Food: quotes, facts and reflections

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WonderLanguage

The word 'yogurt' comes from Turkish. English borrowed it from Ottoman Turkish in the early 1600s, and the gh in 'yoghurt' is an old way of spelling the Turkish ğ sound.

Turkish yoğurt is usually traced to an old root meaning to thicken or condense, from the same family as the verb yoğurmak, 'to knead'. Turkic peoples of Central Asia were eating it long before the word reached Europe: in the 11th century, Mahmud of Kashgar's dictionary of the Turkic languages and Yusuf Has Hajib's poem Kutadgu Bilig both mention it. English first recorded the word in 1625, from travellers' accounts of the Ottoman lands. Yogurt became an everyday food in Western Europe only in the 20th century; in 1919 Isaac Carasso began making it commercially in Barcelona under the name Danone. Today most European languages use the Turkish word, with small changes of spelling.

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WonderScience

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, dug into a mountain on a Norwegian Arctic island, stores duplicate seed samples from genebanks around the world. The original collections stay in use elsewhere; Svalbard is the safety copy.

A genebank keeps seeds of crop varieties and their wild relatives so that breeders and researchers can use them. The Svalbard vault opened on 26 February 2008 and is run jointly by the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen). The seeds are kept at about -18°C, and depositors keep ownership under a 'black box' system: only the institution that deposited a box can open or withdraw it. The backup has been needed. When the war in Syria cut off the main genebank of the international research centre ICARDA near Aleppo, ICARDA withdrew samples from Svalbard in 2015, and again in 2017, to rebuild its collection in Lebanon and Morocco. These remain the only withdrawals.

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WonderHistory

Chilli peppers were first domesticated in Mexico about 6,000 years ago and reached Europe, Africa and Asia only after Columbus, carried by Spanish and Portuguese ships from the 1490s.

Columbus brought chillies back to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493. Unlike black pepper, which Europe imported at great cost from India, chillies grew easily in many climates, so they spread fast. Portuguese traders carried them to Africa, India and South-East Asia in the 1500s, and they reached Korea around 1600; centuries later red pepper became central to kimchi. In Hungary, paprika was once called törökbors, meaning Turkish pepper, because it arrived by way of the Ottoman lands. The heat comes from capsaicin, which triggers pain sensors in mammals but not in birds. Birds swallow the seeds whole and spread them, while mammals, which crush seeds as they chew, are put off.

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StillnessScience

People used fermentation, the work of yeasts and bacteria, to raise bread, turn milk into yoghurt and cheese and preserve food for thousands of years before anyone knew microbes existed.

In fermentation, yeasts and bacteria break down sugars and give off acids, gases or alcohol. Yeasts, above all Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known as baker's or brewer's yeast, release the carbon dioxide that makes dough rise and the alcohol that turns fruit juice into wine. Lactic-acid bacteria sour milk into yoghurt and cabbage into sauerkraut or kimchi, and the acid keeps harmful microbes away. Residue on pottery from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in China shows a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit about 9,000 years ago. Many languages took the word yoghurt from Turkish. Only in the 1850s and 1860s did Louis Pasteur show that living microbes cause fermentation, work that led to pasteurisation.

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WonderHistory

The Ifugao Rice Terraces are mountain fields in the Philippines, carved into steep slopes to grow rice with shared water systems.

UNESCO inscribed the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras on the World Heritage List in 1995, the first site ever listed as a 'cultural landscape', meaning the fields and the farming culture that keeps them working are protected together. The listing covers five terrace clusters, including Batad and Bangaan in Banaue. Each cluster is topped by a muyong, a privately owned but communally managed forest that holds rainwater and feeds the irrigation channels below. Guidebooks often say the terraces are 2,000 years old, but radiocarbon dating by the Ifugao Archaeological Project suggests most were built about 400 years ago, around the time of Spanish contact. Their age is still debated.

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StillnessHistory

Kimjang is the Korean late-autumn tradition in which families and neighbours make kimchi, seasoned and fermented vegetables, in large batches to last the winter.

UNESCO added kimjang to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2013, recognising the shared practice rather than any single recipe. The work usually begins in November, when cabbages and radishes are harvested and the weather turns cold. Napa cabbages are split, salted overnight and rinsed, then rubbed with a paste of chilli flakes, garlic, ginger, spring onion and fish sauce or salted seafood. Families traditionally packed the kimchi into earthenware jars called onggi and buried them in the ground, where the steady cool kept it fermenting slowly through the winter. Because the job is heavy, relatives and neighbours take turns helping one another's households, and part of the kimchi is often shared with people who cannot make their own.

