Americans like food. Evidence? The word food continues to steadily increase in use, with over 263 occurences per million words, nearly four times what it was in the early 1800s. As a reflection of this, nearly every term that became popular remained in full force to present, unlike terms in most other areas of the English language. Cooking, once but a necessity, is also a form of recreation for many Americans, and has nigh quintupled in the same period, and the collocates clearly show this, being almost exclusively recipe terms. Even the verb "to eat" has doubled in the last century.

Breakfast food has remained relatively stable in use since the early 1800s; however, we have many more choices. Egg consumption has steadily increased, with fried, poached, and hard-boiled eggs showing up in the 1830s; soft-boiled, deviled, and scrambled eggs, along with egg salad, were added to the list by the end of the nineteenth century in COHA. Americans also have been eating cereal at a ravenous rate since it was first mentioned as food in the 1900s, with porridge, mush, grits, and oatmeal increasing in usage to this day along with their cold cereal counterparts. The consumption of waffles and pancakes seem to be on the rise, the latter beating out indian cake, hotcake, johnny cake, and ashcake, and competing with flapjack, and buckwheat cake.

Eating out has become increasingly more popular, with the use of restaurant increasing tenfold since a century ago. One might get a burger, hot dog, or another type of sandwich off the increasingly popular menu. Ever since protein was identified in the mid-1800s, meat consumption has been up (tenfold in the last hundred years), with beef, pork, and chicken all showing up more in the corpus over time. Desserts are also more popular than ever, with chocolate and ice cream, though cobblers and pudding seem to have become a bit less in demand. The cultural melting-pot also brought a wide variety of foreign foods: tacos, sushi, and pasta all skyrocketed since 1960.

Innovation in the home kitchen led to the mainstream use of many words now commonplace. Around the turn of the century, the modern refrigerator (fridge) was born. After a relatively stable usage of oven, it tripled in use from 1970 to the present. Among other appliances that changed the home: the microwave (which allowed TV dinners to be prepared quickly), the toaster, the food processor, and the blender; however, the skill of canning has become less popular since peaking in the 1940s.

Diets were a new fad that no longer simply referred to what we eat but instead now refers to what we monitor in our eating. The collocates of the word seem to show its importance, yet no consensus as to what is best, be it counting calories or watching carbs, including the Atkins craze, which popularized the term low-carb. This health-awareness wave also brought forward many words with low-*, *-free, and lite.