“When about 16 years of age I happened to meet with a book, written by one Tryon, recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it. My brother, being […]
Category: posts
How U.S. meat industry has protected itself by cost-cutting
During the 1880s and 1890s, four firms headquartered in Chicago would come to directly and indirectly control most of the United States’ beef. They did so by pushing the social […]
John Glenn’s first space meals crumbled and floated around
The first American to orbit the earth, John Glenn “carried a menu of freeze-dried powders, tubed spaghetti and roast beef, and a variety of foods reduced to bit-sized cubes The […]
Were insects a major food source for early humans?
Insects, specifically termites, could have accounted for almost half the diet of hominins about 1.8 million years ago, according to researchers at Heriot Watt-University in the UK and Wayne State […]
Cookbook that Inspired Generations of Black Cooks
Ebony magazine food editor Freda DeKnight’s A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes, published in 1948, inspired a generation of cooks. Both a cookbook and cultural […]
How apples came to be sold on street corners during the Great Depression
Thousands of men spent thousands of hours on New York street corners during the Depression due to the efforts of a man named Joseph Sicker, chairman of the Unemployed Relief Committee […]
The passage in “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair that sickened America in 1906
“The Jungle” was a 1906 novel by the American writer Upton Sinclair about a family of immigrants from Bohemia struggling to survive under horrific working and living conditions in Chicago. […]
Chestnut trees victim of ecological disaster in 1904
The American chestnut, Castanea dentata, was an incredibly important species, for humans and our eastern deciduous forests. It quickly grew tall and wide, producing large quantities of straight, rot-resistant wood […]
When commercial baby food became popular in the United States
Cans of homogenized vegetables, fruits, and meats sold as baby food first became popular in the 1920s. The first to produce them on a large scale was a man named Harold […]
Anti-Chinese Immigration Laws Encouraged Growth of Chinese Restaurants
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States, yet also ended up stimulating the formation of certain Chinese businesses through a system […]