Every food has a backstory. Most of the ones we got told are wrong.
Not lying-wrong, usually. Story-wrong. Stories travel faster than facts, and the version that travels is the version that wins. Someone decides. The decision calcifies. The origin disappears, or gets sanded down, or gets handed to whoever had better marketing. By the time the dish reaches your table, the version everyone agreed to tell is often a different thing entirely from the actual history.
This series is about what got lost in the transmission.
Three kinds of loss
Not every post announces which kind it is, but the categories shape what I’m doing.
Forgotten by accident. Things displaced by something that won for practical reasons. No conspiracy; the market decided and the memory went with it. The Gros Michel banana wiped out by disease and replaced by the Cavendish. The American lobster that used to be trash food. The original Caesar salad that didn’t have anchovies. These are the lighter posts.
Distorted for marketing. Someone invented a better story and the better story won. Dom Pérignon spent his career trying to get the bubbles OUT of wine. The Spanish have a legitimate claim to crème brûlée. The French have better marketing. These are the medium posts; pointed, playful, with teeth.
Suppressed out of fear or prejudice. Active erasure. Someone benefited from the suppression. MSG and what got called “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” from a single letter to a medical journal in 1968. Edmond Albius, twelve years old and enslaved on Réunion, who figured out how to hand-pollinate vanilla orchids and made every bean grown outside Mexico possible. The African roots of Southern foodways that took most of my lifetime to get proper credit. These are the hard posts.
What I’m doing here
Each post pairs a real food history story with a loosely related recipe. The history does the work of making you care. The recipe gives you something to do with that feeling. Sometimes the connection is thematic and gentle. Sometimes it’s devotional, like crème brûlée for Edmond Albius (you are holding the direct result of his work in your hands when you crack the sugar with the spoon).
I’m not a working historian. I’m someone with a history degree who reads history voraciously and ends up down these rabbit holes more or less constantly. This is what those rabbit holes look like when I write them up. I cite my sources. When I’m uncertain about something, I leave it out rather than guess. When I’m relying on someone else’s work, I name them. Michael Twitty, Jessica B. Harris, Gustavo Arellano, Lisa Fain, Rick Bayless, and the Gastropod podcast are the writers and shows that shaped how I think about this material. There will be more.
The point isn’t gotcha. The point is that what we remember about food matters, and the version we inherited is often a marketing win rather than a historical one. Once you know that, you cook differently. You credit differently. You hear the stories differently.
How to read this section
The series doesn’t need to be read in order. Each post stands alone; pick whichever title grabs you and start there. The rhythm across the series is intentional: light, light, light, hard. The light ones earn the audience that stays for the hard ones. The hard ones are why the series is worth doing.
P.S. If you have a “what got lost” food history story you think I should look into, the comments are open. I take suggestions. Some of the best entries in my running file came from readers.
P.P.S. The series title is borrowed from a question I keep asking myself: what did we once know that got forgotten, or more pointedly, intentionally distorted? For marketing, for profit, out of fear, out of prejudice. What got lost and who benefited from the loss? Once you start asking that question, you can’t really stop.
P.P.P.S. If you wandered in from a single post and stayed long enough to read this far: welcome. You’re the audience this series is for.