What’s your favorite food fact that is true but sounds totally made up? I’ll start: about half of the mushrooms produced across the United States of America each year (more than 300 million pounds of mushrooms in recent years) are produced in *one county* in Pennsylvania.
🍄🟫
It’s little known among NM chili connoisseurs-but though Hatch chili is in everything nationwide-Lemitar chili is as good-or better-and harvested a bit later in the season.
Ok here’s another: Hawaiian pizza was invented by a Greek-born Canadian chef in 1962
I wish this never happened.
This is a popular ice-breaker for trainings I do with my water/wastewater communities. Start with the initial debate, the hit them with a DYK. It’s actually very engaging. Everyone has an opinion.
Like just an unrelated dyk, or a relevant to the topic dyk?
The topic of whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza is a fun & debatable topic. It’s easy to get people engaged & nobody’s feelings get hurt. As we wrap up the debate, that’s when I hit them with the DYK that Hawaiian pizza was created by a Greek immigrant in Canada.
But training topics are water and wastewater infrastructure, operations of small utilities, and the skills they need to become certified in the field.
Man if the Internet was more like this exchange, I'd be all for it. Thanks for the knowledge!
It is a great way to divert a group of people away from heated debates or arguments.
Especially nowadays!
The caesar salad was created by an Italian man in Mexico in 1924.
It was Tijuana chef Caesar Cardini, he ran a restaurant popular with Californian tourists during prohibition. The salad is named after him, and has nothing to do with Ancient Rome despite what a lot of dressing bottles would lead you to believe.
Maybe. But Hawain pizza was popularised in Australia. It's available everywhere. It's totally different to Hawaiian pizza.
How was he punished?
He was lauded as the hero we didn’t know we needed.
You lost me here because this just makes logical sense.
🤣
Yeah, “it wasn’t an Italian” is the least surprising news one could relate here.
The cans of pineapple he used were branded "Hawaii."
That is the biggest war crime Canada ever committed. We should’ve sent that guy to The Hague.
Considering „contributions” Canada made for The Hague’s war crimes definitions, this is pretty bold 😜
I'm a Canadian and a history major and I stand by my statement. Hanging is too good for Hawaiian pizza inventors (and orderers! Looking at you, my former employers!)
Then you know what you’re talking about. Fair enough
The combination was based on a grilled spamwich, which had been very popular in Germany since the 50s under the name of "toast Hawaii".
And is a symbol of colonialism coz pineapples 🍍 are not native to hawaii, they were imported and grown by colonialists settlers
WHAT?!
I once talked my way into a tour of a farm there in hopes of selling a story & came away traumatized: Why has no horror film never been set in a mushroom factory?
Not a movie, but I remember the “Amouse Bouche” episode of the Hannibal series. A killer buries his victims alive, using them as fertilizer for a mushroom garden. 😬
📌
What’s crazy to me is that it’s suburban and prosperous Chester County, not one of PA’s many, many rural counties
Fuck that's Trump country. They will cooperate with ICE raids.
thought "this sounds like a pub radio story" and look there whyy 💕
Mushroom Festival is only a month away! mushroomfestival.org
Lovely as that piece is, it does not mention the fuel for the Chester County mushroom phenomenon: straw bedded horses. Without the fancy horse industry and its requisite horse poo -- also chicken poo -- mushrooms, esp organics, in PA would be another story. www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/...
If it's not from Chester county, it's just sparkling fungus.
The Mushroom Festival is on Sept 6th, it’s worth a visit!
Restaurants are a consequence of the French Revolution.
Sorry, what?!
I was trying to find the Adam Ruins Everything clip that explains it, but I can't. So basically, when all the nobles started losing their heads, their private chefs were suddenly out of a job with no real world skills outside of cooking for rich folks.
So once the heads stopped rolling, they started cooking for people and had them come to THEM. Up until that point you'd go to an inn with a pot of forever stew or something, but now you could go and get a custom dinner like a rich guy and feel fancy for a night.
all apples are clones
Rude
It’s easier to grow pears by grafting onto an apple tree, than planting one.
Avocados are all clones, too (at least all the ones that are any good for eating).
And bananas!
Bananas is a whole ass disaster. Monoculture has put bananas at risk of extinction.
A lot of people are surprised that a banana tree is more like a giant weed, it barely has any roots. This is why even a weak hurricane will wreak havoc.
And for those how aren't aware: "Also known as Panama Disease, it is a fungus that has been rampaging through banana farms for the past 30 years. But within the last decade the epidemic has suddenly accelerated..." www.science.org/content/arti... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_...
This can’t be true.
They're not all _the same_ clones, but eating apples are all clones. Apples grown from seed taste wildly different from their parents tree, so every commercially-available apple variety is made by coming and grafting.
Apples grown from seed are pretty much just good for making alcohol (which makes Johnny Appleseed hilarious as a folk-hero hilarious).
You sound like you know what you’re talking about but I’m still going to get a second opinion.
Pretty much all tree fruit is grown this way including citrus, stonefruit, apples, pears, and avocados. Graft a branch of a tree that makes good fruit onto the trunk of a variety that has hearty roots.
Our honey supply is at risk from American foulbrood, a highly contagious bacteria that’s fatal to bees - and dogs are coming to the rescue.
Have to bookmark this for later when I need an endorphin hit.
Maple ❤️ 🙏
Massachusetts uses a dog to sniff out Asian longhorned beetle infestations.
Apiary dogs is my favorite wake-up story yet!
It’s the Pushing Daisies episode I didn’t know I needed!
Holy moly! Good doggie!!
Chester County, motherfuckers!
Exactly. Home of shrooms and the Travel and Leisure best small town in America.
I live in Phoenixville! Home of The Blob!
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In Denmark the danish is called vienna bread. Salmon sashimi is not originally a japanese dish. Norway had a surplus of salmon in the 80s and launched Project Japan to introduce the japanese market to salmon. Filet-O-Fish was created to avoid a drop in burger sales on the catholic friday fast.
The Filet-o-Fish story resonates wit me, because my first visit to McDonald's, as a kid of 9 or 10, was on a Friday. I still obeyed my elders, and ordered the fish.
Yes don’t think I ever had salmon sashimi or sushi 🍣 in a high end / authentic Tokyo sushi bar
Chocolate milk comes from brown cows
No, but generally brown eggs come from hens with brown feathers and white eggs come from hens with white feathers
You mean to tell me that strawberry milk does not come from Swedish red cows ..?.?
It's by breed. Our white hens lay brown eggs.
The color of their ear patches = egg color
Solid white chickens. Brown eggs. Been looking at chickens a lot this year. Most of the breeds state the egg color you'll get.
Wow. If I found a chicken that could talk, I wouldn't care about the egg colour.
Nope.
Yep, that does sound totally made up
This is true and what I say whenever I pass a herd for brown cows.
Potatoes are indigenous only to Peru.
Tomatoes and modern potatoes are both descended from the same potato-like plant.
In a typical year, there are over 600 million chickens in the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia (Delmarva) Peninsula. (Imagine if they could vote!) www.dcachicken.com/facts/facts-...
The outcome of US elections could not possibly get any weirder no matter how many chickens were involved
I grew up on a chicken farm in Virginia and our farm alone had four times as many chickens as there were people in my town.
The first potatoes to become common in Europe were sweet potatoes. When potato potatoes were later introduced, they were called “bastard potatoes” to distinguish them.
Also, China’s huge modern population owes as much to sweet potatoes as rice. Before sweet potatoes were introduced it had about the same population as Europe and persistent famines kept it from growing. Sweet potatoes changed that.
Ie the same population as Europe *at the time* — so 100m to 150m
80% of canned pumpkin in America comes from Morton, IL (pop. 17,000)
My hometown. Smells every September.
The most nutritious part of a banana is the skin. it contains high amounts of vitamin B6 and B12, plus magnesium, potassium, fiber and protein.
I find this information frankly rather discouraging 🙁 🍌. It serms a diet of potato peelings and banana skins is depressingly nutritious 😰😉
😂🤣😂 They're information about the banana skins has changed my life for the worse. Before, I used to be proud about having eaten a piece of fruit. Now I feel bad because I throw the skins. 🤷
😂
Have to admit, I've never seen a monkey eat the banana peel too. 😉
Good point!
📌
Banana milkshake tastes of actual bananas; it's just that the bananas they were based on were wiped out in a mass banana disease epidemic leaving only the sturdier Cavendish banana.
Not particularly sturdy, just not subject to that particular plant disease. Also all cones of the same plant, so when a blight does hit the Cavendish, we're basically SOL.
And that's already happening. biologyinsights.com/what-are-cav...
*all clones of
40% of global carrot seeds come from New Zealand.
Along with half of all butter exports
Ciabatta bread was invented in the 1980s.
Despite our moniker as the prairie state and the more visible corn & beans, Illinois is the pumpkin capital of the world! 🎃 extension.illinois.edu/pumpkins
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Banana-flavored candy tastes so weird bc it’s based off a kind of banana that USED to be the most popular, until we ate it to extinction. Now a different type is what we’re used to. (I don’t have the source but read an article about it years ago)
That'd have to be Menominquaek for me. It's a traditional Menominee dish from Wisconsin. Mix wild rice (black as night), pecans, a little bit of fat (used to be goose grease, now butter) and maple syrup. Nothing like it for getting you through a -16F day with feet of snow on the ground!
For that matter, maple syrup is pretty unbelievable. Yeah, we tap all these trees and then boil the stuff FOR DAYS in the coldest part of the year, and at the end we have pure sugar that can help us survive in spite of the cold.
Nixtamalization! This is wild. So. Columbus’ voyage brought Corn/ Maiz to Europe in 1493, but they didn’t bring the mesoamerican tradition of pounding corn meal with lime to make masa, which allows the nutrients to be absorbed during digestion. (1/2)
Italian peasants used the corn to make polenta (non-nixtamalized corn meal) which is delicious but far less nutritious. This led to massive outbreaks of Pellagra, which is caused by niacin deficiency, particularly among poor farmers who were using corn as their staple food. (2/2)
Also the word Nixtamal (nixtamalized corn flour) and tamale 🫔 come from the same root in the Nahuatl / Aztec language
Lemons did not exist until a cross between a citron and a bitter orange. Meaning life can never truly give you lemons
whaaaa
When life doesn't give us lemons, we create them ourselves. There's a lesson there.
I feel like we're drowning in the lemons we've created!
I hear you. But this is one of those two sided lessons (I tell myself when I'm depressed). When life doesn't give you lemons, you get spiritual scurvy. You have no strength and no stability if you're never challenged or forced to do the difficult.
Unfortunately right now some people get all the lemons, and some never have to deal with any. That makes for a class of people who are pretty sick and a class who are really tired of living on lemonade.
