Curated playlist
Types of food
- FruitSeed-bearing part of a flowering plant
- RiceCereal grain and staple food
- 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. By 2017, half of all the pork consumed in the world was eaten in a single country: China. That…
- 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 2011 alone, more than two for every person on the planet. That staggering abundance…
- 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 accounted for close to 90 percent of global production. In 2023, the world made 370…
- 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 states. That single line treats the egg not as a humble breakfast item but as something…
- 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 something that outlives the milk it came from. Over a thousand types exist across…
- 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? In the case of Nix v. Hedden, the justices ruled unanimously that a tomato is a vegetable, and…
- 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 find a Persian record from 550 BC, Mughal horsemen racing ice down from the Hindu…
- 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 northeastern desert of Jordan. Older still, in Europe and Australia, rocks dating…
- SushiSushi began, by one well known account, in a shop in Ryōgoku in 1824. A chef named Hanaya Yohei pressed vinegared rice into an oval by hand and draped a piece of seafood over the top. He called it nigiri-zushi. In Edo, the city now known…
- 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": first baked, then dried in a slow oven to drive out every trace of moisture. That…
- PizzaPizza turned into a $128 billion global business by 2017, and that same year 76,000 pizzerias in the United States split $44 billion of it. On any given day, about 13 percent of Americans eat it. Nobody planned for a flatbread topped with…