“Best thing since sliced bagels”
I like pretzels. But in more ways mayonnaise is an interesting invention, and quite recent compared to others listed here. I loathe mayonnaise.
Germ theory and the work of Louis Pasteur has done wonders for wine and food packaging, so I’ll vote for the invention of the live-yeast smack packs, especially Wyeast’s 4632 Dry Mead yeast.
But Ramen noodles only cost 12.5 cents and are done in a moment. They have the most fillingness for the least amount of money.
Fermentation is easily the most interesting/tastiest.
Cheese, Yoghurt, Beer, Wine & other alcoholics, Bread, Olives, Vinegar, Salami, Pickles, Saurkraut… the list is practically endless.
Let’s give props to Clarence Birdseye’s flash-frozen foods.
Alcohol is wonderful, but man didn’t invent it. Yeast did. The ancient Assyrians (?) accepted yeast’s help to make beer a very long time ago. Several centuries later, some great soul discovered how to use distillation to make whiskey (or if that person was a Scot, whisky.) out of yeast’s blessed works.
The meat grinder is a simple yet ingenious and remarkably useful innovation. It made it much easier to make sausage (before, the meat had to finely chopped by hand!), not to mention hamburger.
Whoever first put the processing line and the freezer directly on the fishing boat gets my vote.
Or maybe the garlic press. . .
Yes - freezing stuff - there’s a lot to be said for flash frozen peas!
I have found that there are finally some pretty decent frozen pizzas on the market----light years better that the cardboard discs they had when I was a kid…
(now please dont get me wrong, I would almost always rather have a “real” pizza from even the lowest quality pizza joint (Little Caesars, Pizza Hut) that the top-end frozen ones, but for the times where thats not an option, there are a couple brands of frozen that are really quite good)
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.
Bulimia.
For awhile, they had **baked **ramen noodles. They were a little bit more expensive, but they didn’t make me sick. I haven’t seen them in about 10 years or more, though. Maybe I should shop around and look again. I used to drain the water off and use a small portion of the flavor packet to season them. They were a nice hot snack.
Edible ball bearings.
Just re-watched an old West Wing episode and appearently the invention of dwarf wheat (for India) saved about a billion lives; pretty good invention if you ask me.
According to an ad I’ve been seeing on television, it’s a miracle device known as Slap-Chop…
Oooh! Thanks for introducing me to that!
The fluffernutter.
We want Nissin Choice Ramen, which I haven’t found in stores. I just e-mailed them to ask where I could buy them. I’ll see if I get an answer.