Not buying it. I've had a chronic pain condition for over 30 years. I'm not one iota tougher for living with it. I'm just exhausted.
Sorry. I hope things improve for you. This is something I take comfort in, because the alternative is getting hopeless and wanting to kill myself. So telling myself this is a way to stay alive. Take care of yourself.
It's a fine line to walk, but I have, deep down, eternal hope. Use what works for you. Good luck, my friend.
What is a citron? 🍋
A citrus fruit with a very thick rind and next to no pulp. Varietals include Buddha's Hand and the various sorts of Etrog.
Thanks 🙏. Gosh, never heard of any of these
The wikipedia 'Citrus Taxonomy' page is its own special rabbit hole en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_...
I just barely escaped...
It really turns the phrase “when life gives you lemons” into techno-utopian hopium
But couldn't the cross between citron and bitter orange happen naturally? I guess we can't really know, but maybe life gave us lemons.
Yeah and the smell in that county is insane, don't know how ppl live there
Some Korean soy sauce is fermented to the sounds of classical music. Look up music fermentation. Certain frequencies may affect the critters involved in fermentation. (Yep, I bought some. Yep, it’s tasty😂)
I did look it up. And also found the reversed process phys.org/news/2020-02...
I saw that, too😂 Pretty amazing!
Originally, Coca Cola contained cocaine. But they adjusted the formula due to concerns about addiction; still, I understand the formula still contains some (non-cocaine) coca leaf extracts.
Until the late 1800s, lobster was considered poverty food.
Before with our overpopulation and “development” we destroyed our coastal ecosystems and the food services they can provide us
Similar thing happened with cod, it is only for special occasions now in the poor and not-so-affluent countries where it used to be a staple food before stocks plummeted, thanks to overfishing.
Yeah, but with lobster it was less plummeting stocks than it was lobster suddenly being marketed as a delicacy at high-end clubs and whatnot. Poor people in Maine always continued eating it like normal. Lobster is still not even remotely scarce, because they're actively farmed.
I can see the lobster 🦞 pots from where I live and work, but can barely buy it here as it’s far too expensive. I’m not sure if lobster pots is the same as farm, but that’s what they do in Cornwall/the UK
Lobster is scarce everywhere I’ve ever lived. Costs a fortune and I live in a fishing town on the coast! From what I hear it’s hard for the fishermen to get as much of it as they used to, and hey, UK/global population massively increased, so lobster 🦞 expensive here. We pretty much never have it
I don't think lobster was ever as prevalent in the UK as it always has been in Maine. I'm as far away as you can get from a seashore in the US, and I can still get a freshish lobster for under 10 bucks, which is... cheaper than a burger combo now.
Wow. That’s amazing. Jealous!! If I remember right lobster 🦞 I’m was cheap in the UK a 100 years or more ago?
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Something I very much miss after moving from northwestern NJ to the Midwest. Every supermarket had a wide variety of great mushrooms. Now, it's hard to get anything other than hard white buttons or sad portobellos.
White button and portobello mushrooms 🍄🟫 are the same mushrooms! just grown to different sizes
Yes. It goes button, cremini, and then portobello.
Now I must learn how baby bellas fit into this!
More sweet potatoes are grown in North Carolina than the rest of the country combined.
Nearly 100% of US raisins are grown within 60mi of Fresno, CA. Bonus: 90% of US grown frozen raspberries are from Lynden, WA.
The local fresh raspberries in Whatcom County are fantastic! (I grew up there).
The wild blackberries as well.
A lot to love about Bellingham / Whatcom County, especially in the summertime!
Also, best 4th of July fireworks I've ever seen.
A little media coverage for that. www.seattletimes.com/life/food-dr...
In "The Wells Fargo Wagon" from The Music Man a character says "I hope I get my raisins from Fresno" and it never occurred to me that a kid-1950s musical about a traveling conman WOULDN'T be deeply rooted in agricultural realities.
Sadly not all Lynden is known for. I posted about it before I saw your post. They are yummy though.
💖 I knew about Fresno! We have so many ag heavy hitters in CA. Gilroy - garlic! Castroville - artichokes! Oxnard - strawberries!
The raisin one isn't really surprising if you've been to the Central Valley. The miles and miles of farms as far as the eye can see are truly amazing. The Central Valley grows about half of all the produce consumed in America and about 75% of the fruits and nuts specifically.
You can eat bananas in thirds without cutting them. They naturally split that way. (I used to do this as a kid because I wanted to enjoy the flavor for longer. It baffled family and friends to no end.)
I discovered this as a child playing with my food. You’re the only other person I have seen who knows about this phenomenon.
It's like finding a cheat code for food, right??
I find it astounding that more kids didn’t discover this by sticking their poky little fingers into everything
I used to do this all the time with cucumber slices as a kid, eating the part on the outside and then splitting the seed part in the center into thirds. Every once in a while you get a weird cucumber that splits into fourths instead.
I was not fed many cucumbers as a kid and did not know this
Check it out sometime. Highly recommended
Clarification for those who never stuck their poky little fingers into a banana: do it gently at either end and the fruit magically divides into three lengthwise strips.
What? Explain further please.
I bit along the side, and discovered that it naturally peeled away into thirds.
Poke it in one end and it sort of splits lengthwise into thirds. Usually.
100% of the US grown artichokes are grown in California (41 metric tonnes or 9 million pounds). 80% of which are grown in Monterey county.
In traditional Belgian lambic breweries, spiders contribute to the unique flavor profile of the beer. As the beer is brewed in big open-air tanks to capture wild yeasts from the air, the brewers let spiders live in the brewery as a way to prevent flies and other pests from diving into the beer.
Kennet Square is quite a place.
Yeah, Kennett Square! One of my friends is from there. 😊
If all strawberry-flavoured products were made with real strawberries, an area the size of Africa would need to be cultivated with only strawberries
Check out The Sticky On Prime video
@thejessness.bsky.social many excellent food facts
The three most popular mushroom kinds are actually the same mushroom at different stages in its life.
The “London Fog”, now a staple menu item at coffee shops across North America, was invented by a woman in Vancouver, Canada. She was pregnant at the time and thus couldn’t get her normal coffee fix. www.vancouverisawesome.com/food-and-dri...
I’ve never heard of this drink!
It hadn’t occurred to me before I learned this that it was not, in fact, invented in London.
About two thirds of all hazelnuts in the world are produced in a small region (eastern Black Sea) of Turkey.
Human consume the fluids of other mammals … We even add bacteria to these fluids and leave them sitting around until they form solid masses that we delightfully consume …
And don't get me started on beaver butt squeezings.
To "yes, and ..." A particular kind is then left out to be infested by fly larva, leading to an advanced state of fermentation before being consumed. Traditionally, the larva are not removed first.
That's a cheesy story. Yo gurt to be kidding me.
We got animal puke dishes. Animal poop dishes. Animal milk dishes. Animal blood dishes. And of course, animal cum dishes. There is no excretion that people don't consume.
Berks county
Parsimmons are not in fact tiny pumpkins, but something else, called parsimmons.
Yup! And that’s where my brother’s little specialty mushroom farm is! www.facebook.com/Pennypackmus...
The microalgae Schizochytrium sp, which occurs naturally in mangrove forests, is used for the industrial production of DHA and EPA. Fish do not produce these long-chain omega-3 fatty acids at all, but absorb them from algae with their food.
I read that the "fish smell" is also more an algae smell.
Potatoes are from wild tomatoes way back in the day
Go on…. ?
Here ya go bsky.app/profile/csmi...
Thanks! I knew they were both nightshades …
That was a big news story about a week ago www.techexplorist.com/potatos-dna-...
They don’t rhyme :-)
Sorry. Wyld Tomatoes with Bill and Ted guitar riff
Back in the day being 9 million years ago, according to the article. That's pretty cool though.
Coincidentally, I just listened to the Science Versus podcast on this topic, yesterday. It's fascinating. Potatoes and Tomatoes are both from the Nightshade family. They were like distant cousins. But then they crossbred in Peru 9 million years ago. Some genes from tomatoes trigger the formation of
tubers in potato plants! So cool.
A food called, "Liver mush" ks produced in my home county in North Carolina, & in the surrounding 3 counties. It doesn't exist anywhere else.
I want to know more
I grew up with it, so I thought it was good! It came in the refrigerator section of the grocery store, 1lb square blocks, wrapped in wax paper. It had a peppery taste, & was fried with eggs in the mornings. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livermush
I just read that it was also mixed with sage, & then could *smell* it, like I was 4yrs old again.
Great job naming it ☹️😅
Interesting. My grandmother made cornmeal mush, which was similar preparation and serving, but was largely the course corn meal and a little bit of pork without the liver, etc. Fried up and with a little bit of syrup was delicious.
I've definitely known ppl to eat liver mush w/ syrup. Apparently scrapple can have sweet preparations? I've never heard of liver mush being made sweet.
It’s pretty similar to scrapple, right?
It's a descendant (?) of scrapple. German immigrants in Appalachia used local ingredients+ seasoning.
As a Philadelphian expat in North Carolina, no. It’s packaged similarly but I think that’s about where it ends.
Interesting. Is it a really different seasoning profile?
Liver mush is more pepper & sage.
And do you know what medium they use to grow the mushrooms? The used straw from the horses stabled at Fair Hill Training Center The facility earns revenue from selling soiled straw bedding to local mushroom farmers.
That's gotta be one damp county
Tomatoes were not part of Italian cuisine until the 16th century.
Hmm . . . Is that a "little-known" fact nowadays? It was a pretty standard item in 1960s classrooms (typically during discussions of Columbus, et al).
Hot dogs are an essential part of modern American foreign policy www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hot...
Oregon grows 99% of hazelnuts in the US
This article is always a good read. It's Italy, so of course the food expert started out as a Marxist academic. www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/x...
Excellent article
Mexican al pastor meat was introduced by Lebanese immigrants, along with the rotating grill spit, in the 1920s.
Mexican shawarma!
My local mall has a place that serves taco shawarma
I think Madison County, Texas is the second largest mushroom producer, or at least it was in 2010
Some people prefer to drink raw milk.
They also prefer to die
👍😄
You can lead a stubborn ass to one of biggest breakthroughs in nutrition and food safety in history, but you can't make them drink it.
Some people prefer to drink boiled, water-like tasteless milk
Source?
The best Rhubarb is grown in sheds by candlelight in the Tingley Triangle. You can hear the leaves popping as they grow. youtu.be/CG9Bl5ClBks?...
thanks for sharing that video short. I had no idea anyone managed rhubarb that way. I’ve never seen blanched rhubarb before. It’s pretty!
It's also delicious 😋. And much more tender than outdoor grown rhubarb.
We still use clay rhubarb forcers in the garden en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb...
