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TRIVIA
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FOOD TRIVIA
^^^^^^^^^^^
Although much of the information in this chapter is not
directly related to health, we thought you'd find some of
these facts and figures about food interesting and amusing.
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.
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.
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.
Bites From Food History
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.
John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola referred to
it as, "Esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage."
Ketchup was originally made from fish broth and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.
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
Around 50 million Americans eat at fast-food
restaurants each day.
When you go to a fast-food restaurant, and ask for
white chicken meat, you might actually get bleached dark
meat.
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.
Famous people who were and are vegetarians:
Albert Einstein
George Bernard Shaw
Leo Tolstoy
Clara Barton
Mahatma Ghandi
Adolf Hitler
Leonardo da Vinci
Jeff Juliano, the original Ronald McDonald
Mr. Rogers
Charles Manson
Paul and Linda McCartney
And too many to mention here!
All members of the Roman empire were vegetarians until
Julias Caesar.
There is no known case of a vegetarian dying of
snakebite in America.
99 percent of everything alive on earth is vegetable.
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 with their 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.
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.
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.
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.
Food takes 24 hours to complete its 30-foot path
through your body.
Chop suey was invented in America.
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 food every year.
One day in Poland, a brewery developed a plumbing problem
in which the beer was accidentally pumped into the incoming
water supply. The result: Residents of the town got free
beer on tap at their kitchen sinks, bathrooms and garden
faucets.
Rubbing orange peels or lemon peels on yourself will
repel mosquitoes. The active ingredient being citronella.
Velma Anstadt won a science fair when she made
protein-rich earthworm cookies.
Pepsico also owns the Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut
and Taco Bell chains.
Of all the land on earth, 7.6% is being farmed. 21%
could be farmed.
Michel Lotito has eaten 7 tv sets.
Robert Hopkirk eats 72 raw eggs a week. That's all.
Safeway, the grocery store chain, owns over 22 miles of
bumper to bumper tractor-trailers.
2 out of every 100 Americans are farmers or ranchers. The
other 98 out of a hundred eat their products.
40% of Americans want to eat less salt. Lemon drops can
act as a salt substitute. If you like salt on your steak,
but know you shouldn't eat so much salt, put a few drops of
lemon juice on your food and enjoy the taste.
The average American eats 20 to 30 times as much salt as
is required for good health.
82% of children list pizza as their favorite food.
Half of all kids under age 12 cook at least one meal per
week.
One out of 25 kids think that pasta is seafood.
The average American family spends $411.52 per year on
pizza.
Less than 1/3 of the meals eaten in America are served
to the whole family at once.
One-third of the items bought at grocery stores are not
food.
Four years ago, 17% of Americans knew what their
cholesterol level was. Three years ago, 32% knew the figure.
All the information in this database is reliably
calculated from or based on what others have written.
However, you may wish to conduct your own research to make
absolutely sure of the facts.
An American spends less for food than a person anywhere
else in the world. 12% of our total income goes for food.
When rats were fed only 60% of the food they would eat if
they could, they lived 40% longer than normal.
Here's a puzzle for you: What do you call the long thin
things on the end of a fork? Can't remember? You'll find out
in a minute.
A study has discovered that people tend to eat 44% more
calories when they dine with friends than when they eat
alone.
A survey was conducted in which shoppers were asked what
concerned them most about shopping. Their overwhelming
reply: "Long waits in line at the check-out counter."
Retailers, take note.
Wetco sells glacial ice to Japanese consumers. It has a
bluish tint and pops and cracks as it melts. The tint is
simply the refraction of light in ice denser than homemade
ice cubes. The noises are from 10,000 year old pockets of
air being released. This sound is referred to as "The whisper
of the ages." Price: approximately $3 per pound.
For years milk has been prescribed for ulcers, but recent
research finds that milk actually aggravates ulcers.
The things on the end of a fork are called tangs. If you
guessed tines, you were right, too.
There is more alcohol in mouthwash than in wine.
In the past 4 years sales from vending machines in
America has risen by 7 billion dollars to $24.5 billion
annually.
In the early 1970's, when Americans were in the worst
nutritional position we have ever been in, 90% of women age
10 to 54 were deficient in iron. In cases severe enough to
manifest symptoms, tiredness and listlessness would be
common. Since that time, the picture has become somewhat
better, due to increased nutritional awareness.
So you eat a bowl of salad everyday, and you think this
is helping you get all the vitamins you need. In the 1800's
this would have been true, but latest evidence indicates that
the vegetables grown on modern industrial farms have less
nutritional value. They are carefully fertilized to the
minimum amount necessary to grow and look good. The land has
long been depleted of important trace elements.
The average American eats 16.5 pounds of french fries a
year, totaling 2 million tons. This would fill 50,000 of the
biggest tractor trailers, and it would clog even more heart
arteries.
There is one vending machine for every 55 Americans.
Coming soon: Vending machines that bake and serve a
pizza in 55 seconds.
When you heat cooking oil to over 400 degrees and reuse
it for a long time, the chemicals in it change. Research
indicates that the oil used by many fast-food establishments
for frying hamburgers and other foods such as french fries is
often quite carcinogenic.
A person drinks about 11,000 gallons of liquid in a
lifetime, approximately 1/3 the amount of water in a built-in
swimming pool.
In the early part of this century, Fletcherism was
popular. It was an inexpensive diet of milk, potatoes,
cereals and maple sugar, among other things. What was most
unusual about it, however, was that you were supposed to chew
each bite of food for a very long time before swallowing.
Furthermore, you were to swish milk and other liquids around
in your mouth for at least 15 seconds before swallowing. The
leader of this fad, Horace Fletcher, was quite healthy. In
1899, when he was 50 years old, he could outperform athletes
less that half his age. For instance, he could ride a bicycle
200 miles in a single day. And not a sleek 10-speed bike, but
the machine of the day, a single-speed machine.
End of file.