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Ganna Martysheva / Shuttterstock The Remarkable Versatility of Tonic Water
How an antimalarial medicine became a cocktail sensation
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Gene J. Puskar / AP McDonald’s Is Inescapable
How did a tiny teen hangout become one of the world’s most ubiquitous sources of food?
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Robert F. Bukaty / AP A Menu of Invasive Species
One approach to dealing with unwanted plants and animals: Eat them.
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Aleksandar Mijatovic / shutterstock How the Kiwi Queen Transformed America’s Supermarkets
Seventy years ago, most Americans had never heard of sugar snap peas or spaghetti squash or passion fruit. What changed?
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Brian Yarvin / Getty The Fermented Food That Made It Big
How a staple of Korean cuisine became a flavor at California Pizza Kitchen
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Susan Wood / Getty The Behavioral Economics of Restaurant Menus
Subtle tweaks in pricing and design can nudge diners toward more expensive meals.
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Bettmann / Getty Images The Most Delicious Foods That No Longer Exist
Humans have eaten thousands of species into extinction. Some, supposedly, were to die for.
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Eric Risberg / AP The Rise and Fall and Rise of the American Tiki Bar
Kitschy faux-Polynesian drinks have made a dramatic comeback, and it began with one man’s fixation on Don the Beachcomber.
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Aris Messinis / Getty The Yogurt Industry Has Been Using CRISPR for a Decade
Long before there were CRISPR babies, there was CRISPR dairy.
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Omar Torres / Getty The Colonial Origins of Mexico’s National Dish
How indigenous tradition, Old World ingredients, Islamic cuisine, and a convent combined to make mole a staple
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Mike Blake / Reuters Almost All American Strawberries Are Grown With Toxic Chemicals
For a century, the industry has used fumigants to farm berries year-round.
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Robert F. Bukaty / AP The Fishy Science of Omega-3s
Twenty thousand papers later, researchers are still debating whether the fatty acid is all it’s cracked up to be.
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Thierry Roge / Reuters Will Food Delivery Ruin the Perfect French Fry?
Researchers have spent years looking for ways to prevent flawlessly crispy potatoes from going soggy in transit.
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Jorge Lopez / Reuters Medicine’s First, Gruesome Window on Digestion
In 1822, a surgeon encountered a patient with a bullet hole in his stomach—and spent more than a decade looking through it.
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Margoe Edwards / Shutterstock The Essential Ingredient That Makes Pudding, Pudding
The canonical British dish has lost some of its bloodier associations through the centuries, but some things have stayed consistent.
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Thomas White / Reuters Plants Might Thrive Better Than Humans in Space
From algae to lettuce, agriculture has already shown promise out of orbit.
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Simon Dawson / Reuters The Word Curry Came From a Colonial Misunderstanding
No Indian language uses the term, and the closest-sounding words usually just mean “sauce.”
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Stan Honda / Getty Bagels Weren't Always Soft
The earliest versions of the classic carb circles might have been more like hard pretzels, and entirely unsliceable.
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Seth Wenig / AP The High-Stakes Allure of an Anti-Alzheimer’s Diet
A $20 million study seeks to answer a vital question: What should people eat to protect their brain?
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Lee Reich / AP The Tropical Fruit That Could Have Been an All-American Favorite
How the pawpaw fell from grace