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
Neat! Love an obscure hyper-specific ceramic garden tool! Those are handsome. Do you place them over the rhubarb in early spring when it’s just a cluster of little red knobs? can you harvest all of the stems for a span of weeks before letting it leaf out, like asparagus?
Eating 20 Brazil nuts a day will make you very sick.
The radiation, right?
Selenium.
My favorite food is "Black Raspberries". I even enjoy wading through the briars to pick them.
THis is a fun fact I didn't know that I needed to know. I looked up the region, it seems so small for so much production! Thanks for making me smarter.
the reason i knew this was because some years ago the Philly Inquirer did a story about the abysmal conditions these people work under.
Wieners are named for Vienna, but in Vienna they call them Frankfurters.
Similarly: the pastry that is known to you as Danish is known as Vienna bread in Denmark.
there are tons of regional names for the same thing in German speaking countries - contrary to popular belief, jfk’s speech “ich bin ein berliner” was totally correct, we don’t call jelly donuts berliners in Berlin, we call them Pfannkuchen
In Australia we would say frankfurters. I guess also: images.app.goo.gl/HmB55DQwgyNR...
in Germany there’s actually a difference between wiener (beef/pork) and frankfurter (pork)
Caeser Salad was invented in Mexico. Also 99.9% of what purports to be Caeser Salad really isn’t.
If the dressing was premade, it’s just a Romaine salad with croutons and a creamy dressing.
Those of us with fish allergies know that the dressing is supposed to contain anchovies.
Pineapple plants can take two to three years to produce a fruit, but they can live up to 50 years
I think probably similar for most fruit trees: Apple 🍎 pears 🍐 plums nectarines 🍑 peaches 🍑 etc?
Yes but a pineapple plant is not a tree, it’s a bromeliad (a flowering plant) and It's the only bromeliad that produces a significant edible fruit
🍍 ❤️ 💛
There's not mushroom left to grow anything else.
And lemme tell you, having played a range of high school sports in the facilities of that county, the nose knows...
The dessert bananas we eat today are all clones from the Cavendish cultivar which, before the 1950's, was considered trash inferior to the much preferred Gros Michel cultivar. But the Gros Michel went extinct due to Panama disease, and now all we're left with is this Cavendish trash fruit.
Actually, it DOES still exist. Though it's hard to find and expensive because not many people grow them anymore, being so susceptible to disease. Also fun: Artificial banana candy flavor is actually based on the gros michel species. So give you some idea of what it would taste like.
There used to be lots of ketchup or catsup recipes. mushroom catsup was the most popular. And they were not sweet. I think it was regulations for food safety that made the high acid content of tomatoes with tons of sugar the standard catsup of today slicesofbluesky.com/cooks-oracle...
Ciabatta was invented in 1982. Apparently it's one of the most well documented food inventions in modern history.
People hating on ciabatta have clearly never had good ciabatta. Freshly baked, homemade .. mmmmm. An enriched bread (contains olive oil), made properly, stays fresh longer than most. A certain sandwich chain has a version which isn’t actually ciabatta .. and yes, it’s horrible.
Ya - I am taken aback by some of the responses here. Real ciabatta is delicious, no matter HOW old it is.
I kind of always hated it. Tasteless and tough with soggy crust. Maybe this is why.
Yeah, it’s definitely the most disappointing of bakery breads.
goes stale in five minutes
Ciabatta is Italian for stale.
🤣
Wasn't trying to fool anyone, just a quip.
Well, so does baguette but it’s glorious for those 5 minutes.
Pas du tout! Quality artisan baguette bread keeps at least until the next day but the thing is that we often buy one every morning and another one in the evening. Germans claim to have the best bread but I can’t concur. The variety and quality of French bread from artisan bakeries is sublime.
Try plain white bread from Tuscany. It’s basically cardboard coming stale right out of the oven. It’s crusty on the outside but in a dry boring way. The inside will turn your mouth into the Atacama desert - without any hint of salt or spices. I feel the urge to down a gallon of water writing this.
I love Costco ciabatta. Needs to be toasted or heated it oven though.
See, the thing is, if you use it to make garlic bread, it's heavenly.
I live very close and that only makes it harder to believe. We have a lot of damn good mushroom soup around here.
Well I’ll be damned
The different colors of bell peppers are from the same plant, just harvested at different times.
It's true that green bell peppers are that color because they're harvested before they're fully ripe, but red, orange, yellow, white, purple, and brown peppers come from different varieties that produce different combinations/concentrations of pigments. www.compoundchem.com/2016/07/05/b...
I used to live one county over in Delaware and there was a mushroom farm nearby and we could smell it on hot days
It's amazing how many crops are like that. I was just reading this a couple days ago about frozen raspberries: www.seattletimes.com/life/food-dr...
Food is a lie perpetuated by the Big S*** Cartel. FREE YOUR #MIND!!! #plarp
There's a chemical in raw celery that some fraction of people are sensitive to that causes them to perceive an extremely strong, gag-inducing taste. Other people just don't taste it. It's similar to the cilantro soap issue.
I love cilantro, but dislike celery (and like celeriac). Celery taste for sometimes like soap.
I was astonished when I first learned that -- that most of us simply can't taste celery. And those who can taste celery reeeeally don't like the taste of celery.
it's absolutely vile, on par with 'I'm consuming a toxin.'
I can taste it and I like it, but . . . I’ve always been weird :)
Is the same chemical? That would make sense, since celery and cilantro are related.
I can’t eat cilantro because of the soapy taste. But I love celery and it tastes fine to me.
I think I have the cilantro soap thing, but overcame it by intense exposure and now I enjoy it _because_ of the odd soapy taste. Celery is fine/neutral to me. Wonder if there is something similar with truffles, because I feel they taste like burned plastic.
I can eat cilantro more easily than I can suffer celery, but cilantro is a really strong soap taste to me and I wouldn't readily do it. I bet you're right that conditioning could work since I don't suffer any allergic reactions, but I can't imagine wanting to get to that point!
I have a friend who feels the same way about truffles.
I have this, cannot fathom how people enjoy the taste, then realised I was tasting something they weren't. Can confirm it has lessened as I get older, but it's still unpleasant.
It took me a really long time to realize they just didn't taste it. I really thought they were eating that vile stuff!
Is that why my tongue goes a bit numb when eating celery?
Mine does this with celery, pineapple and lately, more and more fruits.
If you aren’t familiar (I wasn’t until I went anaphylactic for the 1st time but had allergies my whole life) there’s a thing called oral allergy syndrome where you’re allergic to food because of seasonal allergies. I know pineapple is on the list. (1/2)
I’m allergic to bananas super bad because there’s a protein in bananas that’s similar to a protein found in birch trees. I wonder if celery is on that list and/or if you can make sense of your fruit allergies by looking up a list.
This may mean you’re allergic. I had a colleague who was allergic to celery.
You might be allergic. Get that checked.
I am allergic to other foods. I think it is a cross reactivity between celery and another food that I am allergic to.
I find that allergists these days are useless.
Ok. Just wanted you to have the info.
They can’t even test me for things that I know that have been allergic to for over thirty years. Now I am stuck with an epipen that is expiring and no one to prescribe it to me again.
I don't know! I do know that the chemical in raw celery inspires an absolutely dire, immediate gag reflex in me and that it's sufficiently uncommon that no one had any idea what I was talking about until I was in college and a friend's father had heard of the sensitivity. Goes away when cooked.
OMG! That must be why I love the taste in chicken cacciatore but have spent my whole life barely coming to tolerate them when they turn up in salads.
it's true it's definitely at that level. I've physically forced myself to swallow it when spitting wasn't on, but that's the only other choice and it's a really tough one to make! Try it if you run across a veg platter--even the juice on a carrot is enough to make the carrot hard to consume for me.
I was a picky eater as a kid and Mexican food cured me of that. I'll try anything and love just about every kind of food, but I had to overcome that cilantro soap taste (among other things). I just can't appreciate raw celery.
Interesting. My friend is wildly allergic to raw parsnips (just touching them, never eaten one), but absolutely fine with them once they’re cooked.
life is really strange! It must be a chemical that's denatured at cooking temps like me and the gag taste. I'm definitely not allergic, just can't keep it in my mouth.
wow, I could never eat raw celery, but I love it in soups. now I know why!
Idk if celery is on the list but you might want to look up something called oral allergy syndrome. It’s where food allergies are caused by similar proteins in things you’re allergic to. For me it’s bananas because I’m super allergic to birch trees. You might want to see if the list of crossovers
makes sense to you. If your tongue goes numb eating celery please skip it until you talk to a doctor. It might be the beginning signs of anaphylaxis. Or it could be nothing but I wanted to make sure you were safe!
that might be an allergy!
I think it is a cross reactivity between celery and another food that I am allergic to.
All of the white button mushrooms sold worldwide are descendants of a single mutant mushroom found on a brown mushroom farm in Pennsylvania
Cremini mushrooms and portobello mushrooms have nothing to do with Italy, they were given Italian sounding names as a marketing gimmick
your profile pic is really creepy. AI imagery will forever be in the uncanny valley.
You’re not wrong
Everytime you eat a chocolate bar, you’re eating more than minuscule amounts of ground insects. There is no technology or technique to separate insects from the cocoa seeds on the conveyor belt during the chocolate production process. www.terro.com/consuming-cr...
Yikes! 😳
It’s not just Hershey’s either 🌚
Basically all spices etc has regionally varying maximum levels of allowed bug content, which aren’t ever Zero. There was this hypothesis floating around that chocolate allergy may be related to the insect bits.
SciAm did a thing on this www.scientificamerican.com/article/spic...
This is a much better source than the one I posted! I still can’t find the link I’d last seen some 10 years ago … before I stopped worrying about ground insects and learned to live with chocolate bars. Having said that, thank you for sharing this source!
I spent a moment trying to find the official EU documents, but didn’t hit on the right euphemisms, and then I remembered that SciAm chart.
I read somewhere once that American chocolate is not allowed to exceed 5% by weight of cockroach I have NEVER eaten American chocolate since - and that was some decades ago! The actual rules is that the FDA considers chocolate safe for consumption with less than 60 insect fragments per 100 grams 🪳
This might help me reduce the occasional annoying desire for chocolate 🍫. Now tell me similarly bad things about coffee and biscuits
You’ll have to run at least a 10K to compensate for a box of cookies/container of biscuits. Even after you run 30K, you’re likely to only shed 2000 - 2500 calories (if you don’t take a single banana or drink no coconut water).
Fortunately I rarely eat more than 1-2 biscuits at a time! That still seems to need me needing some 10k runs 🏃 , Altho generally too exhausted to do them
And coffee is good for you ☕
+1
That haggis is made with sheep stomach and guts. And people actually it.
It's the pluck, so heart, liver, and lungs, and the lungs are why authentic haggis is illegal to import to America.
Which makes me so sad.
eat...
