“ The earliest quotation of the slang use of the word in the sense of food in the New English Dictionary is dated 1659 from Ancient Poems, Ballads, &c., Percy Society Publications. “Grub-street,” as a collective term for needy hack-writers, dates from the 17th century and is due to the name of a street near Moorfields, London, now Milton Street, which was as Johnson says “much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems.” ”