Beginning in the early 20th century, the United Fruit Company promoted bananas in a series of pamphlets and ads, taking it from a little-known novelty to a household staple. At […]
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Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 full text
An Act for preventing the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors, and for regulating traffic therein, and for other […]
Developing tasty foods for NASA astronauts took years
NASA began spaceflights with the idea that astronaut food had to be limited because of fear that weightlessness would cause crumbs and other food fragments to fill the air. That’s […]
Green Books guided black Americans to welcoming restaurants and inns
“Prior to the arrival of the Green Book, Black Americans relied on the kindness of strangers – also Black – when traveling. Until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws in Southern […]
The Troubled History of Horse Meat in America
Horse meat has a long history of causing problems for American politicians. The Trump administration wants to cut the budget used by the Bureau of Land Management to care for […]
Tasty menu at Alcatraz federal prison in September 1946
Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary opened in 1933 on an island in the San Francisco Bay to house troublemakers from other prisons. It closed in 1963 and was replaced by a prison […]
New York City guts successful school lunch program in 1919
A few days before Thanksgiving in 1908, the home economist Mabel Hyde Kittredge initiated a school lunch program at an elementary school in Hell’s Kitchen, serving soup and bread to […]
Ancient barley in Finland shows hunter-gatherers also farmed 5,000 years ago
A discovery of 5,000-year-old barley grains reveals that hunter-gatherers took to farming already that long ago in eastern Sweden and on islands along the southwest coast of Finland. These representatives […]
Demand for spices in Middle Ages drove globalization
“The quest for spice was one of the earliest drivers of globalization. Long before the voyages of European explorers, spices were globally traded products. Desire for spices helped fuel European […]
Bread discovered that predates agriculture by 4,000 years
At an archaeological site in northeastern Jordan, researchers have discovered the charred remains of a flatbread baked by hunter-gatherers 14,400 years ago. It is the oldest direct evidence of bread […]