Well, definitely organs but I wouldn’t say they’re the “guts.” It’s really good! It’s not really any weirder than many sausage-type products.
One of the best meals of my life was haggis and whipped parsnip at an upscale restaurant in Scotland. It was incredible.
It’s basically I sausage-meatloaf hybrid
I think of haggis as “loose sausage “
The Netherlands (17 million people) is the second largest exporter of agricultural goods in the world (by value).
But that’s because they import and re-export a lot of things, not because they are the 2nd biggest agricultural producer.
I will make it more specific by focussing on a single crop: The Netherlands is the largest exporter of onions world wide.
This is part of the reason, but as a single statement, a bit short sighted. Other reasons are major food surplus because of extreme productivity of greenhouses, very fertile soil in land-reclaimed areas (Flevopolder), and high value crops (flowers).
water-reclaimed*, if only we had an edit button.
Also the sheer intensity we breed plants and how far it is away from "select the best ones and seed again" "Hey let's see what doubling the chromosomes of this little thing would do!" 🤔 Or the way they crossed citrus fruits back and forth until they have a totally new plant. Or Hybrid Breeding 🤯
Kale is a traditional winter food in Northern Germany, prepared very unhealthy (cooked for hours, lots of fat and meat) and often eaten socially with lots of alcohol
But with non-alcoholic beer once or twice a year it's still delicious.
I could have it every week. Also had some great vegetarian versions.
Yep! The traditional Christmas dinner of my northern German husband’s family is kale cooked for hours with pork roast & sausage, then served with caramelized potatoes. They would eat it on the 24th and 26th of December only (and abstain food from kale the rest of the year). We still eat it at Xmas.
I can't find something called "Knackwurst" here in Germany
You can home produce it if you aren't to attached to the letter "n" in that word. ...I'll see myself out.
Another one: The whole concept of "Atomic Gardening" (a breeding technology) and that many of our crops have this in their ancestry en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_...
📌 WOW, just wow!
Oh jeah, also it is interesting to look into horse meat. Very common in parts of Europe, but taboo in UK and US. In Europe it became less common because people, especially soldiers badly remembered it als war food.
Horse meat isn't just taboo in the US. It's federally illegal to slaughter horses for human consumption. There is however a farm in Texas that you can get lion meat from.
I would go with Grapefruits being GMOs and their ability to interfere with lots of medication
*Pink* grapefruit strains being created by bombarding regular grapefruit with gamma rays is the wild one for me
WHAT
bsky.app/profile/mask...
🤯
Not just grapefruit, canola was also created by irradiation. Mutation that eliminated a toxic natural component of the parent plant
Grapefruits naturally have an enzyme that keeps your liver from metabolizing stuff the way it's supposed to. No genetic modification necessary. Actually, all they had to do to make grapefruits was hybridize citrus fruits like we do with dogs, shooting for a 75% pomelo and 25% mandarin.
You are right. I should have specified pink grapefruits which is all I get in the supermarket here.
-40 seconds into bingeing pink grapefruit errata- "Remember, that one Guitar Hero track exists" Sorry. I'm too internet poisoned. I can't.
www.seattletimes.com/life/food-dr...
American and European currants are different fruits. Actual currants (from Europe) were illegal in the US for a long time because the plant carried a fungus that also attacked pine trees, & the US valued its lumber industry more. "Currants" in the US are instead a type of raisin.
Red currants are native to Europe, too, though, and my German grandmother grew them. They’re members of the same genus as black currants and gooseberries, Ribes. It’s still illegal to grow any them in my town (dammit) in Massachusetts, but many other places have removed the restrictions.
But consequently, we don’t really have black currant flavored anything. Zante currants (the raisins) are available, but not very known, at least not where I’ve lived. (Upper Midwest, Florida, NYC, DC, California, and New England.)
Canned pumpkin isn't made with any pumpkin you'd recognize as pumpkin. The Dickinson pumpkin that you make pie with is a different species more closely related to cantaloupe and cucumber than to field pumpkins you carve at Halloween (which are stringy and watery in flavor).
You can use carrots to make pumpkin pie.
I've eaten it. It's texturally different, but pretty good.
Carrot pie, or field pumpkin? I've roasted the little "pie pumpkins" (wondering what the hell those are now) and they were... disappointing.
Carrot. The only fresh pumpkin I've had in pie was butternut, and it needed a lot more water removed.
Did a rabbit write this? *suspiciously eyes your user pic*
Hilarious. Actually my mom was thrifty.
There're some confusions here: - Canned pumpkin is Dickinson pumpkin - Dickinson pumpkin is Cucurbita moschata: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickins... - Butternut squash is also C. moschata: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbi...
- Field pumpkins are C. pepo, as are zucchini and acorn squash: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucurbi... - So canned pumpkin and field pumpkins are the same genus, different species - While cantaloupe is Cucumis melo, a different genus - And cucumber is also Cucumis, Cucumis sativus
Apologies, that is correct... I didn't double check that claim of the article. I was actually only reading the article at all to double check my father's claim that canned pumpkin is butternut squash before posting, and found that (incorrect) information.
To add to the fun, Giant pumpkins are a third species entirely, Cucurbita maxima. This species also includes Kabocha squash, Hubbard, and other eating varieties. Squash taxonomy will keep you busy for years.
According to this Atlantic piece, the confusion happens because "pumpkin" and "squash" used to be interchangeable words. web.archive.org/web/20171102...
This is the second time in about 10 minutes that linguistic evolution entered my timeline. It's helpful to be aware that language is not a static entity. bsky.app/profile/isaa...
It’s cheaper to buy New Zealand grown lamb in the US than it is in actual Aotearoa New Zealand.
We buy NZ beef if there is no grass fed Canadian beef available.
Belfast, 2002: In residence I was friends with a girl from Mauritius. Our first trip for groceries she was delighted to find demerara & muscovado sugars - produced in Mauritius - for under £5. She had never tasted it because locals were completely priced out, and the vast majority was exported.
When I came to Europe I believed bananas that didn’t have black dots on them were not comestible yet. The pristine ones are exported as they can withstand transportation and fit the European customer’s preference. I still wait for them to get black dots though, they taste better then.
In related news, I think the NZ supermarkets are the least competitive and most profitable in the world
At least it was before new tariffs, I don’t know how those affect the comparison.
When we lived in Kenya, you couldn't really buy local coffee at all because it was all exported
Many children and young people (and I presume many adults harvesting cocoa for chocolate 🍫 have never tasted it
Both those facts are utterly heartbreaking.
A lot about how we get chocolate is heart breaking. Buy Fairtrade or Tony’s if you can and need to buy chocolate and support @oxfamgb.bsky.social and other charities working to help chocolate growing communities get a fairer deal
Ridiculous isn’t it
How on earth…
It’s the same with New Zealand butter. Export 95% of what is made here and it’s less expensive in other countries.
I had a friend tell me a similar thing about shrimp in Vietnam. Great quantities being exported, scarce and expensive for locals.
There's basically no freight infrastructure where it's needed. South Island has one suitable port, one coastal freight train line south of Chch, and limited capacity for air travel. So the only real option for domestic use is slow, small capacity trucks which are super expensive for what they offer.
It's also somehow more carbon friendly to import lamb from New Zealand to England then it is to just use English lambs.
There are more than 9 million dairy cows in the United States, and more than 99 percent of them can be traced back to one of two bulls, both born in the 1960s. www.scientificamerican.com/article/from...
Every human being on the planet today is descended from a common ancestor, who probably lived as recently as the Roman era www.scientificamerican.com/article/huma...
Finland is one of the world leaders in caraway seed production (Carum carvi), a spice popular in India.
Confusingly, it is called ”kumina” in Finnish and ”kummin” in Swedish, but is not the same as English ”cumin” (Cuminum cyminum), called ”Roomankumina” in Finnish and ”Spiskummin” in Swedish. The plants are related, however.
It's similar in German - caraway is Kümmel, and cumin is Kreuzkümmel. Although just calling it cumin (with a German pronunciation) seems to become the new normal.
Good old Kennett Square, PA. Mushroom capitol of the world. Spent many of my summers on a mushroom farm.
Beyonce is older than the concept of ciabatta
Brevibacterium, a bacteria, causes smelly feet and is also used to ripen some cheeses
And if you've ever driven through that county, it sure smells like that's the case
Over 90% of blackcurrants grown commercially in the UK (around 10,000 tonnes) and nearly half grown around the world, are used for making Ribena. www.hutton.ac.uk/case_study/b...
Premodern European medicine was based on balancing the four bodily humors, especially through regulating the patient's diet. This sometimes extended to medical cannibalism, as glands, tissues, and other substances harvested from human bodies were consumed for their supposed medicinal properties.
Cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and more (keeping the list manageable) are all cultivars of the same plant, Brassica oleracea.
Oh yeah. bsky.app/profile/wait...
And bsky.app/profile/nerd...
AND, it was originally considered a roadside edible weed. People just started growing it at home instead of going out to the road every time they wanted some.
"Wild mustard"... Which is of course not any of the three plants mostly used for making mustard the condiment.
bsky.app/profile/pogt...
Most people know that the original recipe of Coca-Cola contained cocaine. Fewer are aware that coca is still part of the recipe because it contributes to the distinctive flavor, and the company has special permission to import it. The narcotic chemicals are removed during production.
That sounds made up. Do you have a source for that?
He's an article from Eater, you can find lots of others if you look. www.eater.com/23620802/coc...
That's wild! Thanks for sharing. Sounds expensive. I would have thought they'd drop it to save costs. Especially since so little goes into the final product and no one really knows it's in there. But corporations do weird things sometimes.
Or as I like to call it, the Ur-Brassica 🤗
Brassica oleracea is my mortal enemy. Cabbage can be made acceptable, but every other vegetable you named is gross af to me.
I’m with you
You may be a "supertaster". Like cilantro, Brassica cultivars are eaten for their strong flavor, but some people have an unusual sensitivity to the flavor compounds and find them overwhelmingly bitter.
Does it also make the scent nauseating? Because I once had to ask a coworker to heat up her Brussel sprouts elsewhere because they smelled so awful.
I don't know that one. Maybe. Anecdotally, I love sprouts I think they smell delicious during roasting or sauteing. But reheating them in the break room microwave is antisocial. Strong sulfurous fart odor that really lingers. It's a different smell but the same level of offense as reheating fish.
Similarly, the beta vulgaris has been cultivated into Beets, Chard and sugar beets. Or the Brassica rapa, Rapeseed, has been made into rutabaga. Not nearly as impressive, but also a sign that this isn't all that uncommon with vegetables.
Excuse me, brassica rapa is, of course, the common turnip. The one I was talking about is brassica napus, which itself is half brassica rapa and half.... yes, of course, half brassica olearacea.
