Trail4 steps

Your plate is a passport

Foods that aren’t from where you think, and the myths that grow around them.

Every dish has travelled. This trail follows four foods across borders and centuries, and sorts the documented history from the stories.

Start the trail →

I
France’s breakfast icon arrived from Vienna.
No. 031DishCuisine & Food
The croissant is Austrian (sort of) France’s most famous breakfast pastry descends from the Viennese kipferl, brought to Paris by an Austrian entrepreneur around 1839.
II
An “Italian” salad invented in Mexico by a man named Caesar.
No. 020DishCuisine & Food
Caesar salad was invented in Mexico It has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. It was improvised in Tijuana in the 1920s by an Italian-American restaurateur named Caesar Cardini.
III
A vegetable whose colour came with a patriotic legend attached.
No. 087FactCuisine & Food
Carrots used to be purple The earliest cultivated carrots were purple and yellow. The orange carrot became dominant in the Netherlands, and a famous patriotic explanation for it is probably a myth.
IV
A plant that evolved to hurt mammals, and that people across the world learned to love.
No. 021FactCuisine & Food
Spicy isn’t a taste. It’s pain. Chilli “heat” triggers the same receptor that detects a burn. Birds can’t feel it, and that seems to be the point.