frankenfood

In 1992, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to allow American companies to market genetically modified foods. That decision prompted Paul Lewis, an English professor at Boston College, to write a letter to the New York Times in which he decried what he called "Frankenfood," an innovation as misguided (in Lewis' view) as Victor Frankenstein's creation of his monster. Since then, the word has spread like wildfire: a Google search for "Frankenfood" on the Internet returns over 84,000 hits, and it appears in a book title, The Frankenfood Myth, published in 2004.

what is an ort?

an ort was originally a scrap of food or leftover fodder not eaten by cattle or pigs. The word then came to be applied to leftovers from the kitchen table, leftovers that were also known as relief or relics. Ort appeared in the mid fifteenth century as a compound of the prefix oor, meaning not, and etan, meaning to eat; quite literally, therefore, orts are the uneaten scraps of a meal.

mark morton is the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (Insomniac Press, 2004). His most recent books are The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp through the Language of Love and Sex and The End: Closing Words for a Millennium. He teaches English and Learning Technologies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

previous orts:
pemmican
frangipani
aperitif
flummery
runcible spoon
mezzaluna
fletcherize
abligurition
cornucopia
banyan day
spurtle
appetite
plague-water
nym
spork