There are many 100s of Apple 🍎 varieties that used to be grown and eaten across the UK but these days we generally only eat a few varieties
You can swirl the hairy part of a Moroccan wild thistle in milk so it thickens into a delicious yoghurt. It’s called raib (there are other transliterations). The recipes online try to reproduce the flavor without the thistle but the original will always be best. bsky.app/profile/hish...
And I learned something new. Thanks I was aware of a Scandinavian variant, a filmjölk called Tätmjölk, made using sundew or butterwort ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmj%C...)
Interesting. I always wonder who first thought of doing these things. Doesn’t seem like the kinda thing that can happen by happy accident. I mean who was peeling away the wild artichoke leaves, saw the hairy pulp and thought “hey, what happens if I swirl this in milk?”
Ah, the opportunity for random speculation: 1) The parent peeling away, and not paying attention to the toddler creating a flotilla in the bucket of milk with the peelings 2) Some long-forgotten recipe where the thistle was cooked in milk, and someone forgot to put it on the fire etc.
Italian cheese is mostly made by Punjabis. www.bbc.com/news/magazin...
Stanley Tucci interviews one of these dairy farmers in his series.
Coffee is disgusting. It's actually kind of an open secret. :)
So, additional fin fact: almost all varieties of coffee you can get at a grocery store are blends designed to be cut down with milk and sugar. You can get varieties much more pleasant to drink alone, but they are harder to get/more expensive.
“I’m just going to mute this rando – oh, wait, I know him, and hadn’t seen him here before”. SMDH.
Who's that? I can't tell.
📌
Caesar salads were invented in Tijuana, Mexico.
Caesar Cardini. I won a corporate trivia contest because I knew this fact
That the modern commercial strawberry began as an accidental cross in the greenhouse at Versailles (between, iirc, a Chilean species and a Virginian).
The molecule that gives caraway seeds their flavor is the mirror image of the molecule that gives spearmint its flavor.
Speaking of caraway, I like it but it's on the ropes in America fivethirtyeight.com/features/out...
Today is a day of wonders! Thank you for posting!
This, strangely, makes sense. If I had to think of a flavor OPPOSITE spearmint, caraway’s not a bad choice.
This actually makes perfect sense to me.
Are the flavors similar to you?
I guess? Wouldn't necessarily say they taste similar, but the flavors feel very adjacent to me. The use cases are pretty adjacent, too. Both used in liqueurs and digestive bitters and tonics. From culinary standpoint, it's like caraway does for savory what mint does for sweets.
Why does spearmint have H2C and caraway CH2? And what is the actual atom the arrow is pointing at? Is there a better way to depict optical isomers?
It is both smell and flavor.
That's jist a convention for writing hydrogens stuck to a carbon that's on the left- or right side of a diagram. the other lines also indicate carbon carbon bonds (the carbons are at the vertices and hydrogens are implied)
Oh, also, the orientation of the CH2 and CH3 attached to that tertiary carbon bonded south of the chiral carbon doesn't matter. Single-bonds can sort of rotate, so that bit is just sort of constantly spinning like the key in an old windup toy.
Really, this is the most accessible way to depict molecules. More accurate or informing methods get into molecular orbital theory and that'll just look like a mix of double-entry accounting and a doppler radar weather map sneezed onto a balloon animal.
Ok, so, carbons bond to four things. Take the lightest thing, have it pointing at you. The remaining three things will rank from lightest to heaviest in either a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion, and that's it's handedness.
Differently handed versions of the same chemical are nearly identical in how they play with other substances, unless those other substances are also chiral, and the receptors in your nose and tongue are chiral, so that's why bizarro-spearmint tastes like soap to you.
The easiest way to think about it is literally just looking at your hands and thinking about all the times you troll people by offering left-handed handshakes, or putting your shoes on the wrong feet, or dropping out of college to work in logistics, and just keep looking at your hands for a bit.
Oh, wow -- I don't mind spearmint at all, but any hint of caraway flavour deeply offends me. I never would have guessed they're mirror-twins.
Now that’s fucking cool!
I'm guessing it's not "mirror image" in a traditional sense? Because looking at those two images, they're not mirror images of each other, for the lower sections
Yeah chemical chirality is not exactly mirroring, because only certain chemical bonds are flipped.
True, I was being very imprecise in my language
Cheers
Oh! That seems plausible. They've always carried a similar vibe for me, speaking in an olfactory way, that is.
You've really got to hand it to organic chemistry.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news... Illinois produces 41% of the nation's pumpkins - mostly in 5 counties in Central Illinois, including Tazewell County, home to Morton, the "Pumpkin Capital of the World", and hometown of yours truly.
I stayed at an Airbnb that was also (primarily) a pumpkin farm in Moline a few years ago while on business. Woke up to some piggies going ham on spoiled squash. Fun scene.
And canned pumpkin uses a different squash
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickins... The Dickinson pumpkin
And Wisconsin makes 60% of the cranberries. We also for some reason grow a lot of ginseng.
I learned this recently while visiting friends near Peoria. They didn't mention the penicillin cantaloupe, though.
My friend's father worked at that ag lab for decades. Modern miracles, brought to you by Peoria.
It's no good to mention it without filling people in!!!
The USDA lab in Peoria, during WWII, is where they first figured put how to mass produce antibiotics. Their starter sample was from a moldy cantaloupe bought locally.
Thanks!!!
Mushrooms have less nutritional value than celery.
mushrooms at least have vitamin D. celery on the other hand has nothing going for it.
I think that’s a myth. Celery has a perfectly respectable amount and range of nutrients (the leafy ones probably even more so). I think mushrooms do too, for that matter.
From a first look celery edges past mushrooms.
Yeah, it’s a green vegetable so I would expect as much.
poison ivy is also green
And a vegetable?
technically
“vegetables” aren’t a real classification. veg are made up of roots, stalks, fruit (okra, peppers, tomato), pods (legumes), leaves, etc etc.
"Vegetable" has a real and commonly understood meaning in the English language.
If you are a rabbit this is true.
You might want to do a literature search.
A nutritionist said this on a podcast recently. Thanks for the heads up if it isn't true - not that it stopped me enjoying mushrooms.
The first IWW union members I met were organizing their mushroom farmworker job.
and you can smell it for a fair distance!
I used to live near Kennett Square! So I immediately knew where you were writing about!
carrots weren't always orange, they're available in plenty of other colors (white, purple, yellow) and the orange variety was bred intentionally in the netherlands by a botanist who wanted to celebrate the house of orange, the country's new (at the time) leaders
I’m looking forward to a harvest of Purple Haze carrots. They’re the best I’ve ever tasted.
It takes approximately 1.3 gallons of water to produce one almond.
I don’t think I’ve eaten an almond since I read that
The problem with this (admittedly fascinating) stat is that it’s never put in context with the water demands of other crops or, say, cows. People swear off almonds and go have a cheeseburger with avocado.
Good point.
It's something of a skill issue/intensivity/greed thing. Historically, they are dry farmed (a lot of Iberian almonds still are) but high input/high yield makes a lot of money.
Would love to see comparative analysis of water usage by crop type, nutrients, etc. I guess I have some searching to do
I read the paper, which the California Almond Board paid for. The UC scientists gave them jaw-dropping and unflattering results. 1.3 gallons per almond could be an underestimate after accounting for higher evapotranspiration due to CC & soil salinity badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/2019/01/put-...
Amazing what an intensive crop this is.
Two words: Hemp Milk.
good on the UC for real. Also this fact was how I quit almonds
Reminds me of the 338 gallons to grow an avocado.
This is how I quit almond milk, and pretty much all almonds
I did this calculation independently a few years ago, and report 1.6-1.7 gallons per almond. Here's a detailed look: pacinst.org/national-geo...
It also takes ungodly numbers of bees to pollinate the almond crops. They are trucked in on semis which reduces availability to other farmers. There is also controversy that this is contributing to colony collapse.
You’d think they’d be juicy with all that water.
The story of Kopi Luwak coffee is known by many now but it still sounds totally made up.
One of the earliest companies that produced soy sauce in the US was located in Columbia City, Indiana, starting around 1917. indianahistory.org/blog/the-sho...
Mayonnaise spoils in heat. Obviously anything will but commercial mayos are acidic, shelf stable, and present no more of a risk than anything else on the table at your cookout.
Commercial mayo used in potato salad actually had less harmful bacteria than mayo less potato salad when left out for hours!
I just had this conversation with my family and no one believed me. While I love my homemade mayo...if it's a picnic I'm using Duke's
📌
That carrots make you see in the dark is a fairly recent 'old wives tale'. They don't. It was part of WWII propaganda while RADAR was being developed. That eating too many carrots will make you go orange however, is true.
When I was a 2ish my mom took me to the pediatrician afraid I had jaundice. He asked her about my diet, favorite foods. Mom: mango, oranges, cantaloupe, carrots, sweet potatoes Dr: try feeding her different colors
My son has white-blond hair, and his hair took on an orange tint when he was a toddler for this reason. Doctor said don’t worry, but we backed off. Man oh man, did he love carrots. Still does.
It does! I had a colleague with that unusual hue.
I had a baby with that hue (slightly) because she loved carrot puree so much & I didn't know this fact.
He, *I* made myself orange when I was a kid. I love carrots more than chocolate (to quote something that is also delicious & more unanimous). Today I have a maximum kg/week so I don't do that again.
I had friends who fed their first baby lots of carrot he developed a hue. I think it might of been because it was one of the things he would eat.
Possibly, worrying for them at the time though.
🙂I'm pleased you have a maximum. I love carrots too, but not to that extent.
They're delicious, healthy & easy to plant/cheap, and also can be cooked or eaten raw in several different recipes, I need to give myself boundaries, because anything in excess ends up being bad.
She said she had no health issues- just the orange tone! I love carrots.
But an orange tone just has a really bad vine nowadays - can't imagine why 🙄
Hmm, let's put our thinking caps on. If we think really hard...🤔😳🙄
Be sure to take the right cap - the Red ones won't work.
Ha!
That's one very good reason to have a maximum, I don't want anyone mistaking me for that 🍊🌮💩.
I knew some Moroccans who made a marinated spiced carrot salad. Wish I could replicate but have not figured out the recipe.
I know very little of morrocan food (it's not so common here in Brasil), but I'll try to look it up, thank you.
I love your carrot enthusiasm
Ikr, it's hard to cook a bad carrot- grilled, roasted, I even put them in curry & they store well
My brother was briefly orange as a kid 😂
Oh no. Though going by this thread, it seems like it happens much more than I expected 🤔
Also oranges. The Daughter loved mandarin oranges when she was a toddler. When she developed a definite orange tinge around her nose we took her to the doctor. He saw her, said “I see she likes oranges!”, then asked, “So what can I do for you today?”
I'd not heard of that before. You must have been so relieved!
Yup. And also a bit foolish 🤷♂️
Doctors have seen a lot worse🙂
same thing will happen with seaweed - can turn you orange!
