Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Origin of Words and Phrases: Food

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

We all eat every day. We use English words for the foods and meals we eat without even thinking about it.  But where did those words come from, and what did they originally mean? What is the difference between dinner and supper?  Were the modern distinctions we have between fruits and vegetables always there, and for that matter, was meat always meat? Learn more about the origins of English words pertaining to food on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to Butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily at checkout to get $30 off your first box! Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Ben Long & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all eat every day. We use English words for the foods and meals we eat without even thinking about it. But where did those words come from? And what did they originally mean? What's the difference between dinner and supper? Were the modern distinctions we have between fruits and vegetables always there? And for that matter, was meat always meat. Learn more about the origins of words and phrases pertaining to food on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. All the words I'll be covering in this episode are ones that you're probably familiar with. However, the origins of these. words, I'm guessing, will be quite surprising to many of you, because in some cases they mean almost the exact opposite of what they mean today. So let's start this dive into the origin of food-related words with the meals themselves. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The easiest of these is breakfast. Breakfast is nothing more than a compound of the words break and fast. When you wake up in the morning and have something to eat, you are breaking your fast from the evening. It's

pretty straightforward and simple. However, why do we call it breaking a fast rather than calling it something else like the morning meal or the first meal of the day? Historically, breakfast was never that big of a deal. You didn't wake up and start cooking. Breakfast, assuming somebody actually ate breakfast, was usually nothing more than a piece of bread, perhaps a bit of cheese, and some ale. There weren't special breakfast foods like we see today. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his book Summa Theologica that eating too early was actually committing the sin of glutton. In old English, the first meal of the day was called Morgan Mettin, which literally means the morning meal. Over time, the term breakfast began to be used more often. The first written

use of the word breakfast didn't occur until the 14th century when Middle English was still spoken. The first reference in the United States to breakfast was in 1620, and the meal it was referring to was biscuits and beer. The origin of lunch is much more confusing than the rather straightforward origin of breakfast. The first thing you need to know is that lunch is just a short form of the word luncheon. The origin of the word luncheon isn't totally clear,

but it seems to come from the old English word nunction. And a nunchin was a midday drink. Now, I just told you a second ago that lunch is short for luncheon, and for the modern use of the word that is true. However, the word lunche used to have a separate and different meaning that wasn't short for luncheon. Lunch used to refer to a hunk of something. The word lunch had an origin similar to the word lump.

So a hunk of meat, bread, or cheese would be considered a lunch of meat, bread, or cheese. Eventually, the hunk of something and the midday drink, a nunchin, were combined, to become luncheon. The original use of the word was not to describe a midday meal. It was almost synonymous with our modern word for snack. For example, in 1785, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language defined lunch and luncheon as, quote, as much food as one's hands can hold. The same dictionary defined nuncheon as a piece of vittles eaten between meals.

One theory I came across is that the word lunch or luncheon was only really used by coach-ins where carriages would stop between cities in the 18th and 19th centuries. So if lunch referred to a light snack, usually in the afternoon, how did it come to mean the midday meal? To understand that, we need to understand the origin of the word dinner. Dinner comes from the old French word disner, which means to dine. and that came from the vulgar Latin word disjejunair, which means to break a fast, aka breakfast. The modern French word for breakfast is Petit designe, which is quite similar.

So, just so you're following along, the word dinner comes from French, which is derived from a vulgar Latin word for breakfast. Dinner eventually came to mean the main meal of the day. However, dinner for the longest time was not. the evening meal. Dinner was what we would today call lunch. The main meal was usually eaten around midday for several reasons. For starters, there was light. In a world without artificial light, you would want as much light as possible to cook the main meal of the day, which would take most of your time. The second reason was that if you worked in the fields, which most people did, a big midday meal gave you energy and an excuse to get out of the midday sun. This, of course,

raises the next question. How and why did dinner become the evening meal instead of the midday meal? This was due to the Industrial Revolution. When people began moving from the farm to the factory, they couldn't take time off in the middle of the day. The word used for the main meal of the day stuck, but the time the meal was eaten changed to the evening when everyone got off work. What did they eat in the middle of the day? Well, they had a luncheon. The term which was previously used to describe a snack soon became a full-blown meal, although workers in a factory probably did initially have a luncheon in the original sense of the word. Luncheon was shortened to lunch, which was previously a word that meant something else. So with that, what's the difference between

