5 Toxic Foods People Used To Eat

  • Victorian-era restaurant
Victorian-era restaurant
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From our modern vantage point, the culinary options of bygone cultures are sometimes difficult to comprehend. It seems that hungry people gobbled down anything they could get their hands on, including dormice (rodents), beaver tails, and fish bladder jam.

But while some of the choices seem unusual in hindsight, we can at least grasp their nutritional value. Other foods, however, were just downright dangerous to the human digestive system, and certainly wouldn’t have been on the menu had the consumer been aware of the consequences. Here are five toxic foods that people unwittingly used to eat.

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Stone Age Fish

Offering a rich source of vitamins, protein, and fatty acids, seafood is generally considered among the healthiest cuisine to eat — unless, of course, the specimens being consumed contain sky-high concentrations of heavy metals. Such was the case with the Atlantic cod and harp seals that comprised the meals of Stone Age settlers in northern Norway’s Varanger Peninsula around 5000 to 1800 BCE. 

According to a recent study, cod bones from the settlement contained levels of cadmium up to 22 times higher than contemporary recommended limits, while seal bones showed similar dangerously elevated levels of lead. While it might seem strange that wildlife came with the risk of carcinogens in an era well before industrialization, the study authors suggest this was the result of climate change. It’s possible the thaw from the last ice age (between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago) produced rising sea levels that carried soil containing the potent minerals into the water.

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6 Weird Sandwiches People Used To Eat

  • Boy eating a sandwich, 1940s
Boy eating a sandwich, 1940s
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According to popular legend, the English aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was engaged in an all-night card game in 1762 when he became distracted by hunger pangs. Not wanting to stop playing, he instructed his servant to bring him a snack of beef between two slices of bread, allowing him to satiate the twin desires of filling his belly and raking in more dough.

While he was hardly the first person in history to consider eating food in this fashion — Montagu may have been inspired by culinary creations in Turkey and Greece — the earl’s idea caught on across English high society and led to the honor of having his name affixed to this particular bread-based meal.

The sandwich soon spread to other social strata across Europe and in the American colonies, its popularity underscored by increasing appearances in cookbooks through the 19th and 20th centuries. However, numerous once-popular foods have failed to survive to the present day, and the same goes for certain old-fashioned sandwiches; some of them are just too bizarre for modern palates. Here are six sandwiches that were (mostly) pushed aside by modern diners in favor of tastier options. 

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Oyster Sandwich

In the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries, oysters were a popular sandwich filling. Sandwiches known as “oyster loaves” were featured in Mary Randolph’s cookbook and guide The Virginia Housewife in 1824, and numerous entries in Eva Green Fuller’s Up-To-Date Sandwich Book in 1909. The first and most basic recipe from Fuller’s book instructs readers to supply a dash of tabasco sauce, lemon juice, and oil to chopped raw oysters (without specifying measurements), slather the mixture on white bread, and then top it off with a lettuce leaf. 

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What Grocery Stores Used To Look Like

  • 1890s general store
1890s general store
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Since most of us walk into a grocery store with our minds fixated on the items needed to fill up the fridge and pantry, it’s rare that we take the time to marvel at the wonders of modern food shopping. Whether it’s a small neighborhood mart, a chain supermarket, or a gargantuan superstore, today’s grocery stores offer a dizzying range of brands for any given product, allowing discerning shoppers to make a choice based on price, ingredients, or even packaging. All necessary (and unnecessary items) can be wheeled in a cart to a checkout line, where a friendly employee will happily tabulate the items and accept various forms of payment. There are also self-checkout stations, where you can scan your items yourself and be on your way even faster.

Of course, such a process would have been completely alien to early humans who relied on hunting and gathering their food. And it likely would be fairly shocking even to the people accustomed to earlier forms of food shopping. Here’s a look at what grocery stores were like before the rise of Publix, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and the other popular stores we frequent today.