I remember a magic schoolbus episode where one of the kids turned orange after he started binging on seaweed chips, but the other kids discovered the seaweed chips were secretly made of carrots and that's what did it. Are you telling me that plot point was unnecessary??!
I know that episode, and in fact, I think the final "call with the producer" tag addresses it. (If you watched on syndication on a network with ads, you may not have seen it because they cut that segment to provide time for ad breaks)
That segment usually addresses the inaccuracies or literary licenses that the writers take in the episode. It's basically the "um, actually" for the entire episode. Truly a genius move for a kids' TV show!
Never forget the Orange Man from the pilot of House M.D. Made even worse by the fact that (only) the pilot had a very weird looking colour grade that boosted orange colours. He literally looks like a carrot. (I'm going to blame Bryan Singer for this.)
Beta carotene deficiency does make you see worse in the dark though
That's interesting, I like that there's a little truth to the tale.
In Australia, food security depends almost entirely on oil imports. We have plenty of food outside of cities, but getting it to cities means trucks (often refrigerated trucks). Often along 1-2 highways that can sometimes be flooded, too.
Rhubarb grows so fast you can literally hear the plant creaking as the fibres stretch.
This thread is fascinating!
The pastry that N. Americans call a “Danish” is loosely based on something that in Denmark is called ‘wienerbrød’, or ‘Vienna bread’
The chitin in the cell-walls of mushrooms is chemically very similar to... ...the chitin in cockroach exoskeletons.
You're chitin me. (Yes, I know how it's pronounced...)
It's a tie for me between the US strategic cheese reserve caves and fettucine alfredo being named after a chef in the 60s
Fettuccine Alfredo was invented on the spot for rich American tourists who didn’t like Italian food.
Totally Denny's kids' menu stuff. Amazing
Freaks. Who doesn’t like Italian food???
The way I heard it, when Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford ate at his restaurant, they said they were tired of all the garlicky Italian food they’d been eating on their trip, and Fetuccine Alfredo was what he came up with for them. I’m prepared to agree that he just gave them butter noodles.
Well, in any case "according to family lore" is probably doing some pretty heavy lifting in that wikipedia article.
God, that's even dumber, that makes me so happy
This not so rich american approves
No, in Rome for a wife after delivery. collinaitaliana.com/fettuccine-a...
Fuckin’ Last Of Us ass county
All sweet potatoes with tuberous roots are GMOs.
Nearly every food commercially sold was genetically modified by people. None of the varieties we buy at the grocery store exist in the wild.
Ok, so what word would you use to describe direct modification of a genetic sequence by another organism that would distinguish it from "selective breeding" and "hybridization"? Or do you not see the point in distinguishing?
Or are you just sharing a fun unrelated fact in a kind of weirdly confrontational way?
Both. 😜 There's a big, weird pushback against the latest technology but not against traditional, inefficient, shotgun genetic modification techniques like radiation and chemically induced mutation. So I like to pedantically (read obnoxiously) point out that the modern techniques are extremely safe
, well tested, well understood, precise, and better for the Earth than all previous techniques. "Non-GMO" is just a branding thing that unscrupulous companies pay for to promote their products to the misinformed. Like "organic".
One side of the county makes you larger and the other side of the county makes you small.
French people considers French fries are coming from Belgium. They were invented in Paris though.
I’ve heard even the most chauvinistic french people confess their admiration for how the Belgians make their French fries 🤷🏻♀️
Related fact: portobello mushrooms are just button mushrooms left to grow big. A mushroom grower in that same county in PA invented a fake Italian name for them, got some Philly restauranteurs to put them on their menus, and marketing history was made.
The comedy gag where people slip on banana peels actually has real-world roots, from when bananas were new to America and people tossed their peels on the sidewalks www.atlasobscura.com/articles/can...
For more fun banana facts, read “Banana: the fate of the fruit that changed the world”
All of the oysters grown for consumption in Europe start out life in either La Rochelle or Arcachon.
📌
And they hire a lot of Mexican immigrants to grow them. www.cata-farmworkers.org
My high school marching band always played the Kennet Square mushroom parade (like drove an hour and a half for the mushrooms, which was odd, but nevertheless)! Somehow it was of equal importance to the Miss America parade and the NYC Columbus Day parades in our schedule?
I have yet to make it to the Mushroom Festival, which really seems mandatory for anyone who's lived in the Philly area for any length of time.
I grew up in Avondale (where my parents' first house shared a property line with a mushroom farm) and then Landenberg, and somehow I've never been to the Mushroom Festival!
So true! Now ask how many people who work in the mushroom farms die in mushroom tunnels because they are terrorized by immigration enforcement.
The Netherlands, a rainy and cloudy country smaller than Maryland, is the world’s second-largest agrifood exporter - and in particular the world’s second-largest exporter of TOMATOES.
Sorry just larger than Maryland! Anyway the trick for the overall result is seeds - massive R&D and sales to producers worldwide, see WaPo for want of better sources www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...
Comes, obviously, at huge environmental cost.
Eating about 100 bananas a day will double your normal exposure to radiation.
Because of the potassium?
Yes.
While bananas have potassium like a lot of other plants, even if you could eat 100 of them, the exposure rate remains the same as your body maintains the same amount of potassium.
This is the correct answer!
Cool Hand Radiant Luke 2.0
We have no failure to communicate here! 😀
Soy beans are named after soy sauce and not the other way around.
Oh, come on… well I’ll be.
Wow that’s a strange one.
Wait, what? No way!
that's really interesting. Google tells me that daizu (大豆) is the Japanese word for what we call soybeans, and that "soy" comes from the Japanese word shōyu (醤油) for the fermented sauce made from daizu. 'Course Google could be wrong.
It is.
TIL, as well, there is a SoyInfo Center.
🫣
I’ve heard something similar about the color orange and the fruit, but it could be entirely apocryphal.
It's true. (Relatedly, though not foodily: The colour-word pink comes from the flower, even though many pinks are not pink. And pinks are named for their jagged-edged leaves, which look as though they were cut for ornamentation... as in "pinking shears".)
Now you have me thinking of those red hunting coats worn by English aristos, known as "hunting pinks."
That one is true, too. William of Orange. He's also why carrots are typically orange now, instead of purple or white.
Curiously, the words for the colour orange and the Principality of Orange have different roots, so William of Orange (William III of England, and others) is originally unrelated to the colour. (I just went on holiday to Orange in France - beautiful Roman amphitheater)
(Checks OED.) Right you are. But what we now call soy sauce was originally just "soy." That makes the derivation less weird.
somewhat similarly, the word 'oil' comes from the same root as the word for 'olive', and originally meant 'olive oil' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive#E...
There's a scene in the TV show "Servant of the People" where one character talks in his sleep about Ukraine being the top oil producer -- sunflower oil, that is! And he was right. He was played by now-President Zelenskyy. www.datapandas.org/ranking/sunf...
That's why, when Russia attacked Ukraine, everyone here in Germany bulk-bought sunflower oil. No joke.
Intro scene: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fK4...
Dijon mustard is named for a town/prefecture in France, but it's generally made from imported Canadian seeds. If you're in Canada, this can get surreal -- you're buying a European brand but the named ingredient may be from Saskatchewan. The seeds get out of the country more than you do!
Remarkable I did not know this. Now I love it even more.
Brussels sprouts were yummy until a yield-expanding variant took over the market and made them bitter and gross for a few generations, made worse by a cultural practice of boiling them. Sweeter sprouts and better ways of cooking them only came back recently. www.npr.org/sections/the...
I’m going to need to keep an eye out for sweeter ones. I absolutely detest sprouts and refuse to eat them when steamed or boiled; roasted is only because “good for me” but I’d love to try some that don’t taste bad to me!
This is so American, and so Dutch.
In the 90's My Chinese colleagues took me to a restaurant where you could choose your raw food and then have it cooked to order. They excitedly took me to see a novel and rare vegetable that was available to chose. It was of course Brussel Sprouts.
This piece of news might be specific to a country, you know. There are plenty of others. (« Boiling them » : do you actually mean blanching or really boiling them ?)
My Midwestern mom boiled them and slopped them on our plates. I took it for some kind of generational trauma, like religion or being a Lions fan, that was important to continue to remember our ancestors couldn't enjoy food.
They were roasted back into my school canteen days. Which I must say are not near I would tend to say boiling thing is an anglo-saxon trait that we mostly try to avoid. Why waste water when butter is available ?
Maybe it was an Anglo-Saxon trait but her mom was a 2nd gen Latvian Jew, which makes sense because our people will eat gefiltefish, chopped liver, matzo balls, or anything so long as it's bitter, boiled, and textured like a ball of slime. Even the bagel is us seeing bread & going "oh let's boil it!"
Oh 😂 You got a point. (Obviously my grandma’s gefilte Fisch was delicious. I would never, under any circumstances say the contrary. Hi Grandma !) But at least the vodka was frozen and didn’t taste like a budlite.
📌
I oven roast Brussels sprouts 4 or 5 times a week. Only non home fermented vegetable I eat
I grew up hating Brussels sprouts. Yes, my mom boiled them. They were gross. Imagine my shock decades later when I was convinced to try some roasted Brussels sprouts and loved them!! Like - what the heck?? It wasn’t just that I’d developed a more sophisticated palate??
This is awesome
xkcd is WONDERFUL. I don't always know enough about science or math or what have you to get all the jokes but it's always mind expanding. This one is my very favorite:
Oh Wow!
I went looking for the article I learned this from and found the NPR link but I'm sure I must have gotten it from this XKCD comic originally. I'm such a big fan I once cut my own (far smaller) book signing event short to go to Munroe's.
My spouse just blew a raspberry, because he LIKED thd bitter sprouts BETTER. 🙄
Ex-spouse
I have one way of making Brussels sprouts palatable. Poach in orange juice. Sear in pan with a bit of oil. Toss with bacon lardons, chopped walnuts and possibly blue cheese.
Similarly: broccoli - airfry it *very* gently with sesame oil, or stir-fry. Carrots - boil in orange juice with raisins, ginger, coriander and a tiny hint of mixed spice, add butter to orange juice reduction. Or just roast in the pan you roast your meat along it so they get gravy-roasted.
There are very, very few vegetables I can think of for which a good nethod of preparation involves boiling them in plain water - especially if proper boiling rather than just scalding or a quick steam. Potatoes are the only ones I can think of.
Beetroot
Whatever is in that picture isn't a sprout, it's a mutant. Sprouts are supposed to be max the size of grapes. Let them grow any bigger, and they get too strong. Another piece of advice from my greengrocer's daughter Mum: never buy pre-cleaned ones. They're old sprouts with the yellow leaves removed.
This is so interesting! I started roasting Brussels sprouts in the late 90s and just thought the roasting was why they were better than we remembered!!
