Client experience is an important part of the food industry, and one way to offer a great client experience is by including entertainment with their eating experience. Whether you have a vegan food truck or a black-tie vegetarian restaurant, adding a few interesting historical food facts on a menu or sign is a great way to entertain patrons. Keep reading to learn these three historical food facts to share at your restaurant.
Fried Food Is 4,000 Years Old
There’s a delicious history behind fried foods, but the most interesting part of that history is the beginning. We can trace the origins of fried foods to ancient Mesopotamia and the origins of deep-fried foods to the near East, roughly 4,000 years ago.
Most historical scholars believe that the fried food of choice was fried dough, which eventually led to the invention of falafel in the 1300s. That means if you offer falafel on your menu, you’re sharing a food item that’s been around for over 700 years.
The French Banned Potatoes in the 1700s
That’s right; less than 300 years ago, the French Parliament banned potatoes, believing that they caused leprosy. Luckily, French pharmacist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier made it his mission to prove that potatoes were safe to eat—after Prussian officials captured him during the Seven Years’ War and forced him to eat them.
While the capture was bad, the long-term effect was good. Within 10 years of Parmentier’s imprisonment, he convinced the French Parliament that potatoes were beneficial. To further persuade the still-distrustful French people, he grew potatoes in a large farm under heavy guard. Except the guards were a trick to convince people that potatoes were special, and they allowed people to steal Parmentier’s potatoes. His ruse worked, and by the turn of the century, potatoes appeared in French cookbooks.
Chocolate Was Once Money
Technically, what we now call chocolate was never money, but the Aztecs used cacao beans in trade. However, it wasn’t just money. They also ground up the cacao beans and turned them into a drink, which was how the Aztecs introduced it to the Conquistadors.
The Europeans liked the drink as long as they sweetened it with something like cane sugar, so they brought it back to the European continent, where it became popular with the wealthy until they figured out how to mass produce it in the 1700s.
While there are many other historical food facts you can share at your restaurant, these three are particularly interesting and will fascinate your vegan and vegetarian customers. Whether you print them on a poster or type them in a cursive script for your black-tie menu, people will love these bits of entertainment while they eat.
