Cracker Jack’s early marketing warned prospective customers about the effects of the product. “Do not taste it,” one 1896 article cautioned. “If you do, you will part with your money easy.” Some historians believe that the caramel-coated popcorn and peanut treat jump-started the American snack food industry around the turn of the 20th century. It may even hold the title of the country’s first junk food, though the types of junk food popular today didn’t make their appearances until the 1950s. It all started with Chicago candy and popcorn peddlers Frederick and Louis Rueckheim, German immigrants who crafted a nonsticky caramelized popcorn as a way to stand out from other popcorn vendors. Their version — with a sweet, crunchy coating that was different from the salted popcorn and kettle corn available at the time — became a hit after it was mass-produced in 1896.

The “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” songwriter had never seen a baseball game.

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Jack Norworth’s most famous tune was scrawled on an envelope during a subway ride in 1908, though the writer wasn’t on his way to a baseball game — he’d never even been to a professional one. Music publisher Albert von Tilzer, who penned the melody, also hadn’t seen a game.

It was a song, however, that helped cement Cracker Jack’s snack status. In 1908, songwriter Jack Norworth — entirely unknown to the Rueckheims — composed “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” after seeing an advertisement for an upcoming game. The song, which mentions the snack by name, led to a surge in sales that forever linked Cracker Jack with sports. Four years later, the Rueckheims sweetened their popcorn business with a marketing gimmick that would eventually be replicated by cereal brands, fast-food restaurants, and candymakers for decades to come: a toy in every box. By 1916, Cracker Jack was the bestselling snack worldwide.

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The wheel is credited as one of humankind’s most important inventions: It allowed people to travel farther on land than ever before, irrigate crops, and spin fibers, among other key benefits. Today, we often consider the wheel to be the ultimate civilization game-changer, but it turns out that creating the multipurpose apparatus wasn’t really on humanity’s immediate to-do list. Our ancient ancestors worked on other ideas first: boats, musical instruments, glue, and even alcohol. The oldest evidence of booze comes from China, where archaeologists have unearthed 9,000-year-old pottery coated with beer residue; in contrast, early wheels didn’t appear until around 3500 BCE (about three millennia later), in what is now Iraq. But even when humans began using wheels, they had a different application — rudimentary versions were commonly used as potter’s wheels, a necessity for mass-producing vessels that could store batches of brew (among other things). 

Vodka is the world’s most-consumed spirit.

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The potato-based alcohol is popular, but baijiu, a traditional Chinese liquor, accounts for nearly 25% of all spirits sold globally. Brewed from sorghum or rice, baijiu (meaning “clear liquor”) has an alcohol content of 50% to 65% and is meant to be imbibed as a shot.

Some researchers believe our long-standing relationship with alcohol began 10 million years ago thanks to a genetic mutation that allowed our bipedal ancestors to consume overly ripe fruit. Alcohol consumption eventually transitioned from a snack-time byproduct to a purposefully crafted, fermented beverage, and different cultures began to create their own brews independently. After China’s beer and wine appeared around 7000 BCE, early vintners in the Caucasus Mountains followed 1,000 years later. Sumerian brewers crafted beer around 3000 BCE, while Indigenous communities in the Americas, such as the Aztecs and Incas, later made their own alcoholic drinks from agave and corn. It may seem surprising that ancient humans were so fermentation-focused, but early alcohols played a major role in prehistoric communities: Booze was often the center of religious and social celebrations, and could serve as a go-to cure for illness and pain. In some cases, it even acted as a nutritious, probiotic boost during times of food scarcity. With their many uses, both lifesaving and life-enhancing, brewed beverages have withstood the test of time.

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French cuisine is often considered the epitome of fine dining, and that could be because French cooks are said to have launched the modern restaurant — and even invented the word “restaurant” itself. Many etymologists and historians attribute the origins of both to A. Boulanger, a Parisian soup vendor who set up shop in 1765. Boulanger peddled bouillons restaurants — so-called restorative meat and vegetable broths, from the French restaurer, meaning “to restore or refresh” — an act that wasn’t entirely revolutionary, since other cooks were selling healing soups from “health houses” around the same time. But Boulanger’s approach was different because he also offered a menu of other meals at a time when most taverns and vendors served just one option, dictated by the chef. Boulanger’s concept of seating guests and allowing them to choose their desired meal exploded in popularity after the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, as kitchen workers who formerly served aristocratic households set up their own dining rooms or joined new eateries. By 1804, French diners could choose from more than 500 restaurants across the country.

Waffle House has its own record label.

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Waffle House doesn’t just sling breakfast; the 24-hour diner has also pressed its own jukebox records since the mid-1980s. Restaurant-themed songs across genres (such as gospel, bluegrass, and R&B) are released under the Waffle Records label and exclusively played at the chain’s diners.

Some historians disagree with this long-told tale of the restaurant’s origin, suggesting there isn’t much evidence by way of historical documentation to prove Boulanger was a real person. And others believe attributing the public dining room to French ingenuity isn’t wholly accurate, since humans have been offering up their cooking talent to the hungry masses for millennia. Take, for example, how Chinese chefs in major cities such as Kaifeng and Hangzhou customized menus to appeal to traveling businessmen looking for familiar meals nearly 700 years before France’s iteration of the restaurant. Or the excavated ruins at Pompeii dating to 79 CE that include ornately decorated food stalls called thermopolia, where hungry Romans could choose from a variety of ready-to-eat dishes. Though the names have differed, smart humans have been selling snacks to each other for a long, long time.

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