Same here!!
I am still pretty sure it’s mostly this. Sometimes poorly roasted sprouts will steam, and those ones are always much worse than the properly roasted ones.
Roasting helps but they identified the compounds that caused them to bitter and bred them to have much less of those things. I’m sure that helped a lot. I roast them with garlic, olive oil, and parmesan cheese. Delicious.
They must have tasted so much worse before!
let's be honest: any veggie with garlic, olive oil, and parmesan cheese is going to taste better than just straight-up boiling it
Bacon. Bacon plus the other things. Or wrap each in a piece of bacon and roast them that way. ❤️
And drizzle with maple syrup!
Or balsamic vinegar + honey!
YUM. Thank you -- that sounds delicious.
I think I got the idea from an appetizer at a boutique movie theater where I attended a conference!
OOOOOHHHH. I must try that the next time!
Anything wrapped in bacon will taste good because bacon
It's basically cheating.
Pan fried with chopped bacon and green apple slices
Oh yum I gotta try that! 😋
Cut in half and fry in butter with garlic. By far the best way
I'd heard about the recent change in flavour (carefully bred by Dutch researchers), but I didn't realize that what screwed up the plants in the first place was the drive to mass production! Thanks for the info!
Prove it. 🤨 When my husband cooks them our house smells funky, not sweet. In fact, I begin singing ... "Won't you take me to funky town! Won't you take me to funky town!" 😂
I hated them as a kid. Then again my mother, despite all her gifts, was a Midwestern girl who never met a vegetable that she believed couldn't be improved by 40-60 minutes of boiling. Her decision to cook Brussels sprouts was announced by a stench reminiscent of a septic tank inspection gone wrong.
I assumed it was my younger taste buds being more sensitive to flavours.
The word “flavonoid”
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potato chips came to be because of some frustrated chef who kept getting complaints that the fries were too thick
I thought they were derived from game chips, traditionally served with pheasants etc
Ha! I didn’t know that. Happened in Saratoga Lake, NY in 1853 invention.si.edu/invention-st....
Except you can read the recipe in cookbooks published in 1824, 1822, 1845, etc (The Virginia housewife by Mary Randolf to name one) So this saratoga story is to be taken with a pinch of salt.
I always take my potato chips with a pinch of salt 🥁
I have a friend whose father is a mushroom farmer in Delaware. I had no idea that that part of the world was where they came from!
I'm here whenever you want or need to talk. Big fan i grew up with you i appreciate you so much.
That even the exact recipe, products, and processes cannot replicate the exact taste of Mom’s spaghetti sauce
Chicken Teriyaki was invented in Seattle and the inventor still has a teriyaki joint.
That’s not true. Seattle chicken teriyaki could be argued to be a different dish I suppose, but teriyaki itself does originate in Japan en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teriyaki
yeah, OG teriyaki comes from japan, and funnily (or deliciously) enough, Seattle teriyaki comes from the korean population mostly
The bananas that we're most familiar with today are called Cavendish bananas, and they're named after the Duke of Devonshire whose gardener managed to cultivate them in the East Midlands of England, of all places.
The reason why white eggs are ubiquitous in American supermarkets is because large scale industrial farms rely on one breed of hen that's smaller than average, requires less feed, and happens to not produce a pigmented egg shell
In New England, up until about the 1980s, most of the store eggs were brown because the local chickens were Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Rocks. There was even a jingle on TV: "brown eggs are local eggs and local eggs are fresh"
My mom, daughter of a New England chicken farmer, will only buy brown eggs.
My mother would not buy white eggs either. At Easter, we had to put them in the dye bath several times to get stronger color. 😂
I remember learning that decades ago and deciding that eating brown eggs, especially if they were locally produced was a way to support biological diversity. Have purchased only brown eggs since then.
Similarly, I learned 70% of carrot seed comes from one county in Oregon
Some plants “call predators for help” when a pest eats them by releasing volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Predators of small bugs and pests can smell the VOCs and know a bug is present for the predator to eat thus helping the plant get less eaten news.cornell.edu/stories/2017...
Tomato roots can *almost* produce cocaine. The plant family for coca plants and tomatoes both evolved tropane alkaloid pathway which produces cocaine in coca leaves. In tomatoes that pathway is expressed in the roots and are only TWO GENES away from making cocaine. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
relatedly, tomato is *one* enzyme away from being able to produce capsaicin in fruit: www.cell.com/trends/plant... & onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Yea nightshade family!
I see the problem, but I'm not hearing a solution...
A post doc I used to work with would joke if he ever needed a backup career he would GMO tomatoes to make cocaine
The Simpsons nearly nailed it in this episode (for context, Homer accidentally cross-bred tomatoes wirh tobacco and created "tomacco" which effectively was like edible chewing tobacco). Lie and art once again imitating each other.
By the time it was banned they’d be a billionaire
OK but if ever there was a time for a PhD plant-whisperer to do a bit of a Walter White, it feels like now might be that time.
It just occurred to me that this is likely where the Tomacco plot of the Simpsons got started in the writer's room
Tomacco actually exists! A farmer and Simpsons fan grafted a tomato and a tobacco plants together, and successfully grew tomatoes containing nicotine.
The future is now!
Do they taste like grandma?
Farms that grow tomatoes don't allow smoking anywhere nearby and smokers must wash hands diligently because tobacco mosaic virus can survive all sorts of processes and still be passed on to tomato plants.
Two genes can be a LOT of difference…
In some, slightly different, universe, it's known as tomatnose-candy.
Who doesn’t want pasta sauce that keeps you up all night at the club??
We know that Polynesians had contact with indigenous South Americans hundreds of years before Europeans “discovered” the Americas because the Sweet Potato traveled from South America to Polynesia between 1000AD and 1100AD www.npr.org/sections/the...
They’re delicious, nutritious, and so good for you!
And they still suck.
Learn to cook them.
Skill issue
Black Cheeseburder has never tasted a well-seasoned basket of sweet potato fries.
I'm not much of a sweet potato fry girlie, but in a curry? Divine
weird thing to add
they are a diabetic superfood. they are extremely high in fiber, minerals, vitamins, and nutrients. they are low in everything bad for you. you probably eat cheeseburger every day get a life stop bullying potato it died for your sins
Perhaps 15C in Aotearoa/New Zealand; the 'Kumara' is culturally important. (a friend quipped that if fish & chips was popular amongst Maori now their diet hadn't changed a lot from Kumera & fished seafood) www.rnz.co.nz/national/pro...
KENNETT SQUARE, BABY!
Rhubarb is a thing that exists and people eat.
Honey never spoils. A beekeeper friend told me that, & I’m still in awe of it.
Neither does mustard.
Do you mean mustard seed, powder, or like French’s?
I guess like French's?
They found honey that was still edible in Ancient Egyptian tombs! 🍯
That's actually an urban legend that found its way into the Smithsonian magazine. There's no evidence for this at all, unfortunately, and all claims trace their provenance back to the unsourced magazine article.
Honey is naturally antiseptic - good for wound dressings if you’re in the wild.
Good luck with getting honey in the wild without getting stung to death or burning down harf a forest - while having a wound which needs antiseptic threatening
No: obviously you take a tame hive with you🙄. Do I have to do all the thinking?
this gave me a good giggle!
😂
Or a bear. They’re good at getting honey. Successful outcomes require planning…
I'm picturing a comic where a dude & his bear pal are out hiking, the bear accidentally sideswipes him with his paw and is like 'oh shit sorry bro I got you' and comes back with an entire fricking hive
I would buy that comic
It exists: its called The Big Honey Hunt by the Berenstain Bears authors; a classic
Completely enjoyed this rabbit hole, er honey bee hole!🕳️
😁😁
IIRC, this is due at least in part to a small amount of naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide being in honey.
Just an added note that it can contain botulism spores that could infect the wound so that is not a first resort. (Medical grade honey exists and is irradiated to kill the spores. Also, boiling/cooking the honey first destroys the spores but it also destroys the antiseptic properties.)
I don’t honestly think honey would be my go-to wound salve, tbh, it’s just one of those Velcro facts I remember reading (with absolutely no substantiation) in somebody’s novel a while ago. I suspect there might be a problem with ants, in the jungle. And I’d probably try a wasp nest first…
It does work! They used honey soaked bandages to pack wounds in medieval times (like, iirc, Henry IV's arrow wound 6 inches deep in his face). And there are some pretty exciting developments and studies using (medical grade) honey for wound care currently.
Every day’s a school day…🙂
I recall a story about a Polish king who went up against Ottomans in the time of the Crusades, lost, and had his head sent back to Poland people in a jar of honey, as proof of his demise. Preserved for the long, unrefrigerated trip.
Lovely
Properly stored honey never spoils. You can absolutely spoil honey by storing it improperly. It’ll grow mold if you just leave it in a dish in a hot, humid room. You can also spoil honey into mead if you store it improperly properly.
It can start fermenting, though. We had that happen to raw honey. Starts smelling of alcohol and eventually tastes of it too.
Mead!
You've got to water it down for that to happen, though, otherwise it'll continue being antiseptic against whatever kind of yeast you use.
Interesting. We didn’t add water, so maybe the beekeeper is stretching the supply? We’ve taken a young Ukrainian man into our family and his mom brought lots of raw honey from Ukraine on a visit and that was what turned. But she doesn’t have bees herself. She bought it from a beekeeper.
Maybe. It might not take a lot, once something can survive in the stuff long enough to burn some sugar for energy it'll produce more water as a metabolic byproduct. But that'd be really slow to turn the whole batch into mead.
It was sitting around for quite a while. I think the mom was worried that her honey-loving son couldn’t get honey here in Germany, because she brought a LOT in small plastic buckets with plastic lids (so not sealed or jarred).
Oh yeah, that could do it. Easy to get a little compromise in there, and yeast is just all over the place. Like, before people figured out you could sell it in little packets, they'd just leave their beer vats open to the air to get yeast to eventually settle in.
Fascinating!
Yes, and the stings are a natural treatment for arthritis. Our aviary was founded by a scientist that creates medications based on bee science. Bears are going for the larva as a protein source, not the honey. If bee colonies continue to collapse, learn how to hand pollinate.
Wow. Climate change will impact dishes like chicken Marsala & a lot of vegetarian favorites.
Kennett Square! Mushroom capitol of the world!
The Hamburger originated in Hamburg Germany. Immigrants brought it to the US.
Maybe. It's one of those things that nobody knows exactly what happened. There are references to a "Hamburg Steak" suggesting it was widely known, there are stories of ship galleys making flat meatballs so they wouldn't roll, but like 🇬🇧 Fish & Chips, there's so many conflicting sources & claims.
Dragon fruit comes from a cactus. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
I think my favorite in the "no way it grows like *that*" category is asparagus. Literally looks like some prankster is trying to fool you into thinking this is how asparagus grows.
