45 facts, each with a source
Food facts
Food facts with more chemistry and history than the label admits. Honey does not spoil, tinned food arrived fifty years before the tin opener, and the statistical test behind much of modern science was invented to check barley for Guinness. Every fact links to its source.
Cooking Science
Nutrition
Spices
- Every vanilla pod outside Mexico is pollinated by hand, using a method worked out in 1841 by a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion.
- Chilli heat is aimed at mammals.
- Chilli heat was originally measured by human tongues.
- Most wasabi is not wasabi.
- To protect their monopoly, Dutch traders soaked nutmeg in lime before export so no seed could ever germinate elsewhere.
- Nutmeg in large amounts is a deliriant.
- Saffron is the dried stigmas of a crocus, three per flower, picked by hand at dawn before the sun opens them.
Fermentation
Food History
- Tinned food arrived 50 years before the tin opener.
- Then whaling got bigger, not smaller.
- Avocados were built for animals that no longer exist.
- Wealthy Europeans avoided tomatoes for years as poisonous, and they had a point.
- The pyramid builders were paid in bread and beer.
- Chocolate used to be money.
- Pineapples were so expensive in 18th-century Britain that people rented one for the evening, displayed it at dinner, and returned it.
- Irish bogs keep coughing up ancient, edible butter.
- Ketchup started as a fermented fish sauce in southeast Asia.
- Lobster used to be prison food.
- Cheap ice meant you could move meat instead of animals.
- The croissant is not French.
- The first food ever grown in space was a potato.
- Honey pulled from ancient tombs was still edible after 3,000 years.
- Romans poured a fermented fish sauce on almost everything, and its factories left salt tanks all over the empire.
- Carrots used to be purple.
- Margarine exists because Napoleon III offered a prize for a butter substitute that would keep for the army and the poor.
Beverages
- The statistical test behind much of modern science was invented to check barley for Guinness.
- The world's costliest coffee is picked out of animal droppings.
- Coca-Cola's flavour still involves coca leaf.
- Coffee has been banned again and again.
- A champagne bottle holds around six times atmospheric pressure — roughly triple a car tyre.