EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY
HOW SWEET IT IS
It takes one ton of water to make one pound of refined sugar.
A one-kilogram package of sugar will contain about 5 million grains of sugar.
In 1976, the first eight Jelly Belly flavors were launched: Orange, Green Apple, Root Beer, Very Cherry, Lemon, Cream Soda, Grape, and Licorice.
A honeybee must tap 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey. A bee produces only one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during her entire lifetime.
The world’s first chocolate sweet was produced in 1828 by Dutch chocolate-maker Conrad J. Van Houten. He pressed the fat from roasted cacao beans to produce cocoa butter, to which he added cocoa powder and sugar.
Americans consumed more than 3.1 billion pounds of chocolate in 2001, which is almost half of the total world’s production.
A 1.5-ounce milk chocolate bar has only 220 calories.
A recent study indicates that, when men crave food, they tend to crave fat and salt. When women crave food, they tend to desire chocolate.
American and Russian space flights have always included chocolate.
The bestselling chocolate bar in Russia is Snickers.
Per capita, the Irish eat more chocolate than Americans, Swedes, Danes, French, and Italians.
American chocolate manufacturers use about 1.5 billion pounds of milk, which is only surpassed by the cheese and ice cream industries.
Aztec emperor Montezuma drank 50 golden goblets of hot chocolate every day. It was thick, dyed red, and flavored with chili peppers.
Hostess Twinkies were invented in 1931 by James Dewar, manager of Continental Bakeries’ Chicago factory. He envisioned the product as a way of using the company’s thousands of shortcake pans, which were otherwise employed only during the strawberry season. Originally called Little Shortcake Fingers, they were renamed Twinkie Fingers, and finally Twinkies.
More than 180 million Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are sold between January and Easter each year.
Nabisco’s Oreo is the world’s bestselling brand of cookie, at a rate of 6 billion each year. The first Oreo was sold in 1912.
The daughter of confectioner Leo Hirschfield is commemorated in the name of the sweet he invented. Although his daughter’s real name was Clara, she went by the nickname Tootsie and, in her honor, her doting father named his chewy chocolate logs Tootsie Rolls.
The first ring doughnuts were produced in 1847 by a 15-year-old baker’s apprentice, Hanson Gregory, who knocked the soggy center out of a fried doughnut.
Laws forbidding the sale of sodas on Sunday prompted William Garwood to invent the ice cream sundae in Evanston in 1875.
The ice cream soda was invented in 1874 by Robert Green. He was serving a mixture of syrup, sweet cream, and carbonated water at a celebration in Philadelphia. He ran out of cream and substituted ice cream.
A black cow is a chocolate soda with chocolate ice cream.
Chocolate chip cookies are the baked goods most likely to cause tooth decay. Pies, un-iced cakes, and doughnuts are less harmful to the teeth.
It takes as much as 50 gallons of maple sap to make a single gallon of maple sugar.
Vanilla is the extract of fermented and dried pods of several species of orchids.
Thirty-five million pounds of candy corn is produced every year in America, which is enough to circle the moon four times.
RABBIT FOOD
The carrot belongs to the family Umbelliferae. The wild variety is classified as Daucus carota; both of the words in Daucus carota mean orange.
The carrot is a member of the parsley family, including species such as celery, parsnip, fennel, dill, and coriander.
The ancient Greeks called carrots karoto.
The Japanese word for carrot is ninjin.
Carrots produce more distilled spirit than potatoes.
Carrot flowers are also called birds’ nest, bees’ nest, and the devil’s plague.
The classic Bugs Bunny carrot is the Danvers type.
Holtville, California, dubs itself the “carrot capital of the world” and has an annual festival.
Carrot oil is used for flavoring and in perfumery. An extract of carrots was used to color oleo (margarine) during the fats rationing that took place during World War II.
The Greek foot soldiers who hid in the Trojan Horse were said to have consumed ample quantities of raw carrots to deactivate their bowels.
In early Celtic literature, the carrot is referred to as the “honey underground.”
It is alleged that Nero ate the last remaining root of the ancient carrot sylphion.
Tobacconists in France used to put a carrot in their bins to keep their tobacco from drying out.
The Greeks thought that carrots cured venereal disease. Arab cultures thought they were a possible aphrodisiac.