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StillnessHealth

The Mediterranean diet is not only olive oil and vegetables; UNESCO treats it as a culture of growing, cooking and eating together.

UNESCO first inscribed the Mediterranean diet on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2010 for Greece, Italy, Morocco and Spain, and in 2013 extended the listing to Cyprus, Croatia and Portugal. What it protects are skills and customs rather than nutrients: farming and fishing calendars, markets, preserving, cooking and eating together. The health interest came earlier, from the American physiologist Ancel Keys. His Seven Countries Study, begun in 1958, compared diet and heart disease across seven countries, and its results linked the low rates of heart disease in places such as Crete to meals built on olive oil, vegetables, grains, legumes and fish, with little meat.

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WonderHistory

The 'Three Sisters' are maize, beans and squash, planted together by Indigenous farmers of the Americas so that each crop helps the others grow.

All three crops were first domesticated in Mesoamerica, today's Mexico and Central America: squash about 10,000 years ago, then maize and beans over the following thousands of years. Growing them together later spread across much of North America. Each plant has a job. The maize stalk is a pole for the bean vine to climb; bacteria living in small lumps on the bean roots turn nitrogen from the air into a form plants can use, which enriches the soil; and the broad squash leaves shade the ground, keeping it moist and holding back weeds. Among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the north-east, the crops appear in stories as three sisters who thrive only together, and a modern experiment found that their traditional mixed planting produced more food energy and protein than any of the crops grown alone.

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DriveTechnology

Mumbai's dabbawalas carry home-cooked lunches to offices by suburban train every working day and bring the empty boxes back, guided by codes painted on each box instead of addresses.

A dabba is a lunchbox, and a dabbawala is 'one who carries a box'. The service began in 1890, when Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started delivering lunches in Bombay with about a hundred men, for office workers who had long journeys and wanted food from home. Today 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas move between 175,000 and 200,000 lunchboxes a day. Each box passes through several hands: it is collected from a kitchen, sorted at a station, carried by train, sorted again and delivered, using letters, numbers and colours painted on the lid. A famous claim says they make one mistake in six or eight million deliveries, but it came from a Forbes journalist's extrapolation from the association president's estimate of 'maybe once every two months', not from any audit.

Harvard Business School / RICSRead card

WonderScience

Toast, roasted coffee, fried onions and seared meat get their brown colour and rich smell from the Maillard reaction: heat makes sugars react with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, creating hundreds of new flavour compounds.

The reaction is named after the French chemist Louis-Camille Maillard, who described it in 1912 while trying to recreate how living things build proteins. Its importance for cooking became clear later: in 1953 the American chemist John E. Hodge set out its main chemical steps, showing how heat, moisture and time decide which aroma compounds form. It works best on dry surfaces above about 140°C, which is why meat is patted dry before searing and why boiled food does not brown. It is different from caramelisation, in which sugar breaks down on its own; the Maillard reaction needs amino acids too, so each food browns with its own flavour.

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WonderHistory

Amazonian dark earth, or terra preta, is an unusually fertile black soil made by people. Over generations, charcoal, broken pottery, bones and food waste built up around Indigenous settlements and turned thin rainforest soil rich.

Terra preta is Portuguese for 'black earth'. These soils formed between about 450 BCE and 950 CE at sites across the Amazon Basin, and in places the dark layer reaches one to two metres deep. Ordinary rainforest soil is poor, because heavy rain washes nutrients away, but charcoal barely breaks down and holds nutrients and water in place for centuries. Local farmers still use the soil today. It also changed how archaeologists see the Amazon: not as untouched wilderness, but as a landscape shaped by large, settled communities. Scientists now try to copy the method with 'biochar', charcoal made from farm waste and mixed into poor soils.

MIT / Amazonian dark earth researchRead card

DriveHealth

Oral rehydration solution, clean water with measured amounts of salts and sugar, treats the dangerous dehydration caused by diarrhoea. This simple drink has saved millions of lives, most of them children's.

It works because glucose and sodium are absorbed together in the small intestine, and water follows them into the body even during severe diarrhoea. The Indian physician Hemendra Nath Chatterjee reported treating mild cholera this way in The Lancet in 1953. In 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, intravenous fluid ran out in refugee camps in India; the physician Dilip Mahalanabis had families give an oral solution instead, and 3.6 per cent of those patients died, against about 30 per cent of those on drips. In 1978 The Lancet called the discovery behind it potentially the most important medical advance of the century, and in 1980 the WHO began a global programme to spread it. The mix must be measured, since too much salt can be harmful.

