Food Non-Fiction

Food Non-Fiction tells the incredible true stories behind food. We delve deep into the history and fascinating facts about the most famous and interesting foods. We look forward to taking you on this wild food journey, through history, and around the world.

#73 Ignacio Nicknamed Nacho 10/21/2020

#72 When Impossible Burgers Became Possible 04/14/2020

#71 Pass the Tofurky 05/20/2019

#70 Craft Beer Beginnings 12/24/2018

#69 The Oreo Story 08/24/2018

#68 Kombucha: The Tea of Immortality 06/18/2018

#67 Nutella Since Napoleon 12/31/2017

#66 The Monastery Breweries 11/01/2017

#65 And This Led to Corn Flakes 07/31/2017

#64 How Fondue Became Popular 07/02/2017

#63 Tony the Tiger 05/22/2017

#62 - The Palace Kitchen 03/06/2017

#61 - Turnspit Dogs 01/29/2017

#60 The Carrot Myth 12/01/2016

#59 Trick Or Treat! 10/31/2016

#58 All Your Favorite Chocolates 10/12/2016

#58 All Your Favorite Chocolates Inspired by the book, "Chocolate Wars", by Deborah Cadbury, today we're telling you the incredible true story of how how the biggest chocolate companies in the world fought for our tummies and tastebuds through innovation after innovation that eventually turned cocoa products from a drink, to an edible chocolate, to a milk chocolate powder, and finally, to our beloved milk chocolate bar. In the 1860s/70s cadbury experimented with and successfully created the first mass-manufactured chocolate bar. Milk chocolate bars did not yet exist at this time, so it would have been a plain dark chocolate bar. This was a big breakthrough. The fact that these bars could be mass-produced meant that they could be cheaper...more affordable, so more people could buy it and try it. By the 1890s, everyone in Britain was buying cocoa products - it was no longer just an exotic treat for the rich. In the decade from 1890 to 1900, the amount of cocoa consumed in Britain was doubled. Over in Switzerland, around the same time that Cadbury had managed to mass-produce their plain chocolate bar, Daniel Peter was working on making the world’s first milk chocolate powder. We know that Daniel Peter happened to be neighbors with Henri Nestlé of Nestle fame. And according to one story, Daniel had a baby daughter, named Rose, who wouldn’t take breast milk. So he asked his neighbor Henri for help, because he had just started selling a powdered milk developed for babies. So baby Rose was saved, because she could drink Nestlé’s powdered milk. At the same time her father, Daniel, got the idea to use the powdered milk to create a milk chocolate powder, which of course did not exist at the time. Although, people were already drinking cocoa powder with milk, so they would have been familiar with the flavor. In 1875, Daniel su cceeded in making the world’s first milk chocolate powder - it was called “Chocolats au Lait Gala Peter”. It was a success. He thought about making his drink into a chocolate bar...a milk chocolate bar. After years of working to create a milk chocolate bar, Daniel finally created one he could sell - he called it “Gala Peter”. The year was 1886. Elsewhere in Switzerland, at around the same time, another important chocolate innovation was happening. Rodolphe Lindt, of Lindt chocolate fame, created a much smoother chocolate after pressing the beans for longer than the norm. He experimented with different temperatures and timings to get as much cocoa butter folded into his mix as possible. This created a delicious melt-in-your-mouth chocolate. (Even today Lindt chocolates are known to be silky smooth.) He invented a machine called “a conch” because it looked like a conch shell. Chocolate bars used to be hard and gritty, but now they could be softer and smoother. So what we’re seeing at this time is more and more people getting into the business of