Modern corporations possess a deep, pathological tendency to construct post-hoc historical narratives designed to make their purely profit-driven decisions look benevolent. When an aggressive, extractive strategy successfully inflates the bottom line, corporate PR networks don’t want the public looking at the cold financial engineering under the hood. A pristine, textbook example of this scientific whitewashing … Read more

The Texture Lie: Why Your Can of Potted Meat Isn’t Underwood Deviled Ham If you search the internet for the origin of the canned “Potted Meat Food Product” sitting on the bottom shelf of your local grocery store, you will run headfirst into a ubiquitous, lazy piece of copy-pasted food history. Dozens of trivia sites … Read more

If you consult the standard bibles of American food history, the story of commercial ketchup is treated as a single-player game. Elite reference texts and mass-market culinary historians routinely dismiss the entire competitive landscape with a lazy, one-sentence afterthought: “Other early companies that produced ketchup included Hunt’s and Del Monte.” By treating Heinz’s absolute market … Read more

The late 1960s and early 1970s marked an era where American corporations could successfully sell suburban parents virtually anything, provided it was wrapped in a shiny foil space suit or blessed with a casual nod from NASA. If it was high-tech enough to keep an Apollo astronaut alive during a lunar orbit, it was deemed … Read more

If you search for the history of Kraft’s short-lived 1970s peanut spread, the internet will hand you a definitive, dramatic conclusion: Koogle was discontinued because a scathing 1975 Consumer Reports investigation exposed it as a sugary junk food that was only 60% peanuts, breaking the hearts of a generation of health-conscious parents. While this watchdog … Read more