Bread is important in many cultures; it is the center of every meal. It’s what you stick in the toaster every morning, a required participant in your brown bag lunch, and how do you even eat at a restaurant without those freshly baked buns? But who of you have ever paused to ponder the origins of this dietary staple?
According to Michael Pollan, Ancient Egyptians crushed wheat and added water; then, they baked it to form flatbreads. But on one fateful day, the mixture was left overnight, and the gluten began to rise, so curious to see what would happen, they baked this miraculous rising concoction, and that’s how bread came to be.
Artificial Sweetener
Artificial sweeteners became a charming alternative to real sugar because they add virtually zero calories with only need a fraction of the powdery substance to reach an intense level of sweetness.
The story goes like this: In 1879, Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist at Johns Hopkins University, must have forgotten to wash his hands after work when he noticed a sweet taste on his palm. It was connected to overboiled chemicals - and he then tested the mixture and, upon returning to Germany, started producing the first artificial sweetener: Saccharin.
Dippin’ Dots
If you've ever visited an amusement park or been to the mall, you've probably had your fair share of these tiny little ice cream balls. It turns out, Dippin' Dots have been going strong since 1988, and they most certainly have it trademarked or at least cryogenically frozen.
Curt Jones was developing a flash-freezing process using liquid nitrogen while in a lab in Lexington, KY. He was churning homemade ice cream at home and aimed his liquid nitrogen rays at that homemade ice cream, and that's how Dippin' Dots were born.
Popcorn
Popcorn doesn't grow in the cornfield on stalks as the big, puffed stuff you buy when you go to a movie. How, then, does it get from its origins as a super hard, yellow kernel and into your bowl of popcorn as a yummy snack?
French explorers wrote of American tribes in the 1700's popping kernels of corn in pottery jars filled with heated sand. This method somehow spread throughout the Great Lakes region, so settlers to upstate New York, Vermont, and Quebec were likely the earliest European-American popcorn makers.
TV Dinners
Love 'em or hate 'em, TV dinners are a staple food in many American homes. From low-cost budget dishes to higher-end organic dinners, aisles are fully stocked with these pre-made, ready-to-eat meals. And while some evolved far beyond their humble meat-and-potato origins, some have remained true to their classic form.
Despite attempts in the early 1940s to break into the ready-meal market, it wasn't until Swanson Foods made a business blunder that left it with 520,000lbs of excess turkey after Thanksgiving in 1953 that TV dinners triumphantly made their way into households. Ticked-off bosses requested their staff to think up a way to avoid wasting it, and a ready-made meal that looked like a TV was the answer.