Seven food history facts, checked against the page

Food history facts travel well because they are short, and short is where the conditions get dropped. I read the cited page for seven of them from the library. Two hold up with small edits, four claim more than the page says, and the honey story is contradicted by its own source. [1]

Which food history facts hold up?

Two of the seven survive the reading with only a change of wording. Both sit in the food library, and both rest on a date the page gives plainly.

Tinned food and the tin opener

The library says tinned food arrived 50 years before the tin opener. The page on the can opener puts it this way: "the first can openers were not patented until 1855 in England and 1858 in the United States". [2]

The 50 depends on where you start counting. Peter Durand patented preservation in tin cans in 1810, which gives 45 years to the English patent. The same page has the Dutch Navy using tinned food from at least 1772, which gives 83. It also dates patents, a narrower thing than the first opener anyone made. [2]

Early cans did ask for a hammer and chisel. The instructions on them read "Cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer." [2]

Margarine and Napoleon III

Margarine and the emperor's butter substitute holds up on date and motive. The page says Napoleon III "issued a challenge to create a butter-substitute from beef tallow for the armed forces and lower classes", and that Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès invented margarine in 1869. [3]

The page says challenge where the library says prize, and the passage names no reward. Beef tallow is the detail the headline drops. The win did not make its inventor rich either: he "had little commercial success" and sold the patent in 1871 to the Dutch company Jurgens. [3]

Which ones claim more than the page does?

Four facts have a true core and a stronger headline. In each case the page is narrower than the card, and the gap is set out below.

Avocados and ground sloths

Avocados built for animals that no longer exist is told as settled. The avocado page reports it as something authors "have speculated", with Connie Barlow's 2001 book The Ghosts of Evolution as the named example. Barlow's list of possible dispersers runs from an elephant relative to ground sloths and glyptodonts. [4]

The page then records critics "who note that many large fruit are readily dispersed by non-megafaunal animals", and says agoutis and spectacled bears have been seen eating avocados. [4] That weakens the library's line that the fruit was a dead end without humans.

The wider idea has real support. A paper in PLOS One on fruits and lost megafauna says "both the medium- and large-sized gravigrade species, such as ground sloths, were able to do long-distance dispersal". [5] I searched that paper for the avocado and did not find it, so it backs the sloths and leaves the fruit open.

Carrots and the colour purple

Carrots used to be purple is true of one time and several places. The carrot page says "In the 10th century, roots from West Asia, India and Europe were purple." [6]

The next lines spoil the tidy version. An 11th-century writer describes both red and yellow carrots, and there is pictorial evidence of an orange carrot at least as early as 512 AD. The page thinks orange probably was not a stable variety until the Dutch bred the Long Orange at the start of the 18th century. [6]

The popular reason for all that breeding, a tribute to the House of Orange, gets short shrift: "there is little evidence for this beyond oral tradition and the timing". [6]

Tomatoes and pewter plates

The claim that wealthy Europeans avoided tomatoes and had a point has two halves, and only the first is on the page. Outside Spain, the tomato began as an ornament, "understood to be related to the nightshades and assumed to be poisonous". The English barber-surgeon John Gerard, whose Herbal came out in 1597, believed the same, and his views were influential. [7]

The second half is the lead leaching out of pewter. Neither pewter nor lead poisoning appears on that page. A magazine article I tried to open for it refused the request, and I could not find a primary source for the plates. The pewter stays unverified here, and the page's own explanation is the plant's family.

Coffee and the people who banned it

Coffee has been banned again and again is right on the count and loose on the motive. The first ban on the page reads: "In 1511, it was forbidden for its stimulating effect by conservative, orthodox imams at a theological court in Mecca." [8] The stated objection there was to the drink.

That ban was overturned in 1524. Cairo had one in 1532, and further attempts came in 1567 and 1583. Politics enters with the English coffeehouses, which grew potentially subversive enough that Charles II "made an attempt to crush coffeehouses in the 1670s". [8] So the library's reason fits England better than it fits Mecca.

What does the page say about tomb honey?

The library says honey from ancient tombs was still edible after 3,000 years. The honey page holds two sentences that pull against each other. Its opening section says "Samples of honey discovered in archaeological contexts have proven edible even after millennia." Further down it says "no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs", and that all such cases were other substances or only chemical traces. [1]

That second sentence is the more specific, and it cites a 1975 paper by F. Filce Leek on bees and honey in ancient Egypt, which I have not read. I could not find the 3,000-year figure on the page. Until someone names a tomb, a jar and a taster, I would not repeat this one as told. [1]

The chemistry half needs a small trim. The page credits "high sugar concentration and acidic pH level" for the fact that many microorganisms cannot grow in honey, with an average pH of 3.9 and a range of 3.4 to 6.1. Many is short of all: the same page warns that infants can develop botulism from honey carrying bacterial endospores. [1]

Questions

Is honey from Egyptian tombs still edible?

The page I read says no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs, and that reported cases turned out to be other substances or only chemical traces. It also says honey from archaeological contexts has proven edible after millennia, without naming a tomb in that sentence. Honey keeps very well while it stays dry, but the tomb version of the story is the weak part.

Did the Dutch make carrots orange to honour William of Orange?

The carrot page says Dutch growers created the orange carrot and that a stable variety probably dates from the cultivar called Long Orange. The link to the House of Orange is another matter. It has little evidence behind it beyond oral tradition and the timing, so it is safer to credit the breeding and leave the royal tribute as a story people tell.

Why were tin openers invented so long after tins?

The can opener page offers a modest answer. Early cans were heavy and tough, and people opened them with tools they already owned, so a new tool had to justify its cost and effort. The page says the gap may be attributed to that balance, which makes it a suggestion and falls short of a documented reason.