Have you ever grown your own food and ate it? Getting free food out of the ground is pretty cool. It almost feels like stealing. Killing your food and eating it is like hitting that up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, SELECT, START and getting thirty free lives (Don’t act like you didn’t hit SELECT, because nobody plays Contra solo). This is an appropriate illustration because in the old days if you didn’t grow or kill your own food you were going to die. Most people don’t think about it, but considering people were measuring portions before they were measuring time, and the only reason they started measuring time was to plan growing food; the history of food is pretty fucking cool.

Michelin Stars

Before 1885, if you wanted to fuck a stranger off Craigslist you had to spend half an hour saddling the horses and hitching up the carriage; unless you were poor, in which case you had to walk and hope your hookup didn’t mind sweaty balls. If there weren’t any tranny hookers in your town you were just shit out of luck. The invention of the automobile changed all that.

Unfortunately, the internet wouldn’t be invented for a few hundred more years so people who purchased automobiles didn’t really know what to do with them other than taking it around the block a few times to make the neighbors jealous. This posed a serious problem for Edouard and Andre Michelin, who were hoping to tap into the budding automobile industry with their revolutionary inflatable tire. You don’t have to buy new tires if you don’t wear out the old ones first. In 1900, the brothers came up with the idea to make a travel guide for motorists to let them know there was something over that next hill worth driving to, hopefully with a lot of potholes along the way.

They printed up 35,000 copies of The Michelin Guide and gave them away for free. They handed out free Michelin guides for 20 years until Andre saw a mechanic using a stack of them to prop up his workbench. He was like, “This is why we don’t have nice things. We’re charging $2 for these motherfuckers from now on.” Interestingly, the guides were taken more seriously once people had to pay for them. Shit kind of spiraled out of control over the next hundred years and now that’s why people look to a tire company to tell them where to find the best plate of spotted dick.

The First Restaurants

Restaurants haven’t always existed, aside from maybe some guy on a street corner selling sausage in a bun. There were coffee houses (or Cafes) in Constantinople in the 1550’s that would sell you an overpriced Panini and a cup of coffee while you pretended to write your novel on a borrowed MacBook, but everyone could see the reflection on the window and knew you were looking at midget porn. The French stole the idea while invading Constantinople, but the Aristocracy heavily regulated the food industry to the point where, aside from making badass meals for rich people, chefs could only sell some meat to peasants who were too weak to work so they could get some protein and get back to being slaves. The French word for restore is “Restaurer,” which evolved into “restaurant.”

In 1789 the French Revolution kicked off and people just lost their heads…because they got chopped off. French chefs who catered to the noble assholes were out of work, but more importantly, the assholes who told them who they could and couldn’t cook for, weren’t in charge any more... because they got their fucking heads chopped off. The whole point of the French Revolution was everyone was starving to death so out of work chefs were in an awesome position to capitalize on their skills. Also, despite hating the aristocracy to the point of murdering them, poor people still wanted to feel fancy. So, French chefs started feeding people food on plates instead of the communal pot of slop they were used to and that is why Taco Bell exists today.

Tea Bags

Long before tea bags were synonymous with dropping your ball sack into someone’s mouth, tea bags were actual little bags of tea, and before that, making tea meant you just boiled up some water full of leaves and shit and hoped you didn’t choke on them. The Chinese were packaging tea in hand stitched paper sachets as far back as the 8th century, but the tea bag as we know it today came about as an accident. In 1903 tea importer Thomas Sullivan thought he’d be all fancy and package his tea in little silk baggies. Since people are fucking stupid they just threw the bags in boiling water. Thankfully silk doesn’t have asbestos in it and the tea bags actually worked great for making tea you don’t choke on. Sullivan started getting flooded with requests for his marvelous tea making invention. He was all like, “Yeah, that’s totally what I intended. I’ll sell you them shits all day long.”

Edward Bernays

Sigmund Freud pioneered the idea that your brain is thinking about shit you don’t even know you’re thinking about. His nephew Edward pioneered the idea of tricking that part of your brain into making you buy shit you don’t need.

The pork industry was having a hard time selling the disgusting scraps of shit leftover after getting all the good pieces off of a pig so they went to Edward for help. He said, “I got you fam,” and launched an aggressive ad campaign telling everyone the all American breakfast was eggs and bacon, even though it wasn’t. And that is why Denny's exists today.

In 1952 Betty Crocker couldn’t understand why people weren’t buying their cool ass new instant cake mix. Bernays invented focus groups and interviewed The Real House Wives of Pleasantville. It turns out back then it was actually a point of pride for women to have a good home cooked meal waiting for her husband after he got home from busting his ass at work all day instead of meeting him at the door bitching about beard hairs in the sink, while her side of the bathroom looks like a dumptruck full of Mary Kay products took a shit on it. Anyway…Bernays told Betty Crocker to change the directions to include adding an egg. Women felt more invested in the cooking process and instant cake mix started selling like hotcakes.

He also convinced women they should start smoking cigarettes by paying famous socialites to smoke in public and be photographed. Then he ran an ad campaign calling cigarettes “Torches of Freedom.”

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5