Curated category
Types of food
- FruitA strawberry is not a berry. A banana is. The tomato hiding in a savory salad is, botanically, a fruit and a berry both, while the strawberry that crowns a…
- RiceRice feeds over half of the world's population, more people than any other single food can claim. In 2023, the world produced 800 million tonnes of it…
- PorkPork is the culinary name for the meat of Sus domesticus, the domestic pig, and it feeds more people than almost any other animal on Earth.
- Chicken as foodChicken is the most common type of poultry on Earth, and the second most consumed meat in the world. There were an estimated 19 billion chickens alive in…
- MeatMeat is animal tissue, mostly muscle, eaten as food, and three species alone supply nearly all of it. Between 2000 and 2023, chicken, pig, and cattle…
- Eggs as foodThe Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish work from late antiquity, makes a small and surprising claim. "A soft-boiled egg is better than six logs of farina," it…
- CheeseCheese is a dairy product made by coaxing the milk protein casein to clump together. Squeeze the curds, drain the watery whey, press the result, and you have…
- VegetableIn 1893, the United States Supreme Court sat down to answer a question most people think they already know: is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
- Ice creamIce cream is one of those things so ordinary it almost disappears from sight. You lick it, you finish it, you move on. But trace it back far enough and you…
- BreadBread is one of the oldest human-made foods, and the oldest evidence of it does not come from a kitchen. It comes from a 14,500-year-old Natufian site in the…
- BiscuitBiscuits were twice-cooked by design. The English word traces back through Old French bescuit to the Latin bis and coquere, meaning literally "cooked twice"…