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Chapter 2
FOOD
The FDA considers chocolate acceptable for public consumption
as long as there are less than 60 microscopic insect fragments per
100 grams (four ounces, or approximately one candy bar).
Chocolate is highly toxic to dogs. If they eat as little as
four ounces, they become so hyperactive that they may suffer a
fatal heart attack.
If you are typical, four percent of the food you eat will be
eaten in front of a refrigerator with its door open.
Unusual Appetites
Worlds worst meal: eating a bicycle. A man did this by
grinding it into powder.
In 1743 a teen-age boy was observed to have eaten 384 pounds
of food in one week. There was another boy (or perhaps another
report on this same boy) whose weight increased by 179 pounds in
one year from 105 to 284. Like a cow, he ate fifteen hours every
day yet was still hungry.
In 1963 a man ate a single meal weighing 54 pounds.
There was an olympic hammer thrower who used to eat a dozen
raw eggs for breakfast, complete with shells.
Perhaps the most exotic annual culinary affair was hosted by
Clodius, a rich Roman actor who had one hundred birds given voice
lessons at a cost of approximately $250 per bird. He then had
these birds made into a pie for his guests. He then offered a
drink which contained a dissolved pearl worth about one-half
million dollars.
Historians tell us that a sweet onion was the favorite
dessert of the Romans.
In Africa, roasted termites are considered delicious.
People in Laos would think you were crazy if you refused to
eat giant waterbugs.
In Japan, if you have enough money, you can order gourmet
beef from cattle that have been raised in darkness, fed beer, and
given custom massages by special masseurs.
An English king used to like eating rotten oysters.
When a pineapple was first shown to the infamous glutton
King Louis XIV, he immediately grabbed it and took a giant bite.
He cut his lips and thereafter outlawed pineapples in France.
Professor William Buckland acquired the dried out heart of
King Louis XIV, provided by grave robbers. He ate it!
Bites From The History of Food
In the Bible, the fruit that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden
was not specifically an apple. In the Koran, the sacred book of
Islam, it is called a banana. Some scientists believe the fruit
may have been a lemon, because edible apples did not yet exist in
the time and place of Eden.
The word salary came from the word salt in Roman times. Salt
was used as a trading medium - money.
It's hard to imagine that until about four hundred years ago,
European people ate everything with their fingers. When a few
people started using forks in England, everyone else thought the
idea of using tools to eat was totally strange.
The original reason for tablecloths was as a towel to wipe
one's fingers and hands on after eating.
In the eighteenth century, John Montagu, the Earl of
Sandwich invented a small meal that could be eaten with one hand
while he continued his non-stop gambling.
Coca-Cola, Hires Root Beer and Dr. Pepper were all
introduced in the same year, 1886.
John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola referred to it as,
"Esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage."
7-Up was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime
Soda when it was invented in 1929.
The 7 is for the original size - 7 ounces - and the Up was
for "bottoms up." The first advertising slogan for 7-Up was, "It
takes the ouch out of grouch."
When popsicles first appeared in 1905, they were called
Epsicles, after Frank Epperson, their inventor.
Ketchup was originally made from fish broth and mushrooms.
Tomatoes were added later. Today, ketchup must contain sugar,
otherwise it must be called imitation ketchup.
Ninety to one hundred years ago, the average American worked
about 13 minutes to earn enough money for a quart of milk. Now, it
takes about 4 minutes.
M&M candies are named for Forrest Mars and Bruce Murries,
the inventors. They were first made as a high-energy field snack
for American soldiers because "they melt in your mouth, not in you
hand."
Fruits and Vegetables
Cherries taste great, but if you eat the leaves or twigs of
a cherry tree, you could die.
Strawberries are unique among fruits because they carry
their seeds on the outside.
People have grown tomatoes with a strawberry growing inside.
Americans eat 5681 miles of carrots per day.
A genetic engineer in Japan has created cube-shaped
watermelons. These stack more efficiently than round ones.
Celery has the unusual effect that the more you eat, the
skinnier you will become. It takes more energy to eat celery than
the calories it contains.
If you eat eleven pounds of potatoes, you will gain one
pound of weight. Until the eighteenth century, many Americans
believed that potatoes were bad for your health.
Nine-tenths of cabbage is plain water.
If you store carrots and apples together in your fridge, the
carrots will become bitter because they are affected by the
ethylene fumes (natural) given off by the apples.
Sugar
There is a wild edible plant called Hernandulcin which is
1000 times sweeter than sugar.
If you filled trucks with all the candy American kids eat in
one year, they would line up bumper to bumper from San Diego to
San Francisco.