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Country and General Stores 

According to Michael Ruhlman’s book Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, the earliest grocery depots in the U.S. were the country stores that surfaced in the 17th century. Along with offering a limited supply of culinary staples such as sugar, flour, and molasses, these markets provided a smorgasbord of other necessities of colonial America, including hardware, soap, dishes, pots, saddles, harnesses, shoes, and medicine.  By the early 19th century, these stores — originally constructed from logs and mud — were largely replaced by newer frame buildings, which contained cellars that were large enough to house casks of whale oil and also cool enough to store eggs, butter, and cheese.

By the middle of the 19th century, the general store was a common sight across the small towns of the expanding United States. Similar to the country store, general stores stocked goods that both satiated hunger and catered to other crucial needs of paying customers. Food items included coffee beans, spices, honey, oatmeal, and dried beans, many of which were kept in barrels and required measuring the desired amount on (often inaccurate) scales. The stores also offered nonedible wares, including cloth, buttons, undergarments, hats, lamps, rifles, and ammunition.

Normally featuring at least one large display window, these stores were typically packed with goods piled high on shelves and tables amid the boxes and barrels stuffed into available spaces. A front counter displayed smaller items as well as such contraptions as a coffee grinder, scales, and the cash register. As general stores typically doubled as community centers, they were usually fitted with a stove to warm inhabitants during cold-weather months and often featured chairs for those who planned to stay and chat.

Even so, general stores were neither the most comfortable nor the most sanitary places. Customers often dragged in dirt and animal waste from the unpaved roads outside, while cast-iron stoves could produce a layer of soot over the displayed wares.

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When Did We Start Putting Ice in Drinks?

  • Ice cubes in glasses
Ice cubes in glasses
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Few things are as refreshing as an ice-cold drink on a hot day. Indeed, ice is an essential part of the beverage industry today, with the global ice maker market valued at more than $5 billion. In the United States alone, the average person consumes nearly 400 pounds of ice per year. 

Despite its popularity, most of us have probably never thought about how ice-cold drinks evolved into an everyday necessity. This simple pleasure has a long and interesting history shaped by ancient ingenuity, global trade, and evolving technology. From emperors importing ice from distant mountains to entrepreneurs revolutionizing its distribution, the journey of the ice in our drinks is a story of innovation that dates back to the first human civilizations.

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The Use of Ice Is 4,000 Years Old

Long before refrigerators and freezers, ancient civilizations found ingenious ways to keep drinks cool. ​The earliest recorded instance of ice storage dates back to the reign of Shulgi, the king of Ur in Mesopotamia from 2094 to 2046 BCE. Shulgi named the 13th year of his reign “Building of the royal icehouse/cold-house” (years were often named after a significant event), suggesting the construction of an icehouse during that period.

​In China, the practice of harvesting and storing ice dates back to at least 1100 BCE. During the Zhou dynasty (1046 to 256 BCE), the royal court established a specialized department responsible for collecting natural ice blocks each winter and storing them in icehouses for use in the warmer months. This stored ice was used to cool food and beverages, including wine, and was also used in medical treatments.

Over time, ice collection became an organized practice, with officials overseeing its storage and distribution. Around 400 BCE, the Persians took preservation a step further by constructing yakchals — massive, domed icehouses made of heat-resistant mud brick. These structures allowed them to store ice year-round, even in the arid desert climate. By carefully directing water into shallow pools that froze overnight, they amassed ice supplies that could later be used to cool drinks or create early versions of frozen treats.

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Why Was Turtle Soup Once Considered a Delicacy?

  • Making turtle soup
Making turtle soup
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From the mid-18th century until the mid-20th century, turtle soup was one of the most luxurious dishes in European and American cuisine. It frequently appeared on the tables of wealthy families and was served at dinners held by prominent politicians. While turtle soup is still considered a delicacy in some parts of the world, it has become all but obsolete in America. But why, exactly, did this dish enjoy more than 200 years as a prized culinary staple?

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From Survival Food to Status Symbol

The first Europeans to eat turtle were not aristocrats, but sailors and explorers in the late 17th century. The green sea turtles found in the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean were initially seen as merely suitable sustenance for long journeys at sea. But as Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean islands taught European seafarers more about turtles, the simple food became seen as “exotic” and desirable. It caught the attention of the upper class in Europe, and before long, turtle meat became a coveted luxury on the continent. 

