Alvise Cornaro was a Venetian nobleman who, at forty, was exhausted by decades of heavy eating and drinking. A doctor told him he must choose a regimen or face death, and he chose a temperate, orderly life centred on small portions of simple food. In the 1550s, in his later years, he wrote a guide to living long and well, which was translated into English in 1702 as Sure and Certain Methods of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life. He claimed to have lived to around ninety-eight, and the book was reprinted many times. Cornaro's recommendations included bread soup, eggs, veal and moderate wine, and he advised adding ice to wine and going dry in summer months. Joseph Addison admired the book in 1711. Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols in 1888, argued that Cornaro had mistaken effect for cause, since his slow metabolism had made him sick in the first place and dictated his diet.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.