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August
16, 2007:
Fascinating Food History II
Interview
with Carolyn Wyman, author of Better
Than Homemade
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Mike
Carruthers:
Sanka was the first successful decaffeinated coffee.
Carolyn Wyman:
It was invented by this French food merchant named Ludwig Roselius
because his dad had been a coffee taster and he blamed his job
as a coffee taster for his dad's early death - he thought it
was because of the caffeine.
Carolyn Wyman,
author of the book Better
Than Homemade, has researched the origins of some of the
most popular food products of the last hundred years. She says
TV dinners were invented by Swanson's, which was a turkey processor.
1951 - it was
a particularly warm November so fewer people around the country
had turkey dinners for Thanksgiving. As a result the company
had a whole glut of turkeys they didn't know what to do with.
So they decided to freeze some of this turkey and put it in
these little trays and call them TV dinners to sort of link
the idea of a miracle heat-and-eat meal with the miracle of
television that just started.
Frozen food had
been around for a while but wasn't very popular until Artic
explorer Clarence Birdseye came on the scene.
He went to Labrador
in 1912 and he noticed in those extreme low temperatures that
fish and meat would freeze immediately and would taste and have
almost the exact same texture as fresh when it was defrosted.
So he had the idea that maybe it was the speed of the freezing
that had been the problem before.
At somethingyoushouldknow.net
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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