In Scotland, the Sunday before Michaelmas, September 29, is called Carrot Sunday.
Americans know the wild carrot as Queen Anne’s lace, rattlesnake weed, and American carrot.
A Cleveland man has a collection of more than 10,000 carrot items.
The longest carrot recorded in 1996 was 16 feet, 10.5 inches. The heaviest carrot recorded in the world, in 1998, was a single root mass weighing 18.985 pounds.
There is a carrot-pie flavor jelly bean.
Carrots have the highest vitamin A content of all vegetables.
Carrots are not always orange and can also be found in purple, white, red, or yellow.
Carrots were first grown as a medicine, not a food.
In Suffolk, carrots were formerly given as a remedy for preserving and restoring the wind of horses.
Eleven pounds of carrots contain 1 ounce and 11 grains of sugar.
The Anglo-Saxons included carrots as an ingredient in a medicinal drink against the devil and insanity.
Most common food plants contain natural poisons. Carrots, for example, contain carotatoxin, myristicin, isoflavones, and nitrates.
BANANA REPUBLICSome horticulturists suspect that the banana was the Earth’s first fruit. Banana plants have been in cultivation since the time of recorded history. One of the first records of bananas dates back to Alexander the Great’s conquest of India, where he discovered bananas in 327 BC.
Banana plants are the largest plants on Earth without a woody stem. They are actually giant herbs of the same family as lilies, orchids, and palms.
Bananas are perennial crops that are grown and harvested year round. The banana plant does not grow from a seed, but rather from a rhizome or bulb. Each fleshy bulb pound will sprout new shoots year after year.
As bananas ripen, the starch in the fruit turns to sugar. Therefore, the riper the banana, the sweeter it will taste.
A cluster of bananas is called a hand and consists of 10 to 20 bananas, which are known as fingers. The word banan is Arabic for finger.
Bananas are one of the few fruits that ripen best off the plant. If left on the plant, the fruit splits open and the pulp has a “cottony” texture and flavor. Even in tropical growing areas, bananas for domestic consumption are cut green and stored in moist shady places to ripen slowly.
In 1516, Friar Tomas sailed to the Caribbean from Europe bringing banana roots with him; he planted bananas in the rich fertile soil of the tropics, thus beginning the banana’s future in American life. Bananas were officially introduced to the American public at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The banana is now the most widely eaten fruit in America.
Bananas have no fat, cholesterol, or sodium.
In eastern Africa a popular item is banana beer, brewed from bananas.
In Southeast Asia the banana leaf is used to wrap food, providing a unique flavor and aroma to nasi lemak and Indian banana leaf rice.
India is by far the largest world producer of bananas, growing 16.5 million tons in 2002, followed by Brazil, which produced 6.5 million tons of bananas in 2002. To the Indians, the flower from the banana tree is sacred. During religious and important ceremonies such as weddings, banana flowers are tied around the head, as they believe this will bring good luck.
VEGETABLE MEDLEY
The term “vegetable” is not a botanical term; therefore just about any part of a plant can be considered a vegetable.
The tomato is commonly considered a vegetable even though botanically it is a fruit. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the tomato was a vegetable for the purposes of the 1883 Tariff Act based on a definition that classifies vegetables by use. It is the state vegetable of New Jersey, but both the state fruit and the state vegetable of Arkansas. Other vegetables that are botanically considered fruit include egg-plants, cucumbers, and squashes.
Americans eat more than 22 pounds of tomatoes every year. More than half this amount is eaten in the form of ketchup and tomato sauce.
Most store-bought pumpkins in the United States were originally grown in Illinois, California, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, which produced more than 9 million pounds of pumpkins combined in 2005.
The number of seeds in a pumpkin can be accurately determined, give or take 10 seeds, by multiplying the number of fruiting sections by 16.
Two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey.
Spinach is native to Iran and didn’t spread to other parts of the world until the beginning of the Christian era.
Ancient Greeks and Romans believed asparagus had medicinal qualities for helping to prevent bee stings and relieve toothaches.
Research shows that only 43 percent of homemade dinners served in the United States include vegetables. However, Americans eat 18 percent more vegetables today than they did in 1970.
FRUITY FACTSLemons have more sugar than oranges.
Ninety-five percent of the entire lemon crop produced in the United States is from California and Arizona.