World Health Organization / UNICEFRead card

WonderFood

According to the popular story, the Popsicle ice lolly was invented in 1905 by 11-year-old Frank Epperson, who left a cup of soda powder and water outside overnight with the stirring stick in it and found it frozen by morning. He patented the idea in 1924 and first sold it as the 'Epsicle'.

Epperson's family told the story for decades, but food historians have raised doubts: weather records show no clear overnight freeze in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he grew up, in 1905, and fruit ices on a stick, such as the 'Hokey Pokey' sold in the 1870s, came earlier. What is well documented is the patent, granted in August 1924, for a frozen treat on a stick that could be eaten 'without contamination by contact with the hand'. His children called the treats 'Pop's 'sicles', and the name Popsicle stuck. Epperson later had to sell his rights during the Great Depression, and the brand grew under other owners.

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WonderScience

Saccharin, the oldest artificial sweetener, was discovered by accident in 1879, when chemist Constantin Fahlberg went to dinner without washing his hands and found that his bread tasted sweet. He traced the taste to a compound from his work on coal tar.

Fahlberg was working in Ira Remsen's chemistry laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. By his own later account, he went back and tasted what was in the vessels on his bench until he found the sweet one, benzoic sulfimide, something no laboratory would allow today. The two men published the discovery together in 1879 and 1880, but in 1884 Fahlberg patented it alone, named it saccharin and soon opened a factory in Germany. Remsen never forgave him. Saccharin is several hundred times sweeter than sugar and has no calories; it came into wide use during the sugar shortages of the First World War, and later among dieters. Aspartame and sucralose were also found when chemists tasted something by chance.

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WonderHistory

In 1814 a huge vat of porter, a dark beer, burst at the Horse Shoe Brewery in London. More than half a million litres of beer swept into the poor streets of St Giles, and eight people died.

The vat that failed stood 6.7 metres tall and could hold nearly three million litres. An iron hoop had slipped off it an hour earlier. When it burst, the rush knocked the tap off a second vat and smashed several barrels, and the wave brought down the brewery's back wall and flooded nearby houses and cellars where poor families lived. Among the dead were mourners at a child's wake and 14-year-old Eleanor Cooper, a servant at the Tavistock Arms pub. The inquest ruled the deaths accidental, in effect an act of God, so the brewery paid no compensation, and a refund of the duty it had paid on the lost beer saved it from ruin. The Dominion Theatre now stands on the site.

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WonderFood

The chocolate chip cookie was created in the 1930s by Ruth Wakefield at the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. The popular story says she expected chopped chocolate to melt into the dough and got chunks by accident, but that account is disputed.

Wakefield and her husband ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, a restaurant known for its desserts. She was no novice: she had trained in household arts, taught home economics and worked as a hospital dietitian. She later said she created the cookie on purpose, wanting something new to serve with ice cream in place of a popular butterscotch nut biscuit. The recipe appeared in a 1938 edition of her cookbook and soon on Nestlé's chocolate bars. She let Nestlé use the recipe and the Toll House name; the often-told payment of one dollar and a lifetime supply of chocolate is not firmly documented. In 1997 the chocolate chip cookie became the official state cookie of Massachusetts.

Food historyRead card

WonderFood

Corn flakes grew out of an accident in 1894, when the Kellogg brothers, who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, left a batch of boiled wheat standing. It went stale, and when rolled it broke into flakes instead of a sheet. Later they made the flakes from corn.

John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor, ran the sanitarium as a health resort built on a strict vegetarian diet, and his younger brother Will Keith managed its business. They were looking for an easily digested food for patients. Family members later told the story of the discovery in different ways, and who did what, including the part played by John's wife, Ella, is still disputed. The standing time had let moisture spread evenly through the grains, so each one pressed into a separate flake. Patients liked the flakes, and the brothers later switched to corn. They fell out when Will wanted to add sugar and sell to the public; in 1906 he founded the company that became Kellogg's, and he won the legal fight over the family name.

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StillnessLanguage

Sobremesa is the Spanish word for the time spent lingering and talking at the table after a meal, once the food is finished. In Spain it can last longer than the meal itself.

The word joins sobre (over, upon) and mesa (table): time spent 'over the table' once the plates are cleared. In Spain lunch is traditionally the main meal of the day, and a sobremesa of coffee, perhaps a small liqueur and conversation can stretch well into the afternoon, especially at weekends and family gatherings. The habit even shaped television: the after-lunch slot, known as la sobremesa, is one of Spanish TV's busiest viewing times. The same pairing of words names a desktop computer, an ordenador de sobremesa, one that sits on the table. English can describe the habit but has no single everyday word for it.

