by Lewis, Dan
But not all languages follow this misconception. Others, such as Hebrew, get the origin just as wrong, but in the other direction. The Hebrew term for turkey, transliterated as tarnagol hodu, literally translates to “chicken of India,” furthering the Elizabethan-era myth that New World explorers had found a route to the Orient. This nomenclature for the bird is so widespread that it makes a mockery of the historical basis for the term “turkey” in English. Why? Because the Turkish word for turkey isn’t “turkey.” It’s “hindi.”
BONUS FACT
As for Turkey, the country? The story isn’t as interesting. The word Turkey—actually, Türkiye in Turkish—can be broken up into two parts. “Türk” is a reference to people, potentially meaning “human beings” in an archaic version of the Turkish language. The “-iye” suffix most likely meant “land of.”
A PRINCELY MEALFIT FOR A PAUPER
THE DELICACY THAT WAS ONCE RESERVED FOR THE POOR
At $10–15 a pound, lobster is priced too high to be anything other than a delicacy. Even if you bring home the crustacean alive and cook and prepare it yourself, it is going to be an expensive meal. So for most Americans, lobster is a menu item reserved for a special occasion. Weekly would be a lot; twice weekly is out of the question. Only in a dream, perhaps.
Or, if you were a rather poor worker in the early part of the nineteenth century, a nightmare.
Lobsters are very plentiful in coastal New England, particularly in Maine and Massachusetts. The Pilgrims likely dined on lobster at the first Thanksgiving and there are tales of two-foot high piles of lobsters simply washing up on the shores during that time period. And where things are plentiful, they’re often cheap. Today, one can find high-quality lobster in Maine at about $5 a pound—much less than the going rate anywhere else. But from the 1600s through much of the 1800s, Maine and surrounding coastal areas were the only places one could reasonably find fresh-cooked lobster. As reported by the late David Foster Wallace in the similarly deceased Gourmet magazine, before we had the infrastructure and equipment required to ship live lobsters around the country (and later the world), the crustaceans were killed before they were cooked, just like almost any other animal. Precooked lobster meat in hermetically sealed cans doesn’t taste very good; Wallace noted that the protein-rich meat was used as “chewable fuel,” and not as the culinary draw we think of it as today.
Massive quantities of cheap food that doesn’t taste very good … that’s not a recipe for thrilling dinner guests. It is, however, a solution to other problems—such as, how do you feed prison inmates or indentured servants? That’s exactly where the lobster meat ended up. Wallace says that some states had rules insisting that inmates not be fed canned lobster meat more than once per week, and other sources note that indentured servants often demanded that their contracts limit the lobster meals to no more than twice weekly.
Once lobsters could be transported, alive, over long distances, the Maine lobster canneries began closing up shop. In the 1880s, lobster started to become a much-sought-after entree in Boston and New York, and over the next few decades, that custom spread across the country. By World War II, lobster was a high-priced treat—officially. Most foods were subject to wartime rationing, but not lobster because of its designation as a delicacy.
BONUS FACT
Generally speaking, expensive versions of a food item taste better than their cheaper counterparts. (After all, that’s why