When the diets of inmates of a Virginia juvenile detention
center were changed from typical American junk food to natural
foods - cereal without sugar, fruit juice instead of soda, etc, -
kids who were chronic offenders decreased by 56 percent and kids
who were well-mannered increased by 71 percent.
Meat
When you go to a fast-food restaurant and ask for white
chicken meat, you might actually get bleached dark meat.
The largest Kentucky Fried Chicken store is in Beijing,
China.
Americans eat 127 chickens per second.
Just before a game, Babe Ruth had to be taken to a hospital
due to extreme stomach pain. He had eaten twelve hot dogs in a
row!
Most people don't realize that a hot dog may contain cow
brains, lips, eyes, stomachs or tails. Americans eat an average of
forty of these things per year, at a cost of six hundred million
dollars. If you lined them all up, that line would be about a
half million miles long.
If the water used by the cattle business was not paid for by
American taxpayers, beef would cost $35 per pound.
These people were vegetarians:
Albert Einstein
George Bernard Shaw
Leo Tolstoy
Clara Barton
Mahatma Ghandi
Mr. Rogers
Leonardo da Vinci
Jeff Juliano, the original Ronald McDonald
All members of the Roman empire were vegetarians until Julias
Caesar.
There is no known case of a vegetarian dying of snakebite in
America.
Drink
In America, some people put sugar in their tea or coffee. In
parts of China, people put salt into their tea.
Voltaire drank between 50 and 65 cups of coffee every day.
In France the average person drinks over 25 gallons of wine
per year.
We Americans drink three million gallons of orange juice per
day. We drink over fifteen million gallons of beer daily. This
means that on average, Americans drink five times more beer than
orange juice.
In Old England, people drank beer at breakfast.
In the old days, people did not buy beer in bottles or cans
at the 7-11 store. They went to the tavern and carried the beer
home in a bucket.
In Japan there is a liquor made from the fermented bodies of
venomous snakes.
If everyone quit drinking alcoholic beverages, twenty million
starving people could be fed on the grain saved.
Miscellaneous Food Facts
According to the makers of Hellman's Mayonnaise, contrary to
popular belief, you can't get sick from their product. They have
never had a case of a sick customer. The acid and salt in the
product would kill harmful bacteria.
Nine people per day die in America from accidentally
drinking, eating or inhaling something other than food.
If you lined up all the eggs that Americans eat in one day,
they would reach from Chicago to Waikiki. (4142 miles)
We each eat approximately ten pounds of chemical food
additives per year.
To grow the wheat for a single loaf of bread requires two
tons of water.
You can harvest one-half ton of wheat from an acre, but if
you grow potatoes instead, that same acre will give you five tons.
A scientist is working on a new soft drink that will help you
lose weight in a new way. When you sip this drink, it coats your
intestines with a fluorocarbon that reduces the ability to absorb
nutrition. When you eat, the stuff will just go right through you
without benefit.
Americans are 2,300,000,000 (over 2 billion) pounds
overweight. We average about nine and a half pounds overweight.
Overweight Americans cost about a billion extra gallons of
gasoline per year.
If you occasionally water your plants with Club Soda, they
will increase in color and vitality.
Food takes 24 hours to complete its 30-foot path through your
body.
Chop suey was invented in America.
Honey does not spoil.
If you like exotic foods, perhaps you would like Haggis, from
Scotland. It contains oatmeal, suet, onions, and sheep heart,
lungs, liver and stomach.
If you spin two eggs on a flat, hard surface, one raw, and
the other hard-boiled, the hard-boiled one will spin much longer.
There used to be a custom of putting a small piece of toast
into wine to enhance its flavor by absorbing particles. This is
where the term "to toast" came from.
Potato chips cost 200 times more per pound than potatoes.
The high cost of medical insurance would be reduced by about
33 percent if we all had a proper diet, according to a study by
the Senate Committee of Nutrition and Human Needs.
If we all had a proper diet, 98 percent of the people who die
of heart attacks would still be around.
Some scientists in Tucson, Arizona studied peoples' garbage
cans and discovered that Americans waste ten percent of the food
we buy. We throw away 81 billion dollars worth of good food every
year.
Perhaps you have seen the trick done by jugglers where they
juggle three items, one of which is an apple, and as they juggle,
they eat the apple. This can be done fast and messy, and brings
great laughter as apple juice and bits of apple end up flying all
over the stage as the juggler finishes.
John, a juggler working in Chicago, had performed the apple
trick hundreds of times, but he never really ate the apple. He
didn't swallow it, he merely filled his mouth with bites of apple,
then spit them out back stage afterwards. On one occasion, John
was near the end of the apple routine, and the crowd was loving
it, so he went a bit (or rather a bite) farther than usual. This
proved to be too much, that last bite shoved some apple into his
throat which resulted in John throwing up all over the stage!