cocoa, and working hard and innovating to get ahead. Now, back in Britain, Cadbury’s innovations made them very successful. As Quakers, George and Richard Cadbury wanted to use their money to create an ideal place for their employees to work. In 1878, they bought the idyllic land for their model factory that would be surrounded by nature. The factory was a manufacturing marvel. It was built to be one-storey tall, so that goods would not have to go up and down stairs. And they built cottages and gardens around it with spaces to play sports or relax. They called the model Town Bournville, and Bournville would be the inspiration for model towns to come. Including, the town of Hershey, which we’ve done an episode on. At around this time in the 1870s, young Milton Hershey was still in Philadelphia trying to make his candy shop successful. In England at that time the Quaker-led chocolate companies dominated. The 3 Quaker companies, Fry, Cadbury and Rowntree were all powerhouses. But they were all being threatened by European competition. You can imagine it must have been hard to compete with Lindt’s smooth chocolate and Peter’s milk chocolate coming out of Switzerland. So the Quaker firms discussed pricing and advertising with one another, essentially working together not to destroy each other. Cadbury had to figure out how to make a product that could compete with Swiss chocolate. After a trip to Switzerland and much experimentation, George Jr. created a chocolate bar you may have heard of - it was Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and it launched way back in 1905. That means Dairy Milk has been around for over one hundred years. The first world war really leveled out the chocolate playing field. The big British Quaker companies, including Cadbury, had to withdraw their best products. The Swiss, including Nestle, were very impacted because their home market was small and they had relied on selling across Europe and abroad, but exporting became dangerous. The solution was to borrow a ton of money and invest in companies overseas. In America, Hershey was not affected by the first world war. And soon after the war, another chocolate contender surfaced in America alongside Hershey. It was Mars, which used to be called the Mar-O-Bar Company. The countline that was created was the Milky Way which launched in 1924 and made Frank Mars’s Mar-O-Bar Company a success. Frank Mars and his son Forrest Mars built a new factory and went on to launch Snickers and 3 Musketeers bars. In 1933, the father and son had a fight over how to run the business. After WWI, cadbury had to worry about competition from foreign companies like Nestle again. They had become more efficient after experiencing war-time rationing, and they knew they needed to use their efficiency to make and sell products more cheaply. They also knew that they needed to make fewer types of chocolate and focus on mass producing key products. Soon after WWI they launched Flake (1920), Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bar (1926) which I love, and the original cream-filled chocolate egg (1923) which would eventually become today’s iconic Cadbury Creme Egg (1963). Like Cadbury, the other chocolate companies rolled out fantastic new chocolate bars in the post-WW1 period. In the 1930s Forrest Mars came out with Maltesers. Then Rowntree came out with tons of innovations like - Chocolate Crisp (which was eventually named Kit Kat), and also Aero, and Smarties. Eventually, Cadbury went public And then Cadbury was taken over by Kraft, which I just learned is now called Mondelez International Thank You to Our Interviewee: Thank You to Looperman Artists: Guitars Unlimited - Reaching Home 1 by MINOR2GO Melody 126 Beats by Purge /episode/index/show/foodnonfiction/id/4739339

