The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, had a question: What are the most meaningful innovations in humanity’s culinary history? What mattered more to the development of civilization’s cultivation of food: the oven? The fridge? The plough? The spork?
To answer that question, the Society convened a group of its Fellows – including, yup, a Nobel Prize Winner – and asked them to whittle down a list of 100 culinarily innovative tools down to 20. That list was then voted on by the Fellows and by a group of “experts in the food and drink industry,” its tools ranked according to four criteria: accessibility, productivity, aesthetics, and health.
The top five:
Refrigeration
Pasteurization / sterilization
Canning
The oven
Irrigation
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