The Stories Behind Food Names

- You might remember that in the early 2000's there was an effort to rebrand French fries as freedom fries, a lexical act of vengeance for France's opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Not such a sick burn considering it's probably the Belgians, not the French, who deserve credit for America's favorite side dish.

That wasn't the first time a war provoked a food name change.

During World War I, German imports like sauerkraut and frankfurters were renamed liberty cabbage and liberty sausage.

Let's hope we don't go to war with Italy again, because I am not calling a pizza a freedom Frisbee.

Apparently, rebranding foods over political gripes does not work because none of these monikers stuck.

But many food etymologies have even stranger stories.

Some are passed down over thousands of years, some invented by marketing wizards, and some are so mysterious, we can only guess their origins.

Let's dig to some interesting histories of food words.

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky and this is "Otherwords."

(bright music) - [Announcer] "Other Words."

(bright music) - The word food comes from the Proto-Indo-European root pa, to feed.

It's also where we get pantry, pastor and company.

And surprisingly, many of the oldest human foods have names that are shared among many languages.

Corn, for example, originally just referred to any type of cereal grain, and still retains that meaning in some English-speaking countries.

In fact, corn and grain have the same root.

The native American staple that the Taino people called mahiz was nicknamed Indian corn by Europeans, which in the US was eventually shortened to just corn.

In the UK, it's known by the Anglicized version of a Spanish interpretation of the Taino word, maize.

Because of their similarity to grains, the small berries of the Piper plant were called peppercorns which are dried and ground to make black pepper.

This was a very popular seasoning in the old world, reflected by cognates in many languages.

In fact, finding a new source of peppercorns was one of the reasons the Spanish monarchy bankrolled Christopher Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic.

What he found instead were the chilis of Mexico and the Caribbean.

In what may have been a devious bit of colonial marketing, he renamed them peppers, hoping to cash in on the popularity of black pepper back home.

Though they share a name in a penchant for spiciness, chili peppers and black pepper are botanically unrelated.

Oddly enough, English has different names for animals depending on whether they're alive or dead.

As we mentioned in a previous episode, this is thanks to the French-speaking Normans who conquered England in the 11th century.

When English farmers raised livestock, they called them pigs, cows, and sheep.

But when the French nobles ordered them served on a platter, they called it porc, beof and moton.

Venison, the word for deer meat, came from the old French venesoun, which roughly meant "the meat that was just hunted."

A lot of dish names are accidentally or deliberately misleading about what's in them.

Sweetbreads, for instance, are not bread at all, but cooked glands, usually from calves or lambs.

The bread part may come from the old English brǣd, meaning flesh or meat.

Head cheese is not a cheese, but a loaf of meat made from a cow or pig's head minced up and packed together with gelatin.

And Rocky Mountain oysters are not oysters, but the deep fried testicles of bulls, pigs or sheep.

After hearing those three, you might be frightened to know what's really in Welsh rabbit, but it's actually just melted cheese on toast.

Some say the name was created by the British to be an insult.

Wales was considered to be so poor that their rabbit had no rabbit in it.

More recently, capitalism has forced the food industry to be very deliberate about what they call their products to attract the most customers.

For example, kiwis are actually native to China, but when they were first imported to New Zealand in the early 20th century, the sellers knew that míhóutáo and qíyìguô wouldn't roll easily off English speakers' tongues.

Since they were from China and tasted a bit like gooseberries, they named them, drum roll, please.

Da-da-da.

Chinese gooseberries.

(triumphant music) But when Chinese gooseberries finally made it to America 50 years later, they didn't sell so well.

And the importers blamed the name.

First, they tried melonettes, since they looked kind of like little melons, and then finally settled on kiwifruits, named after the adorable fuzzy birds of New Zealand.

Third time's the charm.

The fruits took off, and the name was eventually shortened to kiwis.

The ocean is full of lots of weird-looking creatures with unappetizing names.

If you're a fisherman who catches slimeheads, toothfish, rockfish or lizardfish, it might help your sales to use a different name on the menu.

How about orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, Pacific snapper, or even Bombay duck?

And since the name dolphinfish might make people worry that they're about to chow down on Flipper, you can call it mahi mahi instead, a Hawaiian term for "very strong."

Last but definitely not least, sea urchin, a delicacy known as uni in Japan were once known as whore's eggs.

No one knows why, but I think we can all agree sea urchin is a big improvement.

In 2000, the FDA approved the California Prune Board's request to rebrand the prune to the dried plum.

Why?

Because of their digestive benefits, prunes had come to be associated with elderly people and bowel problems, two things advertisers don't like to mention when they're marketing towards the cool kids.

Did it work?

Sales improved almost immediately, especially among younger demographics.

Prunes were finally having their moment in the sun.

Well, I guess they always did.

Recently, they decided to switch back to the original name, likely because health trends have changed, and today, having regular bowel movements is, like, totally cool, dude.

(upbeat music) Two of the most popular culinary imports from Mexico, tacos and burritos, have names whose origins remain mysterious.

The original meaning of a Spanish word taco is a plug or a stopper, perhaps related to the English word tack.

Some propose that Mexican silver minors borrowed the term from the plugs of explosives they used.

Gun powder wrapped in a paper tortilla.

(exploding) Though tacos can be explosive depending on how many jalapenos are in them, some have pointed out that a mahiz flatbread stuffed with filling probably predates gun powder in the Americas.

So it's more likely that the word came from the Nahuatl word tlahco, which meant in the middle, because you put the filling in the middle of the tortilla.

Burrito means little donkey in Spanish, but it's not clear why that term became applied to food.

It might be because burritos are filled with so many different things like a donkey's cargo, or maybe it's a reference to the shape of the bundles.

One very specific theory suggests that during the Mexican Revolutionary War, the inventor of the burrito would sell them from a little donkey-pulled cart.

Like many food etymologies, we'll have to take this one with a grain of salt.

From sweet breads to kiwis, there's a clear trend of dressing up our food with names that are attractive and exciting, which makes sense, because food is such a pleasurable, communal experience.

It shouldn't matter what our food is called as long as it tastes good, but no one's gonna stay for dinner if you're serving slimehead in prune sauce.

Maybe Shakespeare was right when he said, "A rose by any other name would smell a sweet."

But under a different name, people might not stop