Immigration Gave Familiar Foods a Whole New Identity. The U.S. has always borrowed heavily from the cuisines brought over by immigrants, but those dishes rarely stayed the same once they arrived. Ingredients were more plentiful,…
What’s Old Is Suddenly on the Menu Again. Food trends have a funny way of circling back, and Gen Z has been particularly willing to dig through the culinary past for inspiration. Thanks to TikTok,…
From Fancy to Everyday Foods. Some restaurant dishes used to come with a certain amount of luxury attached to them. You ordered them for anniversaries, business dinners, or nights when everyone actually bothered to dress…
Restaurant Menus Can Hide a Lot of Salt. Eating out doesn't automatically mean throwing healthy habits aside, but restaurant food can contain much more sodium than you'd expect. Sauces, cheese, cured meats, seasoning, broths, and…
The Snacks & Meals That Defined a Childhood. Millennials grew up during a strange time for food, when lunchboxes were packed with aggressively colorful snacks, microwaves handled a surprising amount of dinner, and nobody thought…
Delicious Food, Terrible Branding. Some foods have names that do absolutely nothing to help their case. You can know perfectly well that a dish is delicious and still hesitate when someone offers you something called…
Geography Isn’t Always on the Menu. Food names can sound surprisingly authoritative about where something came from, even when the history tells a completely different story. Sometimes a place name was chosen for marketing, sometimes…
When Dinner Started Getting a Little Easier. Long before meal-delivery apps and microwave bowls, Americans were already looking for ways to get food on the table with less work. The 20th century brought an explosion…
Dinner Wasn't Always This Relaxed. A lot of foods that are now commonplace were once assumed dangerous. Sometimes people feared them because they resembled poisonous plants, were blamed for diseases nobody understood yet, or simply…
