The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (6 page)

HOLD YOUR LIQUOR

A full 7 percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.

Beer foam will go down if you lick your finger and then stick it in the beer.

Researchers in Denmark found that beer tastes best when drunk to the accompaniment of a certain musical tone. The optimal frequency is different for each beer, they reported. The correct harmonious tone for Carlsberg lager, for example, is 510 to 520 cycles per second.

Widows of a recently deceased king among the Baganda people of Uganda have the honor of drinking the beer in which the king’s entrails have been cleaned.

The Bloody Mary is known as the “Queen of Drinks” and was invented in Harry’s Bar in Paris in the 1930s.

If you put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will keep floating to the top and sinking to the bottom.

The first man to distill bourbon whiskey was a Baptist preacher in 1789.

Wine will spoil if exposed to light, hence the tinted bottles.

Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to twelve hours after a person has stopped drinking.

In medieval England, beer was often served with breakfast.

Vikings used the skulls of their enemies as drinking vessels.

CRACKING SOME NUTS

Almonds are a member of the peach family. They are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.

Peanuts are cholesterol-?free. They are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. It takes more than five hundred peanuts to make one twelve-?ounce jar of peanut butter.

Australian chemist John Macadamia discovered the macadamia nut.

The only real food U.S. astronauts are allowed in space are pecan nuts.

In the summer, walnuts get a tan.

EAT YOUR VEGGIES

Vegetarians make up 4 percent of the U.S. population.

Ninety percent of the vitamin C in brussels sprouts is lost in cooking.

You use more calories eating celery than there are in celery itself.

Eggplant is a member of the thistle family.

Eating raw onions is good for unblocking a stuffed nose.

Onions are low in calories and a good source of vitamin C, calcium, potassium, and fiber. They also help circulation.

Onions get their distinctive smell by soaking up sulfur from the soil.

The oldest known vegetable is the pea.

The most popular sweet pepper is the bell pepper.

The heat of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.

The color of a chili is no indication of its spiciness, but size usually is—the smaller the pepper, the hotter it is.

Pumpkins contain vitamin A and potassium.

Turnips turn green when sunburned.

TUTTI FRUITY

Pomology is the study of fruit.

Tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits.

Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient for waking you up in the morning.

Fresh apples float because 25 percent of their volume is air.

The avocado has the most calories of any fruit.

The most widely eaten fruit in America is the banana.

The average banana weighs 126 grams.

Approximately seventeen thousand bananas are eaten each week in the Boston University dining room.

Bananas do not grow on trees but on rhizomes.

Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

Cranberry jelly is the only jelly flavor that comes from the real fruit, not artificial flavoring.

A cucumber consists of 96 percent water.

Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.

Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.

Seeds are missing from a navel orange. The bigger the navel, the sweeter the orange.

In Ivrea, Italy, thousands of citizens celebrate the beginning of Lent by throwing oranges at one another.

Orange juice helps the body absorb iron easily when consumed with a meal.

The most common pear worldwide is the Bartlett. It is bell shaped, sweet, and soft, with a light green color.

More than a third of all pineapples come from Hawaii.

Pineapples do not ripen after they have been picked.

Tomatina is the legendary Spanish tomato-?throwing festival.

More than two hundred varieties of watermelon are grown in the United States.

JAVA TIME

Coffee is the world’s most popular stimulant. It is the second largest item of international commerce in the world.

When a coffee seed is planted, it takes five years to yield consumable fruit.

There are more than one hundred chemicals in one cup of coffee.

Coffee does not help sober up a drunk person. In many cases, it may actually increase the adverse effects of alcohol.

Too much caffeine can cause heart palpitations.

A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn’t give her coffee.

In Turkey in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anyone caught drinking coffee was put to death.

YOU SAY TOMATO, I SAY AVOCADO

A chili pepper isn’t a pepper. In fact, more than two hundred kinds of chili peppers aren’t peppers.

There is no such thing as blue food—even blueberries are purple.

THE SWEET SPOT

M&Ms stands for the last names of Forrest Mars Sr., the sweet maker, and his associate, Bruce Murrie. The candy was developed so soldiers could eat sweets without getting their fingers sticky.

There are more brown M&Ms in plain M&Ms than in peanut M&Ms.

The top layer of a wedding cake, known as the groom’s cake, is usually a fruit cake so it will last until the couple’s first anniversary, when they will eat it.

As much as fifty gallons of maple sap are used to make a single gallon of maple sugar.

There are more doughnut shops per capita in Canada than in any other country.

Pound cake is so called because the original recipe required one pound of butter.

The only food that does not spoil is honey. It is used as a center for golf balls and in antifreeze mixtures.

When honey is swallowed, it enters the blood stream within a period of twenty minutes.

The most popular ice cream flavor is vanilla.

Ice cream was originally made without sugar and eggs. Seaweed is one of the ingredients in some ice cream.

Five jelly flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.

Less than 3 percent of Nestlé’s sales are for chocolate.

Eleanor Roosevelt ate three chocolate-?covered garlic balls every day for most of her adult life.

Eating chocolate was once considered a temptation of the devil.

NO WONDER WE’RE FAT

During your lifetime, you will eat sixty thousand pounds of food—the weight of six elephants.

The average American chews 190 sticks of gum, drinks 600 sodas and 800 gallons of water, and eats 135 pounds of sugar and 19 pounds of cereal per year.

The biggest-?selling restaurant food is french fries.

The estimated number of M&Ms sold each day in the United States is two hundred million.

The amount of potato chips Americans eat each year weighs six times more than the Titanic.

A can of SPAM is opened every four seconds.

