Curated playlist
Types of food
- FruitA strawberry is not a berry, but a banana is. Botanists call the strawberry a dry fruit.
- RiceRice feeds over half the world, yet less than 8% of it crosses a border. Most is grown and eaten close to home.
- PorkBy 2017, half of all the pork eaten in the world was eaten in China. China also keeps a national pork stockpile.
- Chicken as foodIn the 1800s, Americans treated chicken as a luxury for the wealthy.
- MeatIn Old English, the word meat meant food of any kind. Over time it narrowed to mean animal flesh.
- Eggs as foodJoseph Coyle invented the egg carton in 1911 to settle a fight over broken eggs.
- CheeseThe earliest preserved cheese found came from mummies in China's Taklamakan Desert, as early as 1615 BCE.
- VegetableIn 1893, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled a tomato is a vegetable. The justices admitted it is botanically a fruit.
- Ice creamIn 1851, Carlo Gatti sold ice cream in shells for a penny outside a London station.
- BreadThe oldest evidence of bread comes from a desert site in Jordan, not a kitchen. The Natufian site is 14,500 years old.
- SausageThe sausage, a meat product built from ground meat, salt and spices, once stood at the center of an ancient Greek comedy. In The Knights, the playwright Aristophanes tells the story of a sausage vendor who is elected leader. A sausage…
- SushiThe word sushi traces to an old term meaning sour tasting, not raw fish. Fermentation gave the dish its original tang.
- PorridgePorridge was in the stomachs of Neolithic bog bodies found in Central Europe and Scandinavia, and those bodies are about 5,000 years old. The meal they ate last was oat porridge. At its simplest, porridge is a soft, thick dish made by…
- BiscuitBiscuits were cooked twice on purpose, so sailors could carry them. The word comes from Latin for "cooked twice."
- PancakeA pancake, also called a hotcake, griddlecake or flapjack, once sent a woman running to church with her frying pan still in hand. Tradition places the scene in Olney, England, in 1445. A housewife was frying pancakes to eat before the…
- PizzaThe oldest known written pizza was owed to a bishop in the year 997. A tenant owed twelve pizze every Christmas Day.
- KebabKebab is not one dish. In the Syrian city of Aleppo alone, cooks are said to make at least twenty-six versions of it. Some are cooked with cherries, some with aubergine, some with chili, parsley and pine nuts, and one style is made with…
- CheesecakeCheesecake already had its own book in the 5th century BCE, when a Greek physician named Aegimus wrote a treatise on the art of making it. That is the earliest mention of the dessert anyone has found. The dish he described had little in…
- CroquetteResearch in 2008 found that the Netherlands eats 350 million kroketten every year. Each one is a crisp breaded roll with a soft, thick filling hidden inside. The Dutch call it a kroket, Spanish speakers say croqueta, and in English it is a…
- SandwichThe sandwich went before a court in Indiana in 2024, and the court ruled that "tacos and burritos are Mexican-style sandwiches." That is a surprising verdict for a food most people feel sure they can recognize. At its simplest, a sandwich…
- PretzelThe pretzel is a baked pastry shaped into a knot. At one festival in the German city of Speyer, 22,000 of them are thrown into the crowd. Today it is a salty snack sold in shopping malls and stadiums. Yet nobody agrees on who first twisted…
- PilafPilaf, also written pilav, pilau or plov, is judged by one old test: does each grain stand apart from the next? Thirteenth-century texts set the bar plainly. The grains should be plump and slightly firm, like peppercorns, with no mush and…
- DumplingDumplings appear in a poem written roughly 1,700 years ago by a Chinese scholar, in a verse form called a fu. That poem is one of the earliest mentions of the food. Archaeologists have also pulled preserved dumplings out of the ground at…
- Pickled cucumberThe pickled cucumber goes by two names, and which one you use depends on where you live. In the United States and Canada, it is simply a pickle. In Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, it is a gherkin. Under either…