You couldn’t find milk in Vietnam in 1946.
The nationwide dairy shortage due to the First Indochina War inspired a bartender at a Hanoian hotel, Nguyen Van Giang, to whisk egg yolks into coffee as a substitute.
If you walk into any cafe in Vietnam today—despite there no longer being a dairy shortage—you’ll be able to find Egg Coffee on the menu.
After hearing this story, I started noticing other examples of well-loved foods born out of scarcity.
A World War II cocoa shortage saw Pietro Ferrero use hazelnut paste to create Nutella. And despite today’s recipe being only 13% hazelnuts and 7% chocolate —with the rest palm oil and sugar—the spread has a cult following with its own annual celebration day.
Japanese food shortages in the aftermath of World War II resulted in Momofuku Ando figuring out that if you fried noodles in tempura oil, they’d dehydrate and create perforations that would allow them to be cooked quickly. In 2016 alone, 97 billion packs of instant noodles were sold globally.
These stories are nice reminders that a lack of something doesn’t mean we have to go without. Invention may just be an egg or hazelnut away.