Thin-skinned lemons are the juiciest.
There are more than 7,000 varieties of apples grown in the world. China produces more apples than the rest of the world put together. The apples from one tree can fill 20 boxes every year. Each box weighs an average of 42 pounds.
Americans eat an average of 18 pounds of fresh apples each year. The most popular variety in the United States is the red delicious.
The difference between apple juice and apple cider is that the juice is pasteurized and the cider is not.
Grapes explode when put in the microwave.
The Agen plum, which became the basis of the U.S. prune industry, was first planted in California in 1856.
More than 1,200 varieties of watermelon are grown in 96 countries worldwide. There are about 200 varieties of watermelon throughout the United States. Cousin to the cucumber and kin to the gourd, watermelons can range in size from 7 to 100 pounds.
In 2005 the Bright family from Arkansas grew the world’s largest watermelon, weighing in at 268.8 pounds.
Olives, which grow on trees, were first cultivated 5,000 years ago in Syria.
TASTY INVENTIONS
California’s Frank Epperson invented the Popsicle in 1905 when he was 11 years old.
Aunt Jemima Pancake Flour, invented in 1889, was the first ready-mix food to be sold commercially.
Fortune cookies were invented in 1916 by George Jung, a Los Angeles noodle maker.
Caesar salad has nothing to do with any of the historical Caesars. It was first concocted in a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, in the 1920s, by a man named Caesar Cardini.
To make haggis, the national dish of Scotland, take the heart, liver, lungs, and small intestine of a calf or sheep, boil them in the stomach of the animal, season with salt, pepper, and onions, and add suet and oatmeal.
In 1926, when a Los Angeles restaurant owner with the all-American name of Bob Cobb was looking for a way to use up leftovers, he threw together some avocado, celery, tomato, chives, watercress, hard-boiled eggs, chicken, bacon, and Roquefort cheese, and named it after himself: a Cobb salad.
Goulash, a beef soup, originated in Hungary in the ninth century.
Buttered bread was invented by the astronomer Copernicus. He was trying to find a cure for the plague.
Mayonnaise is said to be the invention of the French chef of the Duke de Richelieu in 1756. While the duke was defeating the British at Port Mahon, his chef was creating a victory feast that included a sauce made of cream and eggs. When the chef realized that there was no cream in the kitchen, he improvised, substituting olive oil for the cream. A new culinary masterpiece was born, and the chef named it Mahonnaise in honor of the duke’s victory.
Sliced bread was introduced under the Wonder Bread label in 1930.
Swiss steak, chop suey, and Russian dressing all originated in the United States.
The hamburger was invented in 1900 by Louis Lassen at his sandwich shop in New Haven, Connecticut. He ground beef, broiled it, and served it between two pieces of toast.
The city of Denver claims to have invented the cheese-burger.
Potato chips were invented in Saratoga Springs in 1853 by chef George Crum. They were a mocking response to a patron who complained that his french fries were too thick.
Popcorn was invented by the American Indians.
Potatoes, pineapples, and pumpkins originate from Peru.
The original recipe for margarine was milk, lard, and sheep’s stomach lining.
HYDRATION HAPPENINGS
In a Washington study, one glass of water stopped midnight hunger pangs for almost 100 percent of the dieters studied.
Lack of water is the main trigger of daytime fatigue. A mere 2 percent drop in body water can trigger fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on the computer screen or on a printed page.
Even mild dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism by as much as 3 percent.
It takes almost nine calories—the equivalent of eating one gummy bear—for the body to warm up eight ounces of 32-degree ice water after drinking it.
Preliminary research indicates that eight to ten glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80 percent of sufferers.
Water is the official state beverage of Indiana.
TEA-TOTALERSA common drink for Tibetans is butter tea, which is made out of butter, salt, and brick tea.
When tea was first introduced in the American colonies, many housewives, in their ignorance, served the tea leaves with sugar or syrup after throwing away the water in which they had been boiled.
There are professional tea tasters as well as wine tasters.
GOT MILK?
Humans are the only species who drink milk from the mothers of other species.
Camel’s milk doesn’t curdle.
Goat milk is used to produce Roquefort cheese.
Sixty cows can produce a ton of milk a day.