#57 What Came First - the Cadbury or the Egg 09/01/2016

#56 Waffle Frolic 08/10/2016

#55 The Sriracha Story 07/26/2016

BONUS Ep - Interview with Kyleena 07/15/2016

#54 Vending Machines - Past to Present 06/23/2016

#54 Vending Machines - Past to Present This episode is about vending machines. The first reference to a vending machine is from the 1st century AD in Egypt. The reference is in a book called “Pneumatika”, written by Hero of Alexandria. In it, there is a detailed description and a picture of a device, which dispensed water when you put in a five-drachma coin. This was invented for dispensing equal amounts of sacrificial water at Egyptian temples. This was a source of money for the Egyptian temples, and it also made sure everyone got the same amount of holy water. Here is how it worked: Imagine a teeter totter. When a coin was dropped into the holy water dispenser, it fell on one end of the teeter totter, causing the other end to lift up, also opening a little exit which let the holy water out. As the teeter totter moved down on the side with the coin, the coin eventually fell off. Once the coin fell, the teeter totter reset and the water exit closed. Unfortunately, one of these devices has never been found, so we don’t know if this was just a design concept or if it was actually used. In fact, we’re not even sure who invented it. It’s possible that the author of the book, Hero of Alexandria, invented it. It’s also possible that one of his predecessors, Ctesibius, invented it. After that, it wasn’t until the 1600s that more vending machines were introduced to the world. Around 1615, you could get tobacco from coin operated devices in English taverns and inns. Here’s how the tobacco device worked: When you put your coin in, it pressed a trigger that popped open the lid. These were very crude vending machines. After each use, you had to manually close it again. And you also had to watch to make sure people didn’t take everything in the box, because when the lid was open, you could just take all the tobacco. The next version of vending machines also appeared in England. Richard Carlile was a publisher and a bookseller who believed in freedom of the press. He had been arrested for selling political texts, so in 1822 he created a book vending machine, hoping to avoid more legal charges that way - because it would be the machine selling the books, not him. Anyhow, the courts did not agree with that logic, and he was still held responsible for selling the books. Moving on to 1857, we get the first patent for a fully automatic vending machine. It was called “A Self Acting Machine for the Delivery of Postage and Receipt Stamps”. That didn’t take off either. Finally, in England, 1883, we get a more successful vending machine. That year, Percival Everitt got his patent for a vending machine which dispensed postcards. With that vending machine, people could finally buy postcards when shops were closed. In 1888, the Adams Gum Company installed vending machines on the platforms of rail stations in New York. These vending machines were designed to sell Tutti-Frutti gum, and inspired the creation of more vending machines that sold small snacks like candy and peanuts. Gum was a great product to sell because it was cheap, it lasted a long time, and they came with no health concerns. Gum can also take a good amount of abuse. You can drop it without it breaking it, and it doesn’t melt when it gets hot out - the way chocolate bars do - so quality control was not an issue. In 1911, many of the big players in the vending machine business started to merge together to become the Autosales Gum and Chocolate Company. This company combined the major players in the chewing gum business, together holding 250 names and brands, and the major players in the vending machine making business, together controlling many patents and wide distribution. The idea behind the Autosales Gum and Chocolate Company was that their vending machines would sell small versions of the goods they wanted people to buy over the counter. The vending machines were a way to market the goods. But vending machines still had a long way to go before becoming the $43 billion industry it is today. The vending machine industry has been plagued with bad behaviour since the start. People abuse the machines. People hit vending machines when they don’t get their purchased item, they plug the coin slots with random objects for fun, drunk people pour beer into the coin slot, and people also use other objects to mimic coins - these mimics are called “slugs”. Slugs were a really big problem, especially in the early 1900s when vending machines were not great at identifying fake coins. In the 1940s vending machines improved their system for checking for slugs. Coins went through multiple tests before they were accepted by the machines. First, the vending machines would test the size of the coin. Then they tested for iron and steel with a magnet - if the coin was magnetic, it would be returned. Then the coin was tested for the proper weight. Then the coin was tested with metallurgy to check for the right composition (for example foreign currency was sometimes used and this test would uncover that). Real coins passed these 4 tests within a fraction of a second. Vending machines really took off in the post-WWII period. They were a convenient way to feed the workers in the factories. Factories also earned commission from vending machine sales. Over time, the technology became more sophisticated. Today, machines are great at detecting fake money, operators can monitor the machines remotely, sensors and machine-learning reduce the energy usage by turning off things like the lighting when there are no customers, and machines can take credit cards. The next step for the vending machine industry is to make vending machines a destination, rather than a last resort. Touch screen video displays and other interactive features are being added that are making vending machines much more fun. Thank you to our Interviewees: Tim Sanford - Editor-in-Chief of Vending Times Dr. Michael Kasavana - National Automatic Merchandising Association Endowed Professor Thanks to Looperman Artists for the Music: happily ever after strings perfect for movie score by nbeats26 Whats Goin Down by rasputin1963 Strings Universal - RIP Old Friend by MINOR2GO Funky Guitar by Neems 1 by Neems /episode/index/show/foodnonfiction/id/4465846