Y’all would not believe the things folks get riled up about over on X. Not too long ago, I made a simple little post saying that here in North Carolina, we don’t call it aluminum foil. We call it tin foil — and yes, it rhymes with oil, pronounced uhl.
Well, one fella absolutely lost his ever loving mind. I’m talking a full-on hissy fit that would’ve made his mama hang her head in shame. And the funniest part? Bless his heart… he was wrong.
So let’s talk about why he was wrong.
Why do Southerners call aluminum foil “tin foil”?
Back in the late 1800s, tin foil hit the scene. Folks used it for all sorts of things, but it got especially popular for wrapping food. It stuck around for more than fifty years — a good, reliable product with one little problem: it left your leftovers with the faint taste of, well… tin.
The Swiss noticed. And in 1910, Dr. Lauber, Neher & Cie. opened the world’s first aluminum-foil plant. Aluminum was softer, easier to shape, and didn’t make your food taste like you’d dropped it in a toolbox. A year later, Tobler started wrapping their famous Toblerone bars in the new aluminum foil.
But here’s the kicker: it took until after World War II for aluminum foil to fully replace tin foil in the American market. And by then, the name “tin foil” was already baked into our vocabulary — especially here in the South.
And that, my friends, is why we still call it tin foil… and why that fella on X was dead wrong.
But more importantly?
It’s a tiny thread that ties us back to our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents — to the kitchens we grew up in, to the voices that taught us how to talk, and to the little pieces of tradition we get to carry forward every time we wrap up a leftover biscuit.