Soymilk, the liquid left after beans have been crushed in hot water and strained, is a favorite beverage in the East. In Hong Kong, soymilk is as popular as Coca-Cola is in the United States.
CHEESED OFFThe Uruguayan army once won a sea battle using Edam cheeses as cannonballs.
In 1987, a 1,400-year-old lump of still edible cheese was unearthed in Ireland.
When Swiss cheese ferments, a bacterial action generates gas. As the gas is liberated, it bubbles through the cheese leaving holes. Cheese makers call them “eyes.”
YOU SAY POTATO, I SAY . . .
The white potato originated in the Andes Mountains and was probably brought to Britain by Sir Francis Drake about 1586.
When potatoes first appeared in Europe in the seventeenth century, it was thought that they were disgusting, and they were blamed for starting outbreaks of leprosy and syphilis. As late as 1720 in America, eating potatoes was believed to shorten a person’s life.
During the Alaskan Klondike gold rush, potatoes were so valued for their vitamin C content that miners traded gold for potatoes.
In the United States, one pound of potato chips costs 200 times more than one pound of potatoes. Potato chips are American’s favorite snack food. They are devoured at a rate of 1.2 billion pounds a year.
Britons eat more than 22,000 tons of french fries a week.
McDonald’s and Burger King sugarcoat their fries so they will turn golden-brown.
TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASONING
Black pepper is the most popular spice in the world.
Saffron, made from the dried stamens of cultivated crocus flowers, is the most expensive cooking spice.
Capsaicin, which makes peppers “hot” to the human mouth, is best neutralized by casein, the main protein found in milk.
The hottest chili in the world is the habanero.
The color of a chili is no indication of its spiciness, but size usually is—the smaller the pepper, the hotter it is.
Although the combination of chili peppers and oregano for seasoning has been traced to the ancient Aztecs, the present blend is said to be the invention of early Texans. Chili powder today is typically a blend of dried chilies, garlic powder, red peppers, oregano, and cumin.
Table salt is the only commodity that hasn’t risen dramatically in price in the last 150 years.
GREAT GRAINS
Rice is the staple food of more than one-half of the world’s population.
There are more than 15,000 different kinds of rice.
Rice needs more water to grow than any other crop.
During World War II, bakers in the United States were ordered to stop selling sliced bread for the duration of the war on January 18, 1943. Only whole loaves were made available to the public. It was never explained how this action helped the war effort.
In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.
There are more than 225 different kinds of bread in Germany.
A 1991 Gallup survey indicated that 49 percent of Americans didn’t know that white bread is made from wheat.
The wheat that produces a one-pound loaf of bread requires two tons of water to grow.
On average, a baby in the United States will eat 15 pounds of cereal in the first year of life.
MEATY TOPICS
Americans consumed more than 20 billion hot dogs in 2000.
When American children were asked what they would like on their hot dogs if their mothers weren’t watching, 25 percent said they would prefer chocolate sauce.
Goat meat contains up to 45 percent less saturated fat than chicken meat.
“Colonial goose” is the name Australians give to stuffed mutton.
The dye used to stamp the grade on meat is edible and is made from grape skins.
Pigturducken is a pig, stuffed with a turkey, which is stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken, deep fried in oil.
The largest item on any menu in the world is probably the roast camel, sometimes served at Bedouin wedding feasts. The camel is stuffed with a sheep’s carcass, which is stuffed with chickens, which are stuffed with fish, which are stuffed with eggs.
A typical American eats 28 pigs in a lifetime.
Worldwide consumption of pork exceeds that of any other type of meat.
It is illegal to import pork products into Yemen, with a maximum punishment of death.
People in Sweden eat about one kilogram of ham per person each Christmas.
A single sausage measuring 5,917 feet in length was cooked in Barcelona, Spain, on September 22, 1986.
PASSION FOR POULTRY
China’s Beijing Duck Restaurant can seat 9,000 people at one time.
Fried chicken is the most popular meal ordered in sit-down restaurants in the United States. The next in popularity are roast beef, spaghetti, turkey, baked ham, and fried shrimp.
In 1995, Kentucky Fried Chicken sold 11 pieces of chicken for every man, woman, and child in the United States.
In an authentic Chinese meal, the last course is soup because it allows the roast duck entree to “swim” toward digestion.
