Last week, we told you how instant noodles landed on your plate. Here are some more facts on how other processed foods came to be. Cornflakes sprung from an effort to make an easily digestible substitute for bread, in 1894. Brothers John H Kellogg, a doctor who ran a sanatorium in Michigan, US, and William Kellogg, who also worked there, were called away when they were boiling wheat and it went stale. They decided to force it through their rollers anyway (they had been experimenting with other foods) and found the wheat had been flattened to thin flakes.

Saccharin was discovered by a Russian chemist called Constantin Fahlberg in 1879 in the Johns Hopkins University labs. When he sat down to dinner and took a bite of bread that seemed unusually sweet, he explored, and traced it back to the experimental compound he had spilled in his lab earlier that day. He applied for a patent in 1884.

The Popsicle (ice pop) was first invented in 1905 when a kid called Frank Epperson in California set out to make a glass of soda with soda powder, water and a stick to stir it all up, and left it out in the cold all night by accident.

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