Feast on this chapter that debunks every falsehood you’ve ever eaten up about food.
Twinkies last forever.
Twinkies were one of the first mass-produced, widely distributed, preservative-packed, shelf-stable foods, leading to the notion that they’d somehow last indefinitely. The real food in Twinkies makes them semi-perishable. One stays fresh for about 45 days.
Neapolitan ice cream consists of three flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.
When it was introduced in Italy in the 19th century, it was meant to evoke the three colors of the Italian flag: red, white, and green. The flavors used were cherry, vanilla, and pistachio.
Eating raw or undercooked pork can make you sick.
Pork can be infected with parasites that cause trichinosis, but modern American meat-processing techniques and laws make that far less likely now than it was even a few decades ago.
The sandwich was invented in the 18th century, when John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, and an avid gambler, didn’t want to leave the card table, so he asked for someone to bring him meat between two slices of bread.
Montagu really did popularize the dish named after his title in London high society, but there’s no way no one else on Earth thought of putting meat between two pieces of bread until the late 18th century. In fact, Montagu probably got the idea when he took a trip to Greece and Turkey, where he feasted on meats and cheeses placed between layers of flatbread.
A slab of juicy, rare-cooked beef will let out a little blood.
That red stuff is myoglobin, a purple-colored protein found in beef tissue, meeting oxygen, which turns it red.
Searing meat seals in the juices.
Searing meat can provide a nice crust, but all methods of cooking meat lead to at least some loss of liquid.
Spam is made from, well, who even knows?
Hormel created the product to deal with a surplus of pork shoulder. That’s the main ingredient, along with ham, salt, spices, and preservatives.
Placing a raw steak on a black eye will help it heal.
The cold meat may feel nice, but it won’t help it heal. In fact, meat-borne illnesses like E. coli can spread to the eye and cause an infection.
Eating lots of carrots will improve your eyesight.
The beta carotene in carrots is good for eye health, but eating them doesn’t enhance vision any.
German chocolate cake is a German dessert.
It used to be called German’s chocolate cake, and it was the invention of an American baker named Samuel German.
The chimichanga is a Mexican food.
This deep-fried burrito was invented in Arizona.
Croissants come from France.
Croissants come from Austria.
French fries are from France.
“French” refers to the way the potato is cut into long, thin strips. The dish originated in Belgium.
Fortune cookies are Chinese.
They were invented in San Francisco by a Japanese man.
The Caesar salad is named after Julius Caesar.
Italian cook Caesar Cardini invented it at a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico.
Pumpernickel got its name when Napoleon tasted some dark bread and thought it more suitable for his horse, Nicol. Bread for Nicol, or pain pour nicol, became pumpernickel.
The word was in the German language for more than 100 years before Napoleon was born—it’s an idiom that means “jerk.”
Barbecue-style cooking was made in the U.S.A.
It’s from Barbados. Spanish explorers called the indigenous method of slow-cooking meat barbacoa, and brought it to what would become the U.S. when their travels took them there.
Apple pie is an American invention.
There’s a recipe for a dessert consisting of a pastry shell filled with apples in a cookbook dating to 1390s England.
The chicken chain Popeye’s is named after Popeye the Sailor.
It’s named after Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the police detective portrayed by Gene Hackman in The French Connection.
Corned beef and cabbage is a traditional Irish meal.
When large numbers of Irish immigrants settled in New York City in the late 19th century, they bought food at delis run by Jewish immigrants. Corned beef is a dietary staple in that culture, and the Irish-Americans liked it, too.
Ray Kroc was the founder of McDonald’s.
Dick and Mac McDonald opened the first McDonald’s restaurant, a barbecue joint, in 1940. By 1954, they’d moved to selling only burgers, fries, and milkshakes and had developed a unique series of methods to cook and serve it all fast in more than 20 franchised locations. Ray Kroc, a milkshake mixer salesman, called on a McDonald’s one day, got involved in the company, and bought McDonald’s outright in 1961. Then he started building it into a massive worldwide operation.
A chipotle is a certain kind of pepper.
A chipotle is a smoked jalapeño.
Peanuts are nuts.
They’re legumes, like beans and lentils.
George Washington Carver invented peanut butter.
He devised 300 different items out of nuts, but peanut butter predated him.
Sushi is raw fish.
Sushi can be made with raw or cooked fish, but the word itself refers to the vinegar-prepared rice that goes with the fish.
Johnny Appleseed planted countless trees so people could have apples to eat.
The drinking water supply in many parts of the country was subpar, and people stayed hydrated with cider—the brewing process tends to kill most water-borne germs. John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman planted those trees not for food, but to provide apples for cider.
Drinking alcohol kills brain cells.
