Popular foods that were born out of scarcity
I thought The Laughing Cow cheese was named because cows were living their best life in French meadows. Apparently, the story is much weirder and the cows weren’t happy at all.
The name actually comes from a dark WWI trench joke. French soldiers mocked the grand German "Valkyries" by drawing a grinning cow on meat-transport wagons and calling it "La Wachkyrie" - a phonetic pun that sounds exactly like "La vache qui rit" (The Laughing Cow). A cheesemaker later turned that wartime inside joke into a global brand to market a processed cheese hack.
Another less discussed food origin story: the USSR's Doctor’s Sausage
It was originally engineered as a state-sponsored "health food" to combat widespread malnutrition, literally prescribed by doctors. By the time I grew up eating it in Lithuania, it was viewed as low-quality, cheap, poverty food. Yet, generations of people still feel an intense, emotional nostalgia for it.
Do you know any other foods that were born out of scarcity/crisis?
I cover the above ones plus Nutella, SPAM and Digestive biscuits here if you're interested: https://substack.com/home/post/p-200090874