My time living in one of the great American cities left me with a taste for coffee made with dried roasted chicory standing in for some of the coffee grounds. I don't make coffee exclusively that way, but it is something I do regularly. Aside from the taste, which I really enjoy, chicory holds other interests for me. You end up needing less coffee because of chicory's strong taste, so it has some economical aspect to it. This is supposedly how it ended up in coffee to start with--the French needed a way to "stretch" a limited coffee supply. That may have had to do with some sort of war, which brings a tinge of sadness to the story. War is bad, but I do like historical footnotes.