3 Stories Behind Your Favorite Foods
By: Anthony Adragna
Published: October 10, 2011

Sometimes it's hard to remember that our favorite foods were created by someone. Well, hoping to honor those inventors, here are the stories of three modern food staples. 
1. Chocolate Chip Cookies: Prior to 1930, no one had ever tasted the chocolate chip cookie. Then, Ruth Graves Wakefield invented them by complete mistake. Wakefield owned the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts and was preparing a batch of chocolate cookies (everything in the inn was baked by hand). She had, however, run out of baking chocolate. Without any other options, she decided to cut up a bar of Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate into little bits and pieces. She expected the chunks would melt during the baking process. Obviously, they did not and the chocolate chip cookie quickly became enormously popular. 

2. Ice Cream Cone: America's favorite dessert has more mysterious origins. Certainly, the ice cream cone became popular in the United States during the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. In 1903, an Italian immigrant to New York named Italo Marchiony filed a patent to protect his waffle cone design. He claimed to have been serving customers in pastry cones since 1896, allegedly because people kept walking away with his serving glasses. A more popular story, however, describes how the cone became popular. During the World's Fair, a Syrian immigrant named Ernest Hamwi used zalabia, a waffle-like pastry to serve ice cream after a fellow vendor, Arnold Fornachou, ran out of paper dishes. Whatever the circumstances, ice cream cones quickly caught on. 
3. Coca Cola: Back in May 1886, an Atlanta pharmacist named Doctor John Pemberton mixed a tonic syrup in a kettle in his backyard. He brought the syrup to his pharmacy, mixed it with carbonated water and sold the beverage for five cents. For the first year, Pemberton sold about nine servings of the drink a day and lost money on the product. Then, in 1887, an Atlanta businessman named Asa Candler bought the recipe and aggressively marketed the drink. It quickly became one of America's most popular and hasn't stopped since. Until 1905, the drink contained extracts of cocaine.