It was a change in the table knife that put forks at every place—and forever separated how Americans and European eat. Cardinal Richelieu of France supposedly was so disgusted by a frequent dinner guest’s habit of picking his teeth with his knife that he had the tip of the man’s […]

Although canned food was first produced commercially in 1810, almost another half a century passed before hungry folks had an easy way to open those cans. Peter Durand, the British merchant who first patented the idea of preserving food in cans, showed surprisingly little interest in how consumers could extract […]