By the early 18th century, Britain’s taste for turtle had extended to the American colonies, and while recipes for turtle casseroles and other dishes were prominent in cookbooks from the era, turtle soup was the most popular. Turtle’s delicate, veal-like taste and rich, gelatinous texture made it ideal for slow-simmered broths and stews. 

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Which Came First: Wine or Beer?

  • Glasses of beer and red wine
Glasses of beer and red wine
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Whether you’re enjoying a glass of cabernet with a meal or downing IPAs with friends, you’re taking part in the multifaceted, multicultural act of alcohol consumption that dates back many thousands of years.

Indeed, although the dangers of excessive drinking are well known, and even small amounts of alcohol are now believed to come with health risks, imbibing has been part of the fabric of human existence since the dawn of recorded time. Some anthropologists argue that alcohol featured prominently in social customs that facilitated the rise and progression of civilizations. Others suggest that civilization itself was formed as a result of people settling in one area to domesticate crops for the production of alcohol.

Because spirits such as whiskey or vodka involve a more complex distillation process, beer and wine (and wine’s less-prominent cousin, mead) are the earliest forms of alcohol, left over from a time before any of humanity’s famous names, wars, or inventions etched themselves into history. Which sets up the ultimate bar debate: Which of these two ancient libations is older?

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Early Humans Likely Discovered Alcohol by Accident

To let some of the air out of the suspense, we’ll note that it’s difficult to pinpoint when people first began drinking wine or beer, since proto-versions of both drinks can be formed with little to no human intervention.

Ethanol, or drinking alcohol, is created through the fermentation process that takes place when sugar meets yeast. In the case of beer, that occurs when a grain such as barley is exposed to moisture and its starches are converted into sugar, priming this component for catalyzation by deliberately introduced or naturally appearing yeast. Similarly, crushed or even overripe fruits with high sugar content including grapes or figs will naturally begin to ferment, creating the basis for wine.

It’s likely that early humans (or even animals) stumbled upon the intoxicating effects of fermented grains and fruits, and maybe even figured out how to replicate the experience by leaving their collected wares out in the elements for too long. We can only speculate on the concoctions that may have been experimentally produced by pre-Neolithic people, although they were almost certainly different from the beers and wines that emerged under more controlled conditions in later epochs.

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When Did People Start Eating Sweets for Dessert?

  • Selection of French desserts
Selection of French desserts
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Most of us don’t give a whole lot of thought to the habit of finishing a satisfying meal with a dessert of something sweet — we’re too busy savoring the delectable mouthfuls of cake, custard, or ice cream.

Yet this is a clear culinary tradition that many people follow. While some may elect to eat sweets before a main course, and others simply dig into pie or brownies at any time of the day, most adhere to the standard operating procedure of dessert after the main course at lunch or dinner. But how and when did this order come about? Why do we eat sweets after a savory meal, and not the other way around?

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Humans Evolved To Have a Need for Sweets

To start somewhere close to the beginning, the craving for sweets is biological. Our hominid ancestors realized they derived more energy from ripe fruit with a higher sugar content than unripe fruit, and humans evolved with a hardwiring that connected sweetness to pleasurable feelings.

This primal need perhaps explains why sweets have traditionally featured into religious ceremonies for many cultures. As described in Michael Krondl’s Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert, Mesopotamian cooks prepared cakes as an offering to the goddess Ishtar. Similarly, Hindus throughout India have presented a sugar and milk concoction known as pedha to deities such as Kali for more than two millennia.

At times, the ritual of serving sweet dishes at distinct intervals has translated to something similar to the modern idea of dessert. After a day of fasting in celebration of Krishna’s birthday, Hindus traditionally indulge in treats such as bhog kheer, a pudding, or shrikhand, a sugar-flavored yogurt. In Turkey, the end of fasting at Ramadan means an opportunity for celebrants to sink their teeth into baklava, a beloved pastry.  

