Chicken nuggets are a quintessentially American food: easily mass produced and a quick, convenient protein source that can be eaten on the go. A staple of fast food restaurants and grocery freezer aisles for decades, they weren’t always on America’s dinner plates and children’s ...read more
TV dinners—those frozen, pre-cooked and pre-portioned meals that can be reheated and ready to eat in minutes—became an American culinary staple in the mid 20th century. But the true origin of this quarter-trillion-dollar industry may never be fully unwrapped. TV dinners may not ...read more
Where did fortune cookies come from—and how did they become so ubiquitous? It’s customary in many restaurants for diners to receive a small treat with their check: mints, hard candy, sometimes even chocolate. But at many Chinese restaurants around the United States, patrons get ...read more
How does a restaurant become “historic”? For most American eateries, it’s a feat to survive even a few years—much less decades or centuries. In the brutally competitive industry, statistics suggest that 60 percent of eateries don’t make it past their first year; 80 percent close ...read more
The credit for America’s greatest inventions is often a matter of controversy. The telephone: Alexander Graham Bell or Elisha Gray? The radio: Guglielmo Marconi or Nicola Tesla? The airplane: Gustave Whitehead or the Wright Brothers? Add to that illustrious list: the potato ...read more
When Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1920, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, the law nearly decimated the alcohol industry. But it helped give the nascent ice cream business a sweet boost. Between 1919 and 1929, federal tax ...read more
Mankind’s love affair with chocolate stretches back more than five millennia. Produced from the seeds of tropical cacao trees native to the rainforests of Central and South America, chocolate was long considered the “food of the gods,” and later, a delicacy for the elite. But for ...read more
Candy bars may seem quintessentially American, but they have origins in the World War I chocolate rations given to European soldiers. The American military followed suit, helping its doughboys develop a sweet tooth they would bring home after the war. Throughout the 1920s, ...read more
On July 9, 1962, a little-known artist named Andy Warhol opened a small show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. His head-scratching subject: Campbell’s Soup. Each of his 32 paintings portrayed a different flavor in the lineup, from Tomato to Pepper Pot and Cream of Celery. For ...read more
Sultan Murad IV decreed death to coffee drinkers in the Ottoman Empire. King Charles II dispatched spies to infiltrate London’s coffeehouses, which he saw as the original source of “false news.” During the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau and Isaac Newton could all be found ...read more
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, Americans woke up to a new kind of breakfast. Poured from a box into a bowl and doused with milk, cold cereals like Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Grape-Nuts and Shredded Wheat were not only lighter and easier to digest than more ...read more
Battle Creek Sanitarium, America’s most popular medical spa of the early 20th century, may be best known as the birthplace of the corn flake. But some might say that the biggest flake to come out of Battle Creek was the man in charge: John Harvey Kellogg, the dapper doctor who ...read more
The great Cola Wars of the 1980s were a battle between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo for dominance. The disastrous introduction of “New Coke” in 1985 appeared to set Coca-Cola back. Yet by the end of the year, it was clear the “mistake” had actually helped Coca-Cola’s sales, allowing ...read more
How did pizza, a saucy dish originating in a southwestern region of Italy, become so dominant in the United States? Legend has long recognized Gennaro Lombardi as the founder of the country’s first pizzeria. He supposedly received his business license for it in 1905, in Lower ...read more
January 17, 1920, marked a dark day for American brewers. At the stroke of midnight, America became a dry country under Prohibition, with over a thousand producers swiftly banned from selling their chief commodity: alcohol. Prohibition forced brewing companies to adapt or ...read more
If you’ve ever tasted what’s known as “government cheese,” you won’t soon forget it. Its flavor was described as somewhere between Velveeta and American cheese and smacked of humiliation or gratitude for the people who couldn’t afford not to eat it. Its color, a pale orange, was ...read more
A bar of Hershey’s chocolate is a simple pleasure—milky flavor, iconic brown-and-silver wrapper, traditional American roots. But though Hershey’s is among the most beloved and recognized brands in the U.S., the company’s history isn’t as simple as its flavors—like the time when ...read more
From packages of waffles to bags of peas, the myriad items found in the frozen-food section of grocery stores today owe their existence, in part, to Clarence Birdseye, who in the 1920s developed a quick-freezing process that launched the modern frozen-food industry. Between 1912 ...read more
Before it became the world's second largest fast food chain, Kentucky Fried Chicken was the brainchild of a man named Harland Sanders, who cooked up simple country dishes at a roadside gas station. Even after his death in 1980, Sanders is still the instantly recognizable face of ...read more
Cleopatra swore by them. So did Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte. Pickles got their start more than 4,000 years ago, when ancient Mesopotamians began soaking cucumbers in acidic brine, as a way to preserve them. Since then, they have been a staple in cultures around the ...read more
New Hampshire brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald opened the very first McDonald's on May 15, 1940, in San Bernardino, California. Their tiny drive-in bore little resemblance to today’s ubiquitous “golden arches,” but it would eventually come to epitomize the fast-food ...read more
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The time-tested adage appears to be the lesson from Coca-Cola’s disastrous introduction of “New Coke." Except in 1985, Coca-Cola indeed thought its signature brand was broken. Although Coca-Cola remained the world’s best-selling soft drink, rival ...read more
While colorful packs of chewing gum may seem like something dreamed up by a modern-day, real-life Willy Wonka, chewing gum has been used, in various forms, since ancient times. There’s evidence that some northern Europeans were chewing birch bark tar 9,000 years ago—possibly for ...read more
By the fall of 1921, Babe Ruth had become the brightest star in America’s most popular pastime. The New York Yankees slugger, who first broke into the major leagues in 1914, had set the single-season home run record for the third straight year and already smashed Roger Connor’s ...read more