Forks appear in ancient Egypt, Rome and China, but they were mostly cooking and serving tools. The personal table fork most likely developed in the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire, where it was common by the 4th century. It reached the Italian peninsula, where it was especially useful for twirling long pasta, and by the 1600s it was nearly universal among merchants and the upper classes in Italy. Italian etiquette then carried it to Spain, France and northern Europe. Many people disapproved; a church writer, Peter Damian, called it vanity. In England it was viewed for years as an unmanly foreign habit, and it only became common in Britain in the 1700s.

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.