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Home --> Food --> Food Origins

Food Origins

We consume an amazingly wide variety of foods, and many of those foods (or their names) have colorful origins. Here we present a sampling of amusing tales about the births of some popular consumables.

Ratings Key

        Green bullet = true
        Red bullet = false
        Multiple status bullet = multiple truth values
        Yellow bullet = undetermined
        White bullet = unclassifiable veracity

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Green bullet Potato chips resulted from a cook's moment of pique.*

Green bullet Chop Suey is an American dish.

Red bullet The term hot dog was coined in the early 1900s by a cartoonist who couldn't spell "dachshund."*

Red bullet A choice cut of beef taken from the upper hindquarter (i.e., the loin) of a cow is called sirloin because an English king was once so delighted with his meal that he knighted the meat, dubbing it "Sir Loin."*

Red bullet Pumpernickel bread is so named because a Frenchman derisively declared it was fit only for his horse, Nicol. ("C'est du pain pour Nicol.")*

Red bullet German chocolate cake comes from Germany.*

Green bullet Graham crackers were named for a man who believed that unhealthy diets led to sexual excess.

Red bullet Caesar salad was invented by, or named for, Julius Caesar.

Green bullet Gatorade was invented by researchers at the University of Florida and named in honor of the Florida Gators, the school's football team.

Green bullet The "Luther Burger," a bacon cheeseburger served on a Krispy Kreme doughnut bun, is a real food named after R&B singer Luther Vandross.

Red bullet Fortune cookies come from China.

* Entries marked with an asterisk will display in a separate browser window.

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