century ago someone, much like yourself, was seated at a kitchen table, much like yours, perusing a morning paper, much like this one. The big difference? The meal. While you may be lapping up fat-free yogurt with a café latte and Sweet'N Low chaser, our fictitious centenarian, depending where he lived, filled his plate with porridge, flapjacks, mutton or a heart-stopping amount of home-cured bacon.

How did we in 10 decades go from gruel to Starbucks?

"Quickly," says Melanie Barnard, a Bon Appétit columnist and author of Short & Sweet (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). "Changes to the food we've eaten started slowly but then went into fast forward, mirroring the times."

This century, more than any other, has been one of staggering transformation. Our population has mushroomed by almost 200 million since 1900. Passenger travel zoomed from the horse to the supersonic. Computers accomplish in hours what took a turn-of-the-century factory crew days. And the foods we've eaten have taken an equally remarkable journey. more >

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