FoodFood History
Irish bogs keep coughing up ancient, edible butter.
Peat bogs in Ireland and Scotland keep yielding buried lumps of 'bog butter', some of them thousands of years old. Cold, acidic and nearly oxygen-free, a bog is a natural refrigerator — and researchers who examined a 2,000-year-old find declared it theoretically still edible.
Step by step
- For centuries, Irish and Scottish farmers buried butter in peat bogs.
- Cold, acidic and airless, a bog is a natural refrigerator.
- Recovered lumps run to thousands of years old — one 2,000-year-old find was called still edible.
Source
This fact is written from the English Wikipedia article it links to, so you can check every word in one tap. Fact Drop rates that source 4 out of 5 for credibility, and the rating travels with the fact on the back of its card in the app.
Keep digging
The ancient world's pantry, it turns out, is still partly stocked.
This fact is a step in the rabbit hole Food that won't die. Follow the rabbit hole
More 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.
- 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.