Persians first began using colored eggs to celebrate spring in 3000 BC, and thirteenth-century Macedonians were the first Christians on record to use colored eggs in Easter celebrations. Crusaders returning from the Middle East spread the custom of coloring eggs, and Europeans began to use them to celebrate Easter and other warm-weather holidays.
A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not. An egg that is fresh will sink in water, but a stale one won’t.
The white part of an egg is called the albumen.
Washing a chicken egg will strip it of natural coatings that keep out bacteria; it will rot very quickly thereafter.
A turkey should never be carved until it has been out of the oven at least 30 minutes. This permits the inner cooking to subside and the internal meat juices to stop running. Once the meat sets, it’s easier to carve clean, neat slices.
Native Americans never actually ate turkey; killing such a timid bird was thought to indicate laziness.
The dark meat on a roast turkey has more calories than the white meat.
GOING NUTS
Most nuts will remain fresh for a year, if kept in their shells.
Macadamia nuts are not sold in their shells because it takes 300 pounds per square inch of pressure to break the shell.
It takes more than 500 peanuts to make one 12-ounce jar of peanut butter. The FDA allows an average of 30 or more insect fragments and one or more rodent hairs per 100 grams of peanut butter.
FOOD HANDLERS
During the Middle Ages, almost all beef, pork, mutton, and chicken were chopped finely. Forks were unknown at the time, and the knife was a kitchen utensil rather than a piece of tableware.
When Catherine de Medici married Henry II of France in 1533, she brought forks with her as well as several master Florentine cooks. Foods never before seen in France were soon being served using utensils instead of fingers or daggers. She is said to have introduced spinach, used in dishes “à la Florentine,” as well as aspics, sweetbreads, artichoke hearts, truffles, liver crépinettes, quenelles of poultry, macaroons, ice cream, and zabagliones.
The Chinese developed the custom of using chopsticks because they didn’t need anything resembling a knife and fork at the table. They cut up food into bite-sized pieces in the kitchen before serving it. This stemmed from their belief that bringing meat to the table in any form resembling an animal was uncivilized, and that it was also inhospitable to ask a guest to cut food while eating.
FUNGI SIDE
The fungus called truffles can cost $225 to $425 per pound. They are sniffed out by female pigs, which detect a compound that is also in the saliva of male pigs. The same chemical is found in the sweat of human males.
Mushrooms have no chlorophyll so they don’t need sunshine to grow and thrive. Some of the earliest commercial mushroom farms were set up in caves in France during the reign of King Louis XIV.
The largest living organism ever found is a honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae). It covers 3.4 square miles of land in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, and is still growing.
The world’s deadliest mushroom is the Amanita phalloides, the death cap. The five different poisons contained by the mushroom cause diarrhea and vomiting within six to twelve hours of ingestion. This is followed by damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system—and, in the majority of cases, coma and death.
BUG JUICE
In South Africa, termites are often roasted and eaten by the handful, like pretzels or popcorn.
According to many who’ve tried them, beetles taste like apples, wasps like pine nuts, and worms like fried bacon.
A pound of houseflies contains more protein than a pound of beef.
EPICURIOUS
The first product with a bar code to be scanned at a checkout was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum.
Chewing gum while cutting onions can help prevent tearing up.
Refried beans aren’t really what they seem. Although their name seems like a reasonable translation of Spanish frijoles refritos, the fact is that these beans aren’t fried twice. In Spanish, refritos literally means “well-fried,” not “refried.”
The English word “soup” comes from the Middle Ages word “sop,” which means a slice of bread over which roast drippings were poured. The first archaeological evidence of soup being consumed dates back to 6000 BC, with the main ingredient being hippopotamus bones.
The herring is the most widely eaten fish in the world. Nutritionally, its fuel value is equal to that of a beefsteak.
The ancient Greeks thought that eating cabbage would cure a hangover, and the ancient Romans thought that eating fried canaries would do the same.
Van Camp’s Pork and Beans were a staple food for Union soldiers in the Civil War.
The Chinese used to open shrimp by flaying the shells with bamboo poles. Until recently, in factories where dried shrimp were being prepared, “shrimp dancers” were hired to tramp on the shells with special shoes.
There are 2 million different combinations of sandwiches that can be created from a Subway menu.
During Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl, food consumption is larger than any other day in the United States.