The ketchup we slather onto hot dogs, burgers, and fries today once had a different purpose: Doctors believed it was best consumed as a health tonic. Ketchup has come a long way from its roots in China as far back as the third century BCE, when cooks fermented seafood to create a salty, amber-colored sauce that resembles modern fish sauce (an anchovy-based condiment that adds umami flavor to many Asian dishes). By around the 16th century, British sailors had taken word of ketchup back to their home country, and British cooks tried to replicate it with their own versions made from walnuts and mushrooms. It’s not clear exactly when tomatoes came on the scene, though the first known tomato ketchup recipe appeared around 1812, published by Philadelphia horticulturist James Mease.

Catsup and ketchup are different condiments.

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The labels may have different spellings, but catsup and ketchup are the same food. “Catsup” was once more commonly used in North America, but Heinz went on to popularize “ketchup,” intentionally using the spelling in the 1880s to stand apart from competitors.

It wasn’t until the 1830s that some doctors began rebranding tomatoes as a 19th-century superfood. One physician, Dr. John Cook Bennett, especially promoted tomatoes as cures for indigestion and other stomach ailments, encouraging a craze for the fruit that eventually saw the introduction of ketchup pills and extracts. (One memorable jingle went, “tomato pills will cure all your ills.”) The fad lasted through around the 1850s, but soon enough home cooks focused on creating their own ketchups instead of taking the vitamin equivalents. The sauce then became an easily obtainable American dinner table staple in large part thanks to the H. J. Heinz Company, which released its first tomato ketchup in 1876.

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The arrival of autumn 2010 in the City of Light brought with it a bold public experiment in the form of a new drinking fountain in the Jardin de Reuilly. As with other public drinking stations in Paris, this one connected to a well-maintained system of water sourced from underground wells and the Seine and Marne rivers. But it had a twist: With the press of a button, visitors were treated to a stream of chilled H2O infused with carbon dioxide, providing a steady supply of sparkling water.

A Frenchman invented sparkling water.

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Eighteenth-century English theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley may be most celebrated for his discovery of oxygen, but his work with gases also fueled the development of carbon dioxide-enhanced drinking water.

The concept of what locals call la fontaine pétillante didn't originate in this corner of Europe; sparkling water fountains first surfaced in Italy around 2009. Yet the idea certainly seems tailor-made for France, the country of origin for popular mineral water brands such as Evian and Perrier. Paris is also home to famed water-spouting structures such as Fontaine Saint-Michel and Fontaine des Mers. Several sparkling water fountains can now be found throughout Paris, and the city has the ultimate goal of installing at least one in each of the city's 20 arrondissements.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the sparkling water fountains are hardly on par with the ornate older fountains; one reviewer recalled a graffiti-tagged fountain as seemingly "designed to troll visiting fantasists with its simple look and battered condition." Yet this same reviewer described the fountain’s cool, bubbly water as "utterly delicious." Considering that the water is free, and that an estimated 12 pounds of plastic waste per year is saved when a family of four ditches plastic bottles for tap water, this citywide initiative should do its part to help keep Paris relatively clean and affordable.

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Beer is as old as history — and by some counts, even older. Many experts assert that the emergence of Sumerian cuneiform in the fourth millennium BCE marks the beginning of recorded history. Similarly, the first hard evidence of beer brewing also comes from the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, in a town called Godin Tepe (now part of Iran). In 1992, archaeologists there discovered traces of beer in jar fragments dated around 3500 BCE. However, some scholars suggest that beer is as old as grain agriculture itself — which would put the boozy beverage’s invention at around 10,000 BCE, somewhere in the Fertile Crescent. 

The minimum drinking age in the U.S. has always been 21 years old.

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Between 1970 and 1975, 29 U.S. states lowered the legal drinking age in reaction to the new voting age of 18 after ratification of the 26th Amendment in 1971. But in 1984, the U.S. government set the national age limit to 21 with the Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act.

Strangely (or not), thousands of Sumerian tablets make mention of beer. In fact, it even makes an appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh, often regarded as the oldest surviving piece of literature. But among all these references, no recipes for this ancient brew were ever recorded. The closest thing to step-by-step instructions is a text known as the Hymn to Ninkasi (aka the goddess of beer). Written around 1800 BCE, this hymn describes the malts, cooked mash, and vats used in the beer-making process. It seems that Sumerian beer had mostly two ingredients: malted barley and beer bread, or bappir, which introduced yeast for fermentation. The beer was then drunk from communal jars, and its sediments were largely filtered out by drinking the concoction from reed straws. In 1989, the Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco worked with anthropologists to recreate this Sumerian concoction; they deemed their results “drinkable.” Thankfully, beer has undergone significant innovations since its invention thousands of years ago.

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It’s a common misconception that potatoes hail from Ireland, or elsewhere in Europe, but they were actually first cultivated in the New World — specifically, South America’s Andean region. Archaeologists uncovered fossilized sweet potatoes in Peru’s Chilca Canyon dating back to around 8080 BCE, making them the oldest known remains of domesticated tubers. There’s also evidence of potatoes having grown along Peru’s coast some 4,000 years ago, as well as along the shores of Lake Titicaca (an area shared by modern-day Bolivia and Peru) roughly 2,500 years ago.

The earliest spuds were cultivated by ancient civilizations that inhabited the Andes, including the Aymara, who settled on the Titicaca Plateau no later than 1500 BCE. The Aymara managed to grow more than 200 potato varieties, despite extreme heights and adverse climatic conditions. Potatoes were also a popular crop among the Inca, who used them for pottery, medicine, and even to predict the weather.

Thomas Jefferson helped popularize french fries in the United States.

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According to the Monticello estate, Jefferson once returned from a trip to France with a recipe roughly translating to “deep-fried potatoes in small cuttings,” an early incarnation of the modern french fry. He also helped popularize other foods in the U.S., including ice cream.

Potatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century, when they were brought back to the continent by Spanish conquistadors. According to the Irish Potato Federation, the spuds arrived in Ireland between 1586 and 1600 CE, though there’s no written evidence of their early cultivation there. Potatoes, which could be grown in cheap soil, quickly became a staple crop among poorer Irish communities. When the Irish Potato Famine struck in 1845, an estimated 1.5 million Irish fled to the United States to avoid hunger. This largely accounts for why many of us draw a connection between Ireland and potatoes, despite the spud’s South American origins.

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