CONTENTS Fun with Food 4 The Story of the Spork 6 Unusual Utensils 8 The Wily Wizard 10 Absurd Appliances 12 Egg-citing 14 Such Strange Shapes 16 Print It Eat It 18 Vending It All 20 The Terror of the Dinner Party 22 Spam I Am 24 Fried Everything 26 Into the Weird Future 28 Glossary 30 For More Information 31 Index 32 Words in the glossary appear in bold type the first time they are used in the text
FUN WITH FOOD Every human on the planet has this in Inventions have been very important common We all need to eat From something as simple as a banana to as complicated as the fanciest wedding cake we eat lots of different things And people keep coming up with new foods to eat and new ways to eat them to the history of food Without refrigeration people couldn’t preserve foods to eat later Without ovens or stoves we couldn’t cook meat And without mills of various kinds we wouldn’t be able to make flour and thus bread or cake or cookies invention that changes the way we eat forever there are dozens that don’t work out quite as well You might even say that they’re well weird Wacky Wonders One popular treat definitely wouldn’t exist without the refrigerator the Popsicle Eleven-year-old Frank Epperson invented this frozen treat in 1905 But for every 4
Refrigerators today are a lot fancier than they were when first invented Some refrigerators today can even connect to the internet MAKING FOOD COOL In 2012 the Royal Society of the United Kingdom came up with a list of the 20 most important inventions in the history of food and drink Refrigeration was at the top of the list People first invented artificial refrigerators in the mid-1700s and first produced them for sale in 1805 There were also much older inventions on the list including the fishing net and the plow People have used these things since the Stone Age 5
