Since the 1950s and 60s, mutation breeding has created around 3,000 commercially available varieties of plant—durum wheat, rice, soybeans, barley, chickpeas, white beans, peaches, bananas, papayas, tomatoes, sunflowers, and more. Almost any grapefruit you've bought was probably a mutant.

"the housewife of the future will never have to worry about dishpan hands if science puts pills and water on the table instead of steak and potatoes."
— Port Angeles Evening News - July 25, 1956

Synthetic food, as tasty and more nourishing than the real thing, yet so compact that a three-course meal goes in a matchbox, has been made in top secrecy by Government scientists....
Matchbox meals can be kept almost indefinitely without deterioration. An example of the matchbox food could be soup, a dish of synthetic stewed steak followed by a sweet in the form of, say, apple puree. There would not be as much as you might be accustomed to see on a well-filled plate, but it would be satisfying to eat, and the flavour would be indistinguishable from the real thing. The soup will probably be in a tablet form. The stewed steak will be a packet of course granules. There will be a teaspoonful or so of white powder which will be the mashed potatoes. Another little packet of powder will contain the apple puree. The only thing to be added to the chemicals will be water.
— Keystone Wire Service, July 17, 1956

Through the hardships of the Great Depression and the lean years that followed, peanut butter and mayonnaise kept many struggling households afloat. They were also the ingredients in a sandwich that was once as popular as peanut butter and jelly in parts of the South...
Newspaper clippings from the national heyday of the peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, a period that seems to have begun in the 1930s and continued through the 1960s, provide evidence that the practice of adding mayonnaise to peanut butter could have originated as a way of transforming rough-hewn nut butters into spreadable pastes.

Studying the problem, [Chevallier-Appert] decided that higher degrees of heat were needed in cooking. The apparatus called the autoclave, a closed vessel in which steam under pressure gave heat much greater than boiling water, had never been used for cooking food, however, and there was danger of over-cooking, because it lacked apparatus to measure and regulate the heat. Chevallier-Appert equipped the crude autoclave with another crude device, a manometer, which had been used for measuring heat in boilers. It would measure differences of only twenty degrees. He made it an instrument of precision, capable of measuring half a degree, and patented the invention in 1852. With greater heat, and an instrument to measure and control it, the difficulties of canning were overcome to such a degree that in June, 1852, Chevallier-Appert exhibited to scientists a whole sheep that had been cooked and sealed in a huge can in his autoclave four months before.