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
THE STORY OF THE SPORK One tale about the invention of the spork (cid:127) People use different utensils or tools to eat their food These may vary from place to place Sometimes inventors decide we need new ways to eat however and the results can be pretty wacky involves Douglas MacArthur a US general who was stationed in Japan in the 1940s after World War II The story says that MacArthur thought prisoners might use forks to attack guards and escape so he invented the spork a legend however People used the spork well before this A man named Samuel W Francis first patented the idea in 1874 Francis was quite an inventor He also created a typewriter that looked like a piano and a self-opening coffin Wacky Wonders A spork is a combination spoon and fork It has a bowl like a spoon but tines like a fork The word first appeared in 1909 and people still use sporks today but they don’t really work very well This story is just 6
BY ANY OTHER NAME Sporks aren’t the only weird combination utensil out there Australian William MacArthur no relation to Douglas MacArthur created the Splayd in 1943 This utensil is a combination spoon fork and knife It’s still popular in Australia where people have purchased more than 5 million of the tools Inventors have also created knorks a fork with a cutting edge spifes a spoon with a handle that can cut fruit and chorks a combination of a fork and chopsticks SPLAYD A US company registered a trademark for the name Spork in 1970 This means it had the right to use the name to sell its products SPORK 7
