A Food Is Born

If you want that information and a whole lot more keep reading.

Ketchup

The Chinese invented it in the 1600's. Over there it was a mixture of pickled fish and spices . but no tomatoes. By the early 1700's it had spread to Malaysia where it was first encountered by British explorers. By 1740 the sauce was a British staple and was renamed Ketchup. However it wasn't until the 1790's that New England colonists first mixed tomatoes into the sauce and modern day ketchup was born. The reason why it took so long for tomatoes to be added to the mix was the simple fact that a lot of people believed tomatoes were poisonous.

Making tomato ketchup at home is a tedious all day project and American housewives hated the process. So when Henry J. Heinz intorduced bottled ketchup in 1875 he promoted it as a labor saving device. His first slogan was " Blessed Relief for Mother and other women of the household " By the 1980s Heinz Ketchup was in one of every two American households.

Wheaties

Wheaties was invented in the 1920s by a Minneapolis health spa owner who fed his patients homemade bran gruel to keep them regular and help them lose weight. One day he dropped some on the stove and it hardened into a crust. He was going to throw it out but he tasted it first and to his surprise the flakes he scraped off the stove were better than what was in the pot. He made more and showed them to a friend at the Washburn Crosby Company which later became the General Mills Company. People at the company liked the flakes to but did not like the way they crumbled. So they came up with a better flake using wheat. Then they held a company wide contest to name the new product. Jane Bausman the wife of a company executive suggested Wheaties and the rest is history.

The first Bubble Gum was invented by Frank Fleer in 1906 , but never made it to market. It was unfortuntly so sticky that the only way it could be removed from skin was with vigorous scrubbing and terpentine. It took Fleer over 20 years to fix the recipe. In 1928 the new and improved gum was intorduced as Dubble Bubble Gum. Fleer made it pink because pink just happened to be the only food coloring on the shelf the day the first commercial batch of Dubble Bubble Gum was made. When his gum became the most popular penny candy on the market other companys copied it including the pink color. Today pink is the standard color for Bubble Gum and the rest is history.

In 1912 , a Cleveland candy maker named Clarence Crane decided to make a mint to sell in the summer. Until then most mints were imported from Europe. Crane figured he could cut the price by making them in the USA. He had the candy manufactored by a pill maker who discovered their eguipment would only work if it punched a hole in the center of each candy and that is how lifesavers were born.

Invented in 1931 by James Dewar , manager of Continental Bakeries Chicago Factory. He envisioned the product as a way to use the company's thousands of shortcake pans. The cakes were originally called little shortcake fingers but during a business trip Dewar and a friend noticed a shoe factory sign that said " Home of Twinkle Toe Shoes " Dewar had been looking for a new name for his product and his friend suggested he call it " Twinklr Fingers " which was shortened to " Twinkies " so it would fit on the box easier.

The Twinkie Controversy

In 1979 a San Francisco employee named Dan White went on a rampage and killed two important politicians , Mayor Goeorge Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in City Hall. His case seemed indefensible but his attorney Douglas Schmidt came up with what came to be called the Twinkie Defense. He blamed what his client had done on junk food specifically Twinkies. Psychiatrist Martin Binder testified that White had eaten too many Twinkies and their high sugar content cause White to have a diminished mental capacity. It all sounded preposterous but to the shock of the grieving city bought this explanation and convicted White of voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. In San Francisco people still refer to this as the Twinkie Defense.