Of course, the preparation and consumption of sweets has long been a part of secular mealtimes as well. The Deipnosophists, a work from the third-century Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis, describes an array of honey-coated fare served over a series of lavish banquets. However, the now-commonplace notion of specifically relegating such sweeter foods to the end of a meal has its origins in France.

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5 Discontinued Snacks We Wish Would Come Back

  • Chocolate cookie with cream filling
Chocolate cookie with cream filling
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As far as ephemera is concerned, few things are as temporary as snack foods from the past. Snacking itself is an evanescent experience, a fleeting moment of between-meal indulgence or an inattentive nosh during a spectator event. But snacks are also a major part of American culture; snacking has doubled since the late 1970s, and according to the 2024 USDA survey “What We Eat in America,” 95% of American adults have at least one snack on any given day.  

The idea of snacking has distinctly 20th-century origins. Eating between the traditional three meals per day was frowned upon during the 19th century, and proto-snack street foods of the time (such as boiled peanuts) were considered low class. But the Industrial Revolution, combined with a more enterprising spirit around the turn of the 20th century, created business opportunities for packaged, transportable foods, which were often marketed as novel expressions of modern technology. 

As the nascent snack market emerged and grew, companies introduced countless products with varying degrees of success. Some, such as Cracker Jack (which debuted in 1896) and Oreos (which debuted in 1912 as a nearly exact imitation of the earlier Hydrox cookies), endure to this day. But history is littered with the wrappers of discontinued snacks. Here are some long-gone treats we’d love to see make a comeback.

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Cherry Humps

The Schuler Candy Company made this distinctive chocolate and cherry candy bar from 1913 to 1987. Each Cherry Hump bar contained two cherries, cordial, and fondant, and was double-coated in dark chocolate. In an unusual final step in their production, the bars were aged for six weeks, in order for the runny cordial and thicker fondant to meld and reach a cohesive state. Despite the cohesion achieved by aging, the filling of the candy bar still contained a more liquid texture than other candies, and this ended up being its undoing. 

When Schuler became a subsidiary of Brock Candy Company in 1972, Brock sought to update the production and distribution methods of Cherry Humps, and chose bulky high-volume pallet shipments instead of the previous method of fanning out multiple shipments to smaller distribution lots. What made sense on paper for efficiency was disastrous in practice for a product as fragile as Cherry Humps: The candy often arrived at its destination badly damaged, with visibly sticky packaging from leaking cordial. 

Instead of shoring up the candy’s packaging to protect it, or adjusting the shipping method, Brock changed the candy’s recipe to make it sturdier. The new recipe did away with the enticingly juicy cordial and fondant filling, instead setting firmer cherries in a layer of dense white nougat. There was no more gooeyness to speak of, and in turn, no more of the candy’s signature appeal. Sales steadily declined and Cherry Humps were discontinued.

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We Cooked the World’s Oldest Written Recipes

  • Two bowls of food
Two bowls of food
Credit: Original photography by Bennett Kleinman

The ancient Babylonians, who lived in modern-day Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria as far back as the early second millennium BCE, were among the earliest human civilizations. They pioneered such concepts as written language, legal justice, and mathematics, and the culinary arts are no exception: The world’s earliest written recipes survive today in the form of ancient Babylonian tablets dating to around 1730 BCE. The tablets were unearthed in the 1920s, but were initially thought to be medical texts. It wasn’t until the 1980s that researchers finally deduced that the artifacts actually comprised an early cookbook — in fact, it’s considered to be the oldest surviving cookbook in the world. 

I was curious to see how these early recipes tasted — especially compared to contemporary dishes — so I set out to recreate a couple of them and try them myself. One of the three tablets contains a summary of 25 recipes for various stews and broths, while the other two describe those recipes in more detail. But the tablets still lack critical specifics, such as exact ingredient amounts and cooking times. The translation for one recipe, for instance, simply says, “Meat is not used. You prepare water. You add fat…” and so on, which would have been hard to replicate. Luckily, a team at Yale University used the information on the tablets, along with their scholarly knowledge of ancient Babylon, to compile several modern recipes that are considered accurate interpretations of those ancient meals. 