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WonderClimate

When Syria's civil war cut the agricultural research centre ICARDA off from its genebank near Aleppo, it turned to the backup seeds it had stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Arctic Norway. Those seeds were used to rebuild its collections in Lebanon and Morocco.

ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, kept one of the world's major collections of wheat, barley, lentil and other crop varieties at Tel Hadya, near Aleppo. A genebank stores seeds alive for plant breeders and researchers, and between 2008 and 2014 ICARDA sent duplicates of 116,484 samples to Svalbard. The vault, opened in 2008, is dug into a mountain on an Arctic island and keeps seeds frozen at about minus 18°C. ICARDA withdrew seeds in 2015, the first withdrawal in the vault's history, and again in 2017 and 2019, until every sample had come back. Once the seeds had been grown again in Lebanon and Morocco, fresh duplicates were returned to Svalbard.

Crop Trust / NordGenRead card

WonderTrade

The Columbian Exchange is the vast transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between the Americas and the rest of the world that followed Columbus's voyage of 1492. Potatoes, maize and tomatoes crossed the Atlantic eastwards; horses, wheat, smallpox and millions of enslaved Africans were carried west.

The historian Alfred W. Crosby gave the process its name in his 1972 book The Columbian Exchange. American crops changed diets across the Old World: potatoes helped Europe's population grow, maize became a staple in much of Africa, and chilli peppers reached India and Korea. In the other direction, horses transformed life on the North American plains, and cattle, sugar cane and wheat remade American landscapes. The heaviest cost fell on Indigenous Americans. Smallpox, measles and other diseases they had never met killed a large share of the population within decades, and the plantation economy that followed drove the forced transport of millions of enslaved Africans.

The Columbian ExchangeRead card

WonderEngineering

The Archimedes screw lifts water with a spiral blade turning inside a tilted tube: each turn traps a pocket of water and carries it upwards. Described more than 2,200 years ago, it is still used to irrigate fields, drain land and pump sewage.

Tradition credits the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse with the invention in the third century BC, but the credit is uncertain. Similar screws may already have been used in Egypt, and the historian Stephanie Dalley has argued that the Assyrian king Sennacherib watered his gardens at Nineveh with bronze screws in the seventh century BC. A famous early use comes from the Syracusia, a giant ship built for King Hiero II of Syracuse: according to an ancient account, one man could pump out the water that collected in its hull with a screw. Run in reverse, with falling water turning it, the same device now drives small hydroelectric plants.

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WonderArchitecture

Machu Picchu, a 15th-century Inca estate on a ridge high in the Peruvian Andes, stands on hundreds of stone terraces. They hold the steep soil in place, drain away heavy rain and gave the Inca room to grow crops.

It was built around 1450 as a royal estate for the Inca ruler Pachacuti, at about 2,430 metres. Much of its engineering is hidden: studies led by the hydrologist Kenneth Wright suggest that some 60 per cent of the construction lies underground, in foundations and layers of crushed stone that let the frequent heavy rain drain away instead of washing the slopes down. The site was never truly lost. Local Quechua farmers always knew it, and the Peruvian Agustín Lizárraga reached it in 1902. The American explorer Hiram Bingham made it world-famous in 1911. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1983.

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WonderFood

Fermentation is the work of yeasts and bacteria that feed on the sugars in food and turn them into acids, alcohol or gas. It gives us bread, yoghurt, cheese, wine and pickles, and it kept food safe to eat for thousands of years before refrigerators.

People fermented food long before they knew why it worked: residues in pottery jars from Jiahu in China show that a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit was made there about 9,000 years ago. For centuries fermentation was thought to be a purely chemical process. In the 1850s the French chemist Louis Pasteur showed that it is the work of living microorganisms, and that different microbes produce different results, some pleasant and some that spoil food. That insight led to pasteurisation, gentle heating to kill unwanted microbes, first used on wine in the 1860s and later on milk.

FermentationRead card

WonderFood

A sourdough starter is flour and water in which wild yeasts and lactic acid bacteria live together. The yeasts make the gas that raises the bread; the bacteria make the acids that give it its sour taste and help it keep longer.

Until commercial baker's yeast became common in the 19th century, much leavened bread was made this way, by keeping back a piece of each day's dough to start the next batch. In 1971 the US Department of Agriculture researchers Kline and Sugihara isolated the bacterium behind the famous sour taste of San Francisco bread, later named Fructilactobacillus sanfranciscensis; it has since been found in starters all over the world. It lives beside a yeast that cannot use maltose, the sugar the bacterium prefers, so the two share the dough without competing. Temperature and how often the starter is fed decide which microbes gain the upper hand, and so how sour the bread turns out.

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