Almanac chapter 2: Food

                                     Chapter 2

                                       FOOD


              The FDA considers chocolate acceptable for public consumption
         as long as there are less than 60 microscopic insect fragments per
         100 grams (four ounces, or approximately one candy bar).

              Chocolate is highly toxic to dogs.  If they eat as little  as
         four  ounces,  they  become  so hyperactive that they may suffer a
         fatal heart attack.

              If you are typical, four percent of the food you eat will  be
         eaten in front of a refrigerator with its door open.


                                 Unusual Appetites

              Worlds  worst  meal:  eating  a  bicycle.   A man did this by
         grinding it into powder.

              In 1743 a teen-age boy was observed to have eaten 384  pounds
         of  food  in  one  week. There was another boy (or perhaps another
         report on this same boy) whose weight increased by 179  pounds  in
         one  year  from 105 to 284. Like a cow, he ate fifteen hours every
         day yet was still hungry.

              In 1963 a man ate a single meal weighing 54 pounds.

              There was an olympic hammer thrower who used to eat  a  dozen
         raw eggs for breakfast, complete with shells.

              Perhaps the most exotic annual culinary affair was hosted  by
         Clodius,  a rich Roman actor who had one hundred birds given voice
         lessons at a cost of approximately $250 per  bird.   He  then  had
         these  birds  made  into  a pie for his guests.  He then offered a
         drink which contained  a  dissolved  pearl  worth  about  one-half
         million dollars.

              Historians  tell  us  that  a  sweet  onion  was the favorite
         dessert of the Romans.

              In Africa, roasted termites are considered delicious.

              People  in Laos would think  you were crazy if you refused to
         eat giant waterbugs.

              In Japan,  if you have enough money, you  can  order  gourmet
         beef  from cattle that have been raised in darkness, fed beer, and
         given custom massages by special masseurs.

              An English king used to like eating rotten oysters.

              When a pineapple was  first shown  to  the  infamous  glutton
         King  Louis  XIV, he immediately grabbed it and took a giant bite.
         He cut his lips and thereafter outlawed pineapples in France.

              Professor  William Buckland acquired the dried out  heart  of
         King Louis XIV, provided by grave robbers. He ate it!


                           Bites From The History of Food

              In  the  Bible,  the fruit that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden
         was not specifically an apple.  In the Koran, the sacred  book  of
         Islam,  it  is  called a banana. Some scientists believe the fruit
         may have been a lemon, because edible apples did not yet exist  in
         the time and place of Eden.

              The word salary came from the word salt in Roman times.  Salt
         was used as a trading medium - money.

              It's hard to imagine that until about four hundred years ago,
         European  people  ate  everything  with their fingers.  When a few
         people started using forks in England, everyone else  thought  the
         idea of using tools to eat was totally strange.

              The original  reason for  tablecloths was as a towel to wipe
         one's fingers and hands on after eating.

              In  the  eighteenth  century,   John  Montagu,  the  Earl  of
         Sandwich  invented  a small meal that could be eaten with one hand
         while he continued his non-stop gambling.

              Coca-Cola,   Hires  Root   Beer  and  Dr.   Pepper  were  all
         introduced in the same year, 1886.
              John Pemberton,  the inventor of Coca-Cola referred to it as,
         "Esteemed Brain Tonic and Intellectual Beverage."
              7-Up  was originally called  Bib-Label  Lithiated  Lemon-Lime
         Soda when it was invented in 1929.
              The  7  is for the  original size - 7 ounces - and the Up was
         for "bottoms up." The first advertising slogan for 7-Up  was,  "It
         takes the ouch out of grouch."

              When  popsicles first appeared  in  1905,  they  were  called
         Epsicles, after Frank Epperson, their inventor.

              Ketchup  was  originally  made from fish broth and mushrooms.
         Tomatoes were added later.  Today,  ketchup  must  contain  sugar,
         otherwise it must be called imitation ketchup.

              Ninety to one hundred years ago,  the average American worked
         about 13 minutes to earn enough money for a quart of milk. Now, it
         takes about 4 minutes.

              M&M  candies are named for Forrest Mars  and  Bruce  Murries,
         the  inventors.  They were first made as a high-energy field snack
         for American soldiers because "they melt in your mouth, not in you
         hand."


                               Fruits and Vegetables

              Cherries taste great,  but if you eat the leaves or twigs  of
         a cherry tree, you could die.

              Strawberries  are  unique  among  fruits  because they  carry
         their seeds on the outside.

              People have grown tomatoes with a strawberry growing inside.

              Americans eat 5681 miles of carrots per day.

              A  genetic   engineer  in  Japan  has   created   cube-shaped
         watermelons. These stack more efficiently than round ones.

              Celery  has  the  unusual  effect that the more you eat,  the
         skinnier you will become.  It takes more energy to eat celery than
         the calories it contains.

              If you eat eleven  pounds of  potatoes,  you  will  gain  one
         pound  of  weight.   Until  the eighteenth century, many Americans
         believed that potatoes were bad for your health.

              Nine-tenths of cabbage is plain water.

              If you  store carrots and apples together in your fridge, the
         carrots will become  bitter  because  they  are  affected  by  the
         ethylene fumes (natural) given off by the apples.


                                       Sugar

              There is a  wild edible plant called  Hernandulcin  which  is
         1000 times sweeter than sugar.

              If you  filled trucks with all the candy American kids eat in
         one  year,  they  would line up bumper to bumper from San Diego to
         San Francisco.

