we include islands in North America, also Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and Dominican Republic.
I live in San Francisco. Coffee will grow here just fine (zone 10b) though not sure converting a chunk of the city to coffee farms during the zombie apocalypse would happen.
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Yep, they clearly stated it was coffee many times. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a super fan of the show, but it suffers from (like most post-apocalyptic fiction) an under-appreciation of how much luxury is due to global supply chains that took hundreds of years to build and would collapse in a moment.
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Okay, but to be fair, I was referencing Walking Dead so obviously I was talking about US and Canada. Your point is made on technicalities though and I won’t argue it. 
Please don’t go on to say they could grow coffee in Arkansas because yes that’s true, but obviously nobody in the show is doing that.
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Oh. I never watched the show. Zombies freak me out. I take it there were too many zombies to make runs down to Mexico?
It will also grow in greenhouses over a much larger area. Given all the local coffee roasters, I imagine during a zombie apocalypse at least a few coffee addicts would take some of the green beans and plant them in a greenhouse.
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I yield! I yield! tapping ground frantically 
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… the boffins at CERN bonked the timeline again and now they grow coffee in California, of course they do, sorry about the Mandela effect 
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Don’t even get me started on the well-kept front lawns and gardens.
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Hey, there may be a zombie apocalypse but we wouldn’t want the neighbours tutting about the state of our lawn. The HOA accepts no excuses.
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Agreed! For all the “efficiencies” we’ve seen through centralization of logistics, it would be nice to see even the big chains shift back to a more regional scale, so here in the fall, all the Cumberland Farm’s would have local apples, for example.
Ya, there’s just no substitute. I’ve tried switching to chicory, but find I’d rather just have something else than something trying to be coffee. Making me curious about what we would do for caffeine in the northeast US if we lost access to imports…
SMH. If there’s one upside to the zombie apocalypse, it should be that people quit with their lawn neuroses already! 
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The native plant with caffeine is yaupon holly, which is from the southeast US but could maybe be cultivated? I think cultivating tea, as in Camellia sinensis, might be possible too.
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