Using their findings, I prepared two of the recipes at home: a lamb and beet stew, and a vegetarian broth whose name has been translated as “unwinding.” (Though it’s unclear why it’s called “unwinding,” experts suggest it could have been a dish people ate to relax.) Despite the ancient nature of these recipes, it wasn’t difficult to compile the ingredients, or at the very least suitable substitutes. 

Lamb and Beet Stew

The primary dish I made was a lamb stew. Lambs were among several animals that were domesticated in ancient Mesopotamia, and were a key component of cuisine in the region. Mesopotamia was also an agricultural hot spot that came to be known as the Fertile Crescent — referring to the area’s rich, fertile soil — so it comes as little surprise that the lamb stew contained plenty of fresh veggies as well. 

Credit: Original photography by Bennett Kleinman
  • Ingredients
  • 1 pound diced lamb leg
  • ½ cup rendered fat (we used cow fat instead of sheep fat)
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup beer
  • ½ cup water
  • 1 small chopped onion
  • 1 cup chopped arugula
  • 1 cup spring onions
  • ½ cup cilantro
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • 1 pound diced red beets
  • ½ cup chopped leek
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • Coriander seed, cilantro, and kurrat (we used spring onion) for garnish

For this dish, I had to make a few minor adjustments given the ingredients I had available. The recipe as written called for an Egyptian leek called kurrat, which is known for having a mild onion and garlicky flavor. Given the similar flavor profile, spring onions are a suitable alternative, so I used those instead.

The dish also calls for beer, which was a major component of Babylonian culture. It was difficult, of course, to find a beer that would have been exactly like the ones drunk by the ancient Babylonians, but I looked for an option that was as close as possible. Most of the beer recipes archaeologists have uncovered from ancient Babylon are made with barley. Tate Paulette, the author of In the Land of Ninkasi: A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia, writes that “there’s no evidence for the use of hops” in Babylonian beer, unlike in modern beers. He also notes that early beers often included “date syrup, and additional flavorings,” giving them a sweetness. Brew Your Own magazine, meanwhile, points out that many ancient beers were sour in nature. Taking all this into account, I selected a fruity and sour ale to roughly replicate the taste profile of Babylonian beer.

Credit: Original photography by Bennett Kleinman

The cooking process for this dish was rather simple, and not unlike how you’d prepare any modern stew. The major difference was how heat was applied — while cooks in ancient Babylon would’ve used an open flame, I used an electric stovetop. 

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What Did Oranges Used To Look Like? (They Weren’t Always Orange)

  • Still life of oranges, 1863
Still life of oranges, 1863
Credit: Heritage Images/ Hulton Archive via Getty Images

When we think of oranges today, we picture an almost perfectly round fruit with a sweet, citric, juicy interior that is, as the name suggests, orange in color. It’s a common fruit around the world; in the U.S., oranges consistently rank as the third-most-consumed fresh fruit behind bananas and apples — and it ranks No. 1 among juices. 

But oranges weren’t always as popular or as common as they are today — and they didn’t even look the same. The oranges we’re familiar with are the result of thousands of years of cultivation and selective breeding. Here, we peel back the layers of history to discover what oranges used to look like and how they evolved into the fruit we enjoy today.

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The Origins of Oranges

Oranges, and all other citrus fruits, can trace their roots to the southeast foothills of the Himalayas. According to DNA evidence, the first citrus trees appeared in this region about 8 million years ago; from there, they spread across the Indian subcontinent and then to south-central China. These ancient citrus fruits, however, were nothing like the oranges we know today. They were smaller, often bitter, and came in a variety of shapes and colors, from knobby, yellow fruits akin to the modern citron to large, green, smooth-skinned citruses similar to the modern pomelo.

All the oranges, lemons, limes, and grapefruits we eat today are descendants of just a handful of ancient species, namely citrons, pomelos, and mandarins, all native to South Asia and East Asia. The sweet orange we know today, which accounts for about 70% of global orange production, is a cultivated hybrid of the ancient pomelo — a large, pale green or yellow fruit with a thick rind — and ancient mandarins, which were then only a little larger than olives. That original hybrid, however, would have been quite different from the oranges we have today.  

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