Snack on This Quiz About Food Origins

TV Dinners were first developed by Swanson after the company had a glut of leftover frozen turkey from Thanksgiving. Salesman Gerry Thomas suggested it be packaged up in aluminum trays with accompanying vegetables and marketed as a whole meal that could be heated in the oven. The new product appealed to the increasing numbers of working mothers who no longer had much time to cook.

Entrepreneur Momofuku Ando invented instant noodles after food shortages caused by WWII hit Japan hard. Ando wanted to develop a cheap and nutritious product based on traditional Japanese noodles. After months of work, he figured out that frying the noodles dried them out so they could be packaged and stored. Ando launched chicken-flavored ramen in 1958, heralding the start of a food phenomenon.

Today, supermarket shelves are stocked with a wide variety of tasty chip flavors, but before 1954, all chips were plain. That changed when Irish company Tayto developed a way to add flavoring to chips and launched the first flavor, cheese and onion, in 1954. The United States soon followed Tayto’s lead, and launched sour cream and onion and barbecue chip flavors.

The first cold breakfast cereals were launched in the 1860s as health foods, and in 1898 the Kellogg brothers launched Corn Flakes, leading the way to a huge breakfast cereal industry. In 1952, Kellogg’s launched Frosted Flakes, the same beloved Corn Flakes recipe but coated in sugar and marketed to children with a cartoon mascot, Tony the Tiger.

Many people lay claim to the cheeseburger, but what is certain is that it was Louis Ballast of the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In in Denver, Colorado, who trademarked the name in 1935. A burger with cheese first showed up on the menu at the Rite Spot in Pasadena, California, in 1924, but it was known as a “cheese hamburger.”

Austrian businessman Eduard Haas III invented PEZ candies in Vienna as an alternative to smoking. The first PEZ were peppermint flavored (the name comes from the German word for peppermint, "pfefferminz") and they came in tins. The famous sweet dispenser was introduced in 1949, and by 1957 the company had brought in the iconic character head; the first themed PEZ dispenser featured a Halloween witch.

After years of trying, Walter Diemer, a junior accountant working for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company, found that adding extra latex to the gum mixture meant it would stay soft enough to blow bubbles with. To make it more appealing, the company added the only available food color that day to the mixture: pink! Fleer launched the first commercial bubble gum, Dubble Bubble, in 1928, and it became an immediate bestseller.

The now-ubiquitous sandwich got its name in 18th-century England. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was so fond of gambling that he refused to leave the gaming table to eat. Instead, he asked the waiter to bring him a piece of meat inside two pieces of bread. This handy innovation soon caught on and was named in honor of the man who popularized it.

Frank and Ethel Mars invented the Milky Way in the 1920s, and after great success introduced Snickers in 1930. They owned a farm in Tennessee called Milky Way Farm and named the new product after their beloved pet horse. Due to the chocolate bar’s high calorie content, Snickers was marketed to athletes, and was known as “Marathon” in Europe until 1990.

The adage “the best thing since sliced bread” proves that this innovation made quite an impact when it was launched in 1928. Jeweler Otto Rohwedder invented the bread-slicing machine after finding that factory-baked bread was too soft to carve at home. His machine produced evenly sliced loaves and was an immediate hit. By 1930, sliced bread could be found in supermarkets all over the United States.