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Food Origin Stories

Food Origin Stories

Written by: OBOMEDIA ENTERTAINMENT
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Food history is a battlefield. Empires fought over spices, fortunes rose and fell on a recipe, and some of the dishes on your table exist because someone, somewhere, refused to lose a war you have never heard of. This show tells the true stories of food history, one fight at a time.

Each episode reconstructs one story in full, cinematic detail: the ingredient worth more than gold, the rival cooks and companies at each other's throats, the secret formula guarded like a state secret, and the moment the war was won or lost. No host chatting between clips, no panel debating tastes. Just one complete story, narrated start to finish, built from archives, court records, and the recipes at the center of it all.

You will taste food history through spice monopolies that launched navies, patent battles over foods you eat every week, and inventions born of famine, fraud, and pure stubbornness. Some episodes follow one recipe across centuries; others expose the corporate wars fought over what the world eats. All of them treat food history as what it really is: the story of civilization told through hunger and appetite.

If you are drawn to food history that reads like a thriller instead of a cookbook, this is built for you. New episodes drop regularly, each one a self-contained slice of food history. Subscribe now so the next story lands the moment it goes live.Copyright OBOMEDIA ENTERTAINMENT Art Cooking Food & Wine
Episodes
  • The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win

    The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win
    Sep 7 2026
    The saddle-shaped chip that let Pringles stack — and win

    In 2008, the children of a retired Procter & Gamble chemist buried part of his ashes inside one of his own inventions: a Pringles can. He had spent two years perfecting the shape that let the chips stack without breaking — then was pulled off the project before it ever reached a shelf. How does an object outlive the argument over who actually made it?

    In this episode, we trace the fifty-year dispute over what a Pringle legally is, who invented it, and who profited from it, asking what happens to credit and identity when a single product passes through four inventors, two tax courts, and three corporate owners.

    Person: Fredric J. Baur
    Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
    Date: 1956
    Case: the hyperbolic paraboloid potato chip and its stackable can
    Status: sold twice, taxed both ways, name still unconfirmed

    - Procter & Gamble assigned Fredric Baur, an organic chemist born in 1918, to fix broken and stale potato chips starting

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
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    20 mins
  • The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy

    The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy
    Sep 7 2026
    The Dime That Proved Two Million People Bet on Privacy

    Somewhere in a crowdfunding ledger sits a single dime, part of a total that ends in exactly ten cents — proof that someone, somewhere, tracked a two-and-a-half-million-dollar campaign down to the last coin. The money bought a phone that did not yet exist, built around a promise that its hardware, not its policies, would keep its owner's life private. But hardware is one thing, and a company's conduct years later is another — so what happens when the people who trusted that promise start asking for their money back?

    In this episode, we trace Purism's Librem 5 phone from its record-breaking 2017 crowdfunding campaign through its delayed 2019 shipment to a 2023 refund controversy, asking whether a company can be trusted to remain the thing it claims to be once the specifications sheet stops being the whole story.

    Person: Louis Rossmann (repair advocate who documented the refund disputes)
    Location: San Francisco, California
    Date: August 24, 2017
    Case: the crowdfunding campaign for the Librem 5 phone
    Status: phone shipped in November 2019, but the company's handling of 2023 refund disputes drew public criticism

    - The Librem 5 crowdfunding campaign closed with $2,677,609.10 raised, 78.5 percent over its $1.5 million goal
    - The campaign reached its $1.5 million goal within two weeks of launching on August 24, 2017
    - The Librem 5's baseband processor connects via USB, isolated from the phone's main computing system, unlike most smartphones
    - PureOS received full endorsement from the Free Software Foundation in December 2017 under its GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines
    - The Librem Key, Purism's USB security token, weighs six grams, measures 48mm long, and contains a 40-kilobit-per-second true random number generator
    - The first Librem 5 units shipped in November 2019, twenty-five months after the campaign closed
    - The cellular modem's firmware remained proprietary, as Purism publicly acknowledged, because no free alternative existed
    - In 2023, Louis Rossmann published two videos documenting customer refund disputes with Purism, and declined a request from a former Purism associate to remove the first video

    To listen to this podcast ad-free and access premium episodes, try our subscription with a 14-day free trial at obomedia.com.

    © 2026 OBOMEDIA. All rights reserved.
    This episode and its content (audio, text, and related materials) are the exclusive property of OBOMEDIA and are protected by applicable copyright laws. Reproduction, distribution, editing, or commercial use, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from OBOMEDIA is prohibited. For permissions, licensing, and business inquiries: business@obomedia.com.
    Show More Show Less
    21 mins
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