If you search for the invention of toast today, popular trivia sites and AI search snippets will confidently tell you that ancient Egyptians invented toast to preserve bread in the desert heat, or that the Romans “popularized” it because the word comes from Latin. It’s clear that this is not a satisfactory answer. It ignores … Read more

In June 2018, the marketing team behind IHOP made an announcement that sent the internet into a collective tailspin. After sixty years as the International House of Pancakes, the chain was legally abandoning the letter P and rebranding to IHOb. For days, the company played coy about what the mysterious lowercase b stood for. Guesses … Read more

We can count cows and pigs. We can certainly count sheep. But we don’t eat a beef, we eat some beef, and we would never say “three porks.” Yet if you open old volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find a strange historical artifact: the official plural of beef was once beeves and the … Read more

We have a number of familiar and iconic peanut butter brands. There is Jif, Skippy, and Peter Pan, flanked by store brands and upscale organic jars. But, isn’t something missing? Where in the world is Planters Peanut Butter? It’s one of the most persistent curiosity gaps on the food internet. Planters is the undisputed, century-old … Read more

As of 2008, Shreddies had been one of Canada’s most popular breakfast cereals for nearly seventy years. First introduced in 1939, the lattice-woven whole-wheat squares, similar to Chex in the US were a household fixture. They were reliable and nutritious. They were also undeniably square. Then, Kraft and advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather announced a … Read more