The cranberry bog.
this post is spider-adjacent
…go on…
I seem to remember, from the Ocean Spray tour thingie that they bounce cranberries to test for quality--good ones bounce up, bad ones don't.
Wisconsin produces a boatload of cranberries. It was No. 1 in the United States for cranberry production in 2020 with 59% of the nation’s total.
Here's an article with pictures! www.ordinary-adventures.com/2019/11/insi...
The spiders of the cranberry bog!!
Wolf spiders!
Do not tell us more.
And the Longwood Gardens cafeteria in that county makes the best mushroom soup. The best.
That is the best soup ever. I even bought a tea towel with the recipe (although I haven’t tried making it at home because I fear it won’t live up to the real thing).
We took a picture of the recipe in the gift shop and it was quite good. I seem to remember it containing truffle oil and shallots. Definitely worth making at home.
Longwood Gardens cafeteria is awesome.
You were right, fantastic soup! Just circling back, thanks for the tip!
Yay!
I'm going to be going there for the first time in a couple weeks, and I love mushroom soups. Will it be easy to locate?
Yah as long as you have a ticket to Longwood Gardens
Hah. Yes. Just go to the cafe in the gardens.
Not a good fact but...
*Food fact FFS
Peanuts can be use to make dynamite.
Potatoes are indigenous to the Americas; they were introduced from Peru to Europe, and from there the rest of the world, in the 1600s. This means potato was never part of any food staple or dish from earlier times. The medieval peasant had no clue what potato tasted like.
Almost all traditional Italian cuisine as we know it is a postwar invention, much of it by American Italians and there’s some dodgy nationalism to how fervently it’s been adopted as traditional
That’s not a wive’s tale, that’s a self-aGrandi-zed overstatement IMO. artofeating.substack.com/p/italian-fo...
Wives’ ffs.
People will pay $1000 a pound for coffee beans that have been eaten and shat out by elephants
I haven’t had that one but I have had the one poo’d out by civets (Vietnam). So good 😂
Along the same vein: Almost every Apple you see in the grocery store came from Washington state, along the Columbia River.
The most common cause of mushroom poisoning in the USA is overeating. Not that it actually poisons you, but they’re very full of protein and you probably don’t have the right gut flora to digest massive amounts, so you feel sick (and then freak out and go to the ER).
A bunch of meats (ie oxtails, flank steak, chicken thighs et al) were cheap until Food Network told ppl how to cook them. Ppl still cook them badly tbh but now they're expensive. I have 3 things I absolutely will not talk about that are still inexpensive.
Edam (a Dutch cheese) is the only cheese in the world that’s made backwards.
Can you explain this? They start with cheese and end up with a cow, or something? 😂
Well yes I spose I could explain it. But you probably wouldn’t like it, and it would spoil the fun for everyone else if I did.
Haha fair
And it’s not the one with the largest mushroom farm; that one was bought up by a competitor and then closed.
The strawberry that makes the Queen's jam, now King's jam, and holds the royal warrant is in Tiptree, UK, where James Bond's jam Little Scarlet is made (made from the first strawberries of the season) is from Santa Cruz, CA.🍓 So British, that it's Californian.
📌
And they have a mushroom festival that I keep failing to go to.
My fact would be Harvey Wiley and his poison squad changing the way we eat food and our safety. blog.history.in.gov/dr-harvey-wi...
I've been trying to find and watch the PBS special on this forever!
Looks like iTunes and Amazon have it. Don't know if that helps. www.pbs.org/wgbh/america...
All cabbages (kale, broccoli, romanesco, cauliflower, brussels’ sprouts, white cabbage, red cabbage, etc… etc…) are all ONE SINGLE SPECIES OF PLANT.
All the “benefits from a mediterranean diet” and “benefits from a japanese diet” are based on one bad, since corrected, study of badly managed data. Despite its health claims, most of it is bunk.
The orange juice containing pulp, often has its juice from Brazil, and its pulp from *entirely different* oranges (for Europe mostly from Spain, iirc)
I read in a book that industrial orange juice is separated into pulp, flavor compounds, and pure sugar before being blended in different proportions. After that I stopped considering OJ a health food. I wish I could remember the name of the book.
There’s an excellent Dutch TV series called “Keurdienst Van Waarde” (“Quality Control Institution”) that taught me this: Europe, eg is TO-TAL-LY dependent on ONE (yearly?) ship containing 3 humongous containers of deep frozen dehydrated OJ syrup. Everything else gets added in Europe (eg pulp)
Ruby Red grapefruit is a byproduct of the Atoms For Peace program
The Irish learned about corned beef from the Jews www.myjewishlearning.com/the-nosher/t...
😳🤯 That explains a lot!! 😹 I have an Irish grandmother and a Jewish one - and I have always assumed that the reason their two recipes (corned beef & cabbage / brisket) seemed so similar was the fault of my memory. 🤷🏼♀️ Turns out my memory is ok.
Lucky you having both of those dishes in the family!
Indeed! Thx
I only put this here, as I had to educate a high-schooler I work with on this a few days ago. Sweet potatoes are NOT potatoes.
sweet potatoes are, however, more closely related to potatoes than they are to yams! actual yams are neither sweet nor orange-colored en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_p...
All Vidalia onions are grown in 20 specific counties in southeast Georgia. These counties are defined by the Vidalia Onion Act of 1986.
The reason why artificial banana doesn't taste like bananas you buy from the store is because the banana artificial banana is based off of (mostly) doesn't exist anymore. You're buying the replacement for that one these days.
As a chemist, this story has never rung true to me. Artificial banana flavor is a single cheap ester compound - it really doesn’t seem to have been picked to match any specific variety:
... Even the article you linked says that the Gros Michel tastes a little like an artificial banana. The ester used does taste more like Gros Michel even if it's not directly distilled from it. So it's not at all wrong to say that ester flavoring tastes more like Gros Michel then Cavandish.
I think candy makers would have settled on “banana ester” (isoamyl acetate) no matter what, though. The other fruit flavorings used in simple candy are also single-ester formulations, and I believe it’s the most generally bananalike.
I haven’t eaten a Gros Michel but was interested listening to people on the Gastropod podcast recently who *had* and said that honestly it didn’t taste very much like artificial banana at all.
They also said that the slapstick slipping-on-banana-skins routine was a genuine social panic in the 1920s and may be due to the fact that Gros Michel skins are slipperier than Cavendish ones.
The Gros Michel cultivar, which went extinct due to Panama disease and was replaced by the inferior, now ubiquitous, Cavendish cultivar.
Not extinct! You can mail order them from specialty growers (I remember reading a review of them awhile back) and even plants
I love this one! Only partly because the old variety was called 'Gros Michel' which pretty much translated to 'Big Mike.'
The colonists drank mead, beer, cider, wine etc throughout the day because the water was often not safe to drink - esp in cities 🍻
They usually brewed their own beer. And it didn't always have hops. The ingredients for beer in the colonies were not as strict as they were in Germany. George Washington brewed something he called beer.
From the French & Indian War until the Civil War, American soldiers were issued a rations of spruce beer to prevent scurvy.
Similar one for the UK: Most of Britain's rhubarb is grown in Yorkshire's 'rhubarb triangle' between Wakefield, Leeds and Bradford.
Here’s another! www.seattletimes.com/life/food-dr...
@cstross.bsky.social I feel like you could do something with the 'rhubarb triangle '
A slice of pie?
Send mine there as it doesn’t seem too happy with Cornwall
Especially considering rhubarb's broad lexical range wordhistories.net/2022/01/28/r...
Egg yolks can become bright yellow or orange if hens eat a lot of yellow and orange flowers. It isn't necessarily an indication of quality, just a seasonal forage difference that could be faked by mass feeding them calendula or marigolds. "Good" free range yolks will vary in color.
We also learned as small children that while hens may love green forage, we were not to Ever Again give them stinkweed. Because nobody appreciates stinkweed-flavoured scrambled eggs. I don’t remember any other flavour transfers, but boy I remember that one!
My mom was raised on a farm and said you can definitely tell when the milk-producing cows have gotten into the stinkweed.
Ooo yeah I can see that.
Or the wild garlic. And the milk in Hawaii tastes like pineapple because they feed the trimmings from the Dole packing plant to the cows.
Oh that’s interesting I don’t recall the milk tasting unusual in Hawaii. Tho tbh that probably wasn’t in our top 10 beverages…
Oh yeah, you can definitely taste wild garlic in milk.
And then the children got dispatched to the upper pasture to find it.
Pineapple milk sounds good...
It *seems* like it would be interesting (in a good way). I’m not sure what I think about garlic milk…savory? Wouldn’t go with Cheerios probably.
"savory" is not the word I would use, there. From what I remember, smell of garlic but very bitter milk. I don't remember if the pigs liked it.
Ooo yeah if it only smells like garlic that’s not nice.
Better than garlic, definitely.
Tomatoes are berries. A berry, in botanical terms, is a fleshy fruit derived from a single flower with one ovary and containing multiple seeds. Tomatoes fit this definition perfectly, as they are fleshy, have multiple seeds, and develop from a single flower.
![From screen cap from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality#Biology All of the known life-forms show specific chiral properties in chemical structures as well as macroscopic anatomy, development and behavior.[26] In any specific organism or evolutionarily related set thereof, individual compounds, organs, or behavior are found in the same single enantiomorphic form. Deviation (having the opposite form) could be found in a small number of chemical compounds, or certain organ or behavior but that variation strictly depends upon the genetic make up of the organism. From chemical level (molecular scale), biological systems show extreme stereospecificity in synthesis, uptake, sensing, metabolic processing. A living system usually deals with two enantiomers of the same compound in drastically different ways. In biology, homochirality is a common property of amino acids and carbohydrates. The chiral protein-making amino acids, which are translated through the ribosome from genetic coding, occur in the L form. However, D-amino acids are also found in nature. The monosaccharides (carbohydrate-units) are commonly found in D-configuration. DNA double helix is chiral (as any kind of helix is chiral), and B-form of DNA shows a right-handed turn. Sometimes, when two enantiomers of a compound are found in organisms, they significantly differ in their taste, smell and other biological actions. For example,(+)-Carvone is responsible for the smell of caraway seed oil, whereas (–)-carvone is responsible for smell of spearmint oil.[27] However, it is a commonly held misconception that (+)-limonene is found in oranges (causing its smell), and (–)-limonene is found in lemons (causing its smell). In 2021, after rigorous experimentation, it was found that all citrus fruits contain only (+)-limonene and the odor difference is because of other contributing factors.[28]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:fi7w2ifgjxjczy2ve5qzo7eb/bafkreiekerc7yg6fk47u6twfo2ghhmtvmdywldn5uktg47ilr2nnt2brjq@jpeg)