Heavy drinking over a long period of time can cause brain damage, as well as damage to the liver, but that’s not cell death. Thus, a drink doesn’t immediately kill brain cells after it’s been consumed.
Alcohol warms you up.
It makes capillaries just under the surface of the skin dilate, increasing the amount of blood that comes to the fore, which makes you feel warm. But it doesn’t change your body temperature any.
“Beer before liquor, never be sicker. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.”
The order in which you drink your drinks doesn’t reduce the chance of hangover or its severity.
Alcohol used in making food “cooks off” and isn’t intoxicating.
Not entirely. After an hour of cooking, 25 percent of the alcohol is intact, and after more than two hours, 5 percent remains.
Cocktails—alcohol mixed with juices and flavoring agents—were created during Prohibition to mask the terrible taste of rough, homemade booze or moonshine.
As long as there has been alcohol (thousands of years), people have been mixing it with other things to make it taste better, or to dilute the alcohol, or to stretch their supply.
Bottles of tequila have a worm at the bottom.
Both tequila and mezcal are made from the agave plant, which is home to a species of moth larvae. In their worm state, that larvae are packaged in bottles of mezcal, not tequila.
As it’s made with wormwood, the green-tinted alcohol absinthe is hallucinogenic.
It’s merely a very, very strong alcoholic spirit.
Caffeine dehydrates you.
Drinking caffeinated beverages doesn’t make you expel any more water than you normally would.
Coffee stunts growth.
It’s an old wives’ tale.
The use of MSG in Chinese food can cause headaches and sickness.
Monosodium glutamate is a flavor enhancer that doesn’t make anybody ill. If you don’t feel well after a large meal at an American-style Chinese restaurant, it’s probably because you just ate a gut bomb of carbs, sugar, fat, and calories.
Vegetables are a specific type of naturally growing food.
There’s no specific classification that makes a plant a “vegetable.”
In medieval times, the main use of spices in European cooking was to mask the nasty taste of rotten meat.
Spices were used to help preserve meat, not to overpower the smell and taste of meat that had turned.
Allspice is a mixture of various ground-up spices.
Allspice is made from the berries of an allspice tree.
Eating spicy foods can cause an ulcer.
They may exacerbate an existing ulcer, but the consumption of spicy foods can’t create one.
It’s safe to eat food that’s dropped on the ground if you pick it up within five seconds.
The “five-second rule” is nonsense. Bacteria can latch onto food instantly.
Avoid milk and dairy products when you have a cold, because it makes the body create more mucus.
Drinking milk doesn’t lead to an increase in mucus production.
It takes more calories to digest a celery stalk than there are in that celery.
A celery stalk has about six calories, and the body burns about 0.5 calories processing it.
Wines get better with time.
More than 90 percent of wines lose their flavor after a maximum of two years in the bottle. Heavy reds are about the only wines that do get better the longer they sit, because bitter-tasting chemicals dissipate. But after about 10 years of sitting around, little more additional change occurs.
Wild rice is a type of rice.
Wild rice is Zizania aquatica, a variety of grass seed. And while it does grow naturally, the kind they sell in stores is cultivated on large farms.
Heavy cream is the most leaden of dairy products.
“Heavy” means “highest fat content.”
U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher invented soft-serve ice cream.
Long before her political career, Thatcher worked as a chemist at food company J. Lyons and Co. at a time when the company was working on a new soft-serve ice cream product.
Never put bananas in the refrigerator.
That’s just according to the Chiquita banana commercial jingle. Keeping them on the counter until they’ve ripened, and then refrigerating them, will make them last longer.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
In the 1940s and 1950s, cereal producers began fortifying their products with vitamins, and their ad campaigns used that in marketing campaigns to argue for the nutritional importance of breakfast. As far as dietary science is concerned, breakfast isn’t any more vital than any other meal.
Need water to boil faster? Sprinkle some salt in there to speed up the process.
Adding salt to fresh water makes no noticeable difference in the length of time it takes water to boil.
Don’t eat foods with mayonnaise in them that have been left out in the sun…unless you want to get really sick.
That did used to happen, but back when people made their own mayonnaise at home. Today’s packaged mayonnaises are loaded with preservatives.
General Foods was battling “exploded kid” rumors as early as 1979, a scant four years after it introduced Pop Rocks to the marketplace. They took out full-page ads in dozens of publications, wrote 50,000 letters to schools around the country, and sent the candy’s inventor on a lecture circuit to explain that Pop Rocks aren’t dangerous. Pop Rocks generate less gas than a can of soda, and the only explosive reaction they can cause, even if consumed with a Coke, is a belch. Despite all that, the rumors abound that the child actor who played “Mikey” in ads for Life cereal in the early 1970s died after consuming the supposedly dangerous concoction. (He didn’t.)