Bizarre Food Facts

I’m reading Ripley’s Believe or Not! Encyclopedia of the Bizarre, and I found some really interesting facts about food that I just had to share. Please note that I can’t attest to the accuracy of these information, I’m quoting directly from the book.

But true or not, they are certainly fascinating, especially since I study natural health and am naturally intrigued with bizarre facts about food. These particularly caught my interest because they relate directly or indirectly to certain things I’m learning about food in my natural health education: 

• In a village near Accra, Ghana, five thousand tons of rock are mined every year, then crushed and mixed with water and turned into edible dough.
• A teaspoonful of sugar can be dissolved in a glass full of water to the brim without spilling a drop.
• The first American settlers used lobsters to fertilize their gardens, and fed them only to widows, orphans, and servants.
• Salt added to a grapefruit will make it sweet.
• The left ham is more tender than the right ham because pigs use only their right leg to scratch themselves.
• Meat was often sold door-to-door in the United States in the 1890s, in unrefrigerated wagons.
• Garlic belongs to the lily family.
• The apple is a member of the rose family.
• Apricot pits are more valuable than apricots.
• There are about five hundred different types of bananas!
• A lemon is a berry, not a fruit!
• The Romans used lemons as mothballs.
• The more sardines packed in a can, the greater the profit to the packer – the oil is more costly than the fish.
• There is no such fish as a sardine. The fish may be pilchards, herring, or anchovies.
• The whites of eggs and the deadly venom of a rattlesnake contains the same chemical constituents, in the same proportion.
• A dull knife can slice cheese thinner than a sharp knife can.
• If you use milk in your tea you are drinking leather. Milk contains fibrin and albumen. Tea contains tannin. The mixing of the two make a turbid liquid – the turbidity thus caused is tannate of fibrin, or leather.
• It takes all the beans from twelve coffee trees to make two cups of coffee!
• Coffee is a fruit juice!

Well, there are a whole lot more bizarre facts to be found in the book, not just about food but about every other subject matter there is! I’m having a great time reading it, and am simply amazed at some of the stuff in there!