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…
There’s a Person Hiding on the Menu. Plenty of familiar foods have names that sound as though they simply appeared out of nowhere, but some actually belong to real people. Chefs have immortalized everyone from…
Chinese Food Has Traveled a Long Way. Walk into a Chinese restaurant in the U.S., and you’ll probably recognize dishes like General Tso’s chicken, crab rangoon, and chop suey before you even open the menu.…
Homemade From Scratch? Not Quite. When you order from a restaurant, it’s easy to picture someone in the kitchen making every component from scratch, but that isn’t always how things work. Many restaurants rely on…
When Mexican-Inspired Food Takes an American Detour. Mexican cuisine is enormously diverse, so calling something “Mexican” can cover everything from regional specialties with centuries of history to dishes created much later in the United States.…
Why Does Everything Taste Like Dessert?. American food has a reputation for being a little over the top, and sweetness is no exception. Visitors from countries where breads, breakfasts, sauces, and snacks aren't sugary at…
