An outing to the cinema isn’t just about seeing a movie, it is a full sensory experience, with a big screen and big snacks. An epic film demands the panoramic widescreen, thunderous surround sound, embarrassingly large boxes of lollies and giant buckets of popcorn that never taste the same at home.

Throughout the history of cinema, however, popcorn has been both scorned as a messy lowbrow distraction and hailed as a profit-making saviour for a floundering film industry.

Popcorn as an ancient snack food

Popcorn is one of the oldest foods we still consume as a snack, with archaeological evidence from Peru, circa 6,700 years ago.

Bernabé Cobo, a Jesuit missionary in Peru in the early 17th century, observed popcorn being made by the local people, toasted until it burst – eaten as a confection called Pisancalla.

French explorers in the Great Lakes region of North America in 1612 saw the Iroquois people heating corn kernels in a clay pot filled with hot sand until they popped – and added them to a soup.

Colonists adopted the practice in the Americas, either using an enclosed wire mesh basket over open flame, or a horizontally mounted thin metal cylinder turned with a hand crank in front of a fireplace.

First bites at the........

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