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
I have a confession painful confession to make for a food historian. I never got to try Koogle. Growing up in Mississippi, it wasn’t available. I never saw its trippy, many-eyed mascot on a grocery shelf, and I never got to experience what a generation of 1970s kids remember as the ultimate Saturday morning cartoon … Read more
If you grew up in the late twentieth century, the phrase “Weaver Batter Dipped Fried Chicken” likely triggers an immediate sensory flashback. For decades, it was the gold standard of the frozen food aisle, yielding a shattered, deeply crunched, golden crust that actual breaded nuggets or uniform frozen patties simply couldn’t replicate. Today, with the … Read more
A highly predictable, cliché trope dominates digital historical media. It usually begins with a dramatic thought experiment: “Imagine a world without pizza, burgers, or salsa.” This hook is invariably followed by a sensationalized warning that the humble tomato “almost didn’t make it” to the modern era, surviving only by the skin of its teeth against … Read more
The Quarter-Inch Fallacy: Potato Frying History vs. Pop History A dominant trend in popular digital food history involves unearthing an early 19th-century cookbook, reproducing a single recipe on camera, and triumphantly declaring a historical origin story ‘debunked.’ A prime example is “The Fake (and real) History of Potato Chips”, which uses William Kitchiner’s 1817 text, … Read more