Americans on average eat eighteen acres of pizza every day. Saturday night is the biggest night of the week for eating pizza.

Dunkin’ Donuts serves about 112,500 doughnuts each day.

More popcorn is sold in Dallas than anywhere else in the United States.

Two million different combinations of sandwiches can be created from a Subway menu.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GASTRONOMIC HISTORY

The food of the Greek gods was called ambrosia.

The chocolate-?chip cookie was invented in 1933.

Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.

California’s Frank Epperson invented the Popsicle in 1905, when he was eleven years old.

Chefs started using onions five thousand years ago to spice up their cooking.

Doughnuts originated in Holland.

Dry cereal for breakfast was invented by John Henry Kellogg at the turn of the twentieth century.

In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.

Fortune cookies were actually invented in America by Charles Jung in 1918.

Jelly Belly jelly beans were the first jelly beans in outer space when they went up with astronauts in the June 21, 1983, voyage of the space shuttle Challenger.

WE’D LOVE TO HAVE YOU FOR DINNER…

Sawney Beane, his wife, eight sons, six daughters, and thirty-?two grandchildren were a family of cannibals who lived in the caves near Galloway, Scotland, in the early seventeenth century. Although the total number is not known, it is believed they claimed more than fifty victims per year. The entire family was taken by an army detachment to Edinburgh and executed, apparently without trial.

British politician John Montagu, the 46th Earl of Sandwich, is credited with naming the sandwich. He developed the habit of eating beef between slices of toast so he could continue playing cards uninterrupted.

Ketchup originated in China.

Laws forbidding the sale of sodas on Sunday prompted William Garwood to invent the ice-?cream sundae in Evanston, Illinois, in 1875.

Potato chips were invented in Louisiana in 1853.

Potatoes were first imported by Europe in the 1500s on Spanish ships returning from Peru.

Beijing boasts the world’s largest Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

Almost 425,000 hot dogs and buns and 160,000 hamburgers and cheeseburgers were served at Woodstock ’99.

The English word soup comes from the Middle Ages word sop, which means a slice of bread over which roast drippings were poured.

COUNTERINTUITIVE BUT TRUE

Vanilla is used to make chocolate.

RECORD BREAKERS

The highest lifetime yield of milk for a single cow is 55,849 gallons.

The hottest chili in the world is the habanero.

The largest apple pie ever baked was forty feet by twenty-?three feet.

The largest hamburger in the world weighed in at 5,520 pounds.

The largest ketchup bottle is a 170-foot water tower.

INTERNATIONAL PALETTES

Dinner guests during the medieval times in England were expected to bring their own knives to the table.

In eighteenth-?century France, visitors to the royal palace in Versailles were allowed to stand in a roped-?off section of the main dining room and watch the king and queen eat.

In certain parts of India and ancient China, mouse meat was considered a delicacy.

Each year, Americans spend more on cat food than on baby food.

It is estimated that Americans consume ten million tons of turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Due to turkey’s high sulfur content, Americans also produce enough gas to fly a fleet of seventy-?five Hindenburgs from Los Angeles to New York in twenty-?four hours.

The Southern dish “chitlins” is made up of pigs’ small intestines.

Yogurt intake among North Americans has quadrupled in the past twenty years.

In Australia, the number-?one topping for pizza is eggs. In Chile, the favorite topping is mussels and clams. In the United States, it’s pepperoni.

The world’s number-?one producer and consumer of fresh pork is China.

China produces 278,564,356,980 eggs per year.

China’s Beijing Duck Restaurant can seat nine thousand people at one time.

If China imported just 10 percent of its rice needs, the price on the world market would increase by 80 percent.

France has the highest per capita consumption of cheese. More than half of the different types of cheese in the world come from France.

The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

Japan is the largest exporter of frogs’ legs.

A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.

CULINARY ER

Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a space suit damages it.

Since 1978, at least thirty-?seven people have died as a result of shaking vending machines in an attempt to get free merchandise. More than one hundred have been injured.

Some people drink the urine of pregnant women to build up their immune systems.

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma in an emergency.

You should not eat a crayfish with a straight tail. It was dead before it was cooked.

Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.

Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

A LITTLE BIT GRAINY

There are more than fifteen thousand different kinds of rice. Rice is grown on more than 10 percent of the earth’s farmable surface and is the main food for half of the people of the world.

Rice is thrown at weddings as a symbol of fertility.

Shredded Wheat was the first ready-?to-?eat breakfast cereal.

The wheat that produces a one-?pound loaf of bread requires two tons of water to grow.

The Book of Useless Information

The Book of Useless Information

The Book of Useless Information

No two cornflakes look the same.

SO THAT’S WHERE OUR TAX DOLLARS GO

The U.S. government spent $277,000 on “pickle research” in 1993.

NO, I SAID CONDIMENTS

Salt is the only rock humans can eat. Only 5 percent of salt produced ends up on the dinner table. The rest is used for packing meat; building roads; feeding livestock; tanning leather; and manufacturing glass, soap, ash, and washing compounds.

Salt is one of the few spices that is all taste and no smell.

Table salt is the only commodity that hasn’t risen dramatically in price in the last one hundred fifty years.

Tabasco sauce is made by fermenting vinegar and hot peppers in a French oak barrel that has three inches of salt on top and is aged for three years until all the salt is diffused through the barrel.

Worcestershire sauce is basically anchovy ketchup.

The number 57 on a Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO “MOOO…”

Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than new cars.

Reindeer’s milk has more fat than cow’s milk.

Sheep’s milk is used to produce Roquefort cheese.

The fat molecules in goat’s milk are five times smaller than those found in cow’s milk.