dinner and supper? In modern usage, supper and dinner are used interchangeably and are basically synonyms. However, there are some subtle differences. While you, you can have dinner at home, most people do not go out for supper. Supper would be something you eat at home and most restaurant meals would be considered dinner. Unless, of course, you are in Wisconsin, which has its own tradition of supper clubs, which is a whole other episode. In fact, according to Google search, the Upper Midwest is the region where supper is most commonly used. The word supper comes from the old French word super, which means to sup, referring to the act of eating the last meal of the day. This word traces back to the Latin soupa, which means

soup, or bread soaked in broth. So supper was a lighter meal, usually the last meal the day, and was often just soup and bread. Nothing fancy and nothing that required a lot of work. When dinner moved from midday to the evening, it sort of became redundant with supper. Before I move on from the meals, just to be complete, I should at least, address brunch. As I'm sure most of you can figure out, brunch is just a portmanteau of the words breakfast and lunch. The word first started to appear around 1896, and it was used occasionally for about 80 years. The term brunch began to be used more and more starting in the early 1970s. The use of brunch in books and other publications has increased steadily since then up until

the present day. So that explains the origin of our meals. But, what about the basics of food itself? Some of the most basic words describing food have changed dramatically over time and mean very different things today. And let's start with the word meat. In old English, the word meat was spelled M-E-T-E, and it referred to any sort of food. Meat was basically synonymous with our word food. So wheat, bread, fruit, and nuts were all called meat. The word originated in Old German and in Frisian.

And now you're probably wondering if everything was meat, then what did they call meat? That was known as flesh meat. Likewise, some plants would be known as green meat and white meat would refer to dairy products. The use of the word meat to describe flesh from animals began to be used around the year 1300. Just as confusing is the origin of the word, Fruit. The word fruit comes from the old French word frui or fruite, which in turn comes from the Latin word fructus, meaning enjoyment delight or produce. The Latin fructus is derived from fruity, which means to enjoy or to use, emphasizing the pleasure derived from consuming or using the

product of plants. Today, fruit means something very specific. We can sit and have debates as to if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable because we have that distinction. The term fruit in English began to be used in the 12th century, and it initially meant any useful product of the earth. By its original meaning, vegetables would be fruit, as would nuts, and as well the things we call fruit. The old use of the word fruit can still be seen in the phrase, the fruit of the earth, which has a general meaning, not a specific one. So if meat meant food and fruit meant plants, what word was used to describe what we would call fruit? The word for fruit was apple.

The word apple comes from the old English, April. The old English word apal is derived from the proto-Germanic word aplas, which is also the source of similar words in other German languages, such as old high German, opul, and the old Norse Eple. The word apple referred to any kind of fruit or round object. In some context, it specifically referred to apples as we know them today, but it was also a more general term for fruits like nuts and berries. This confusion of apple for fruit is one of the reasons why the fruit from the Garden of Eden in the Bible is often depicted as an apple. In the original Hebrew, the word used is piri, which just means fruit.

If you were telling the story of the Garden of Eden in Old English, you would have called the fruit an apple. As the word apple became more specific over time, the use of the word apple in the story from Genesis stuck, even though the meeting had changed. Another possible reason given is that in Latin, the words for apple and evil are very similar. Malum versus Malum, hence the use of Apple would have been sort of a play on words. By the Middle Ages, Apple developed its modern usage to only describe a particular type of fruit from a particular type of tree. So, if meat meant food and fruit meant plants and apple meant fruit, what word was used to describe what we would call vegetables? In Old English, there wasn't a word to describe exactly what we would call vegetables today, because if you remember back to my episode on cruciferous vegetables, they're not found in nature. They were developed over the centuries by selective breeding.

The closest word that would describe something akin to a vegetable would be the word wart or wort. Wirt referred to any green plant that may have been edible, such as cabbage or even an herb. One of the few remaining uses of the word that harkens back to its original meaning would be the plant called St. John's Wart. Beyond that, wart really isn't used for that much anymore. I've barely scratched the surface in this episode in covering the origins of the many words that we use for foods, so a follow-up episode will be necessary at some point in the future.

The one thing you should take away from this episode is that the words we use for meals and food in the past once had very different meanings from what they do today. Slowly over time, those words became more specific about what they were referring to, eventually morphing into the language that we have today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers.

Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the The Pleasionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.