              When the diets of  inmates of a Virginia  juvenile  detention
         center  were  changed  from  typical American junk food to natural
         foods - cereal without sugar, fruit juice instead of soda, etc,  -
         kids  who  were chronic offenders decreased by 56 percent and kids
         who were well-mannered increased by 71 percent.


                                        Meat

               When you go to a fast-food  restaurant  and  ask  for  white
         chicken meat, you might actually get bleached dark meat.

               The  largest  Kentucky  Fried  Chicken  store is in Beijing,
         China.

               Americans eat 127 chickens per second.

               Just before a game, Babe Ruth had to be taken to a  hospital
         due  to  extreme  stomach  pain. He had eaten twelve hot dogs in a
         row!

               Most people don't realize that a hot  dog  may  contain  cow
         brains, lips, eyes, stomachs or tails. Americans eat an average of
         forty  of  these things per year, at a cost of six hundred million
         dollars.  If you lined them all up, that line  would  be  about  a
         half million miles long.

               If the water used by the cattle business was not paid for by
         American taxpayers, beef would cost $35 per pound.

               These people were vegetarians:
         Albert Einstein
         George Bernard Shaw
         Leo Tolstoy
         Clara Barton
         Mahatma Ghandi
         Mr. Rogers
         Leonardo da Vinci
         Jeff Juliano, the original Ronald McDonald

              All members of the Roman empire were vegetarians until Julias
         Caesar.

              There is no known case of a vegetarian dying of snakebite  in
         America.


                                       Drink

              In  America, some people put sugar in their tea or coffee. In
         parts of China, people put salt into their tea.

              Voltaire drank between 50 and 65 cups of coffee every day.

              In France the average person drinks over 25 gallons  of  wine
         per year.

              We  Americans drink three million gallons of orange juice per
         day.  We drink over fifteen million gallons of  beer  daily.  This
         means  that  on average, Americans drink five times more beer than
         orange juice.

              In Old England, people drank beer at breakfast.

              In the old days, people did not buy beer in bottles  or  cans
         at  the  7-11  store. They went to the tavern and carried the beer
         home in a bucket.

              In Japan there is a liquor made from the fermented bodies  of
         venomous snakes.

              If everyone quit drinking alcoholic beverages, twenty million
         starving people could be fed on the grain saved.


                              Miscellaneous Food Facts

              According  to the makers of Hellman's Mayonnaise, contrary to
         popular belief, you can't get sick from their product.  They  have
         never  had  a  case  of a sick customer.  The acid and salt in the
         product would kill harmful bacteria.

              Nine   people  per  day  die  in  America  from  accidentally
         drinking, eating or inhaling something other than food.

              If you lined up all the eggs that Americans eat in  one  day,
         they would reach from Chicago to Waikiki. (4142 miles)

              We  each  eat  approximately  ten  pounds  of  chemical  food
         additives per year.

              To  grow  the  wheat  for a single loaf of bread requires two
         tons of water.

              You can harvest one-half ton of wheat from an  acre,  but  if
         you grow potatoes instead, that same acre will give you five tons.

              A scientist is working on a new soft drink that will help you
         lose  weight  in a new way. When you sip this drink, it coats your
         intestines with a fluorocarbon that reduces the ability to  absorb
         nutrition.  When you eat, the stuff will just go right through you
         without benefit.

              Americans   are   2,300,000,000   (over   2  billion)  pounds
         overweight.  We average about nine and a half  pounds  overweight.
         Overweight  Americans  cost  about  a  billion  extra  gallons  of
         gasoline per year.

              If  you  occasionally  water your plants with Club Soda, they
         will increase in color and vitality.

              Food takes 24 hours to complete its 30-foot path through your
         body.

              Chop suey was invented in America.

              Honey does not spoil.

              If you like exotic foods, perhaps you would like Haggis, from
         Scotland.  It contains oatmeal, suet,  onions,  and  sheep  heart,
         lungs, liver and stomach.

              If  you  spin  two eggs on a flat, hard surface, one raw, and
         the other hard-boiled, the hard-boiled one will spin much longer.

              There used to be a custom of putting a small piece  of  toast
         into  wine  to enhance its flavor by absorbing particles.  This is
         where the term "to toast" came from.

              Potato chips cost 200 times more per pound than potatoes.

              The high cost of medical insurance would be reduced by  about
         33  percent  if  we all had a proper diet, according to a study by
         the Senate Committee of Nutrition and Human Needs.

              If we all had a proper diet, 98 percent of the people who die
         of heart attacks would still be around.

              Some scientists in Tucson, Arizona studied  peoples'  garbage
         cans  and  discovered that Americans waste ten percent of the food
         we buy. We throw away 81 billion dollars worth of good food  every
         year.

              Perhaps  you  have seen the trick done by jugglers where they
         juggle three items, one of which is an apple, and as they  juggle,
         they  eat  the  apple. This can be done fast and messy, and brings
         great laughter as apple juice and bits of apple end up flying  all
         over the stage as the juggler finishes.
              John,  a  juggler working in Chicago, had performed the apple
         trick hundreds of times, but he never really ate  the  apple.   He
         didn't swallow it, he merely filled his mouth with bites of apple,
         then  spit  them out back stage afterwards.  On one occasion, John
         was near the end of the apple routine, and the  crowd  was  loving
         it,  so he went a bit (or rather a bite) farther than usual.  This
         proved to be too much, that last bite shoved some apple  into  his
         throat which resulted in John throwing up all over the stage!