There always have been taverns, inns, takeout places. If you have an urban society, you need to have places where people who, say, are from the countryside and going to […]
Category: posts
Humans Were Roasting Starchy Root Vegetables 170,000 Years Ago
The inhabitants of the Border Cave in southern Africa were cooking starchy plants 170,000 years ago. “This discovery is much older than earlier reports for cooking similar plants and it […]
The Surprisingly Interesting History of Margarine
The pure foods movement of the 1920s helped undermine natural butter and elevate the status of margarine. In 1923 Congress passed a law that made it illegal to add any […]
U.S. growers got their first date plants from Morocco, Syria and Algeria
Dates in this country hark back to 1898, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture began sending teams of botanists and horticulturalist around the globe to find crops that would thrive […]
History of pizza
Pizza as we now know it came into being in late 18th-century Naples. Naples had become one of the largest cities in Europe and was growing fast. As the urban […]
Thousands of historic watercolor paintings of fruit now online
More than 7,500 watercolor paintings, lithographs and line drawings of fruits and nuts commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1886 to 1942 are now online. Their availability is […]
First African-American to dine at White House
A month after he became President with the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, 42-year old Theodore Roosevelt invited 45-year old Booker T. Washington at the last minute to stay […]
How steak became manly and salads became feminine
When was it decided that women prefer some types of food – yogurt with fruit, salads and white wine – while men are supposed to gravitate to chili, steak and […]
The first successful frozen dinner wasn’t from Swanson
The first successful frozen dinner for preparing and eating at home was called the “One-Eyed Eskimo.” Albert and Meyer Bernstein began selling it in 1949 in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. […]
When U.S. Presidents began to be seen eating
Portraits of the Presidents from Washington into the 20th century presented them as strong, powerful, and confident leaders. However, something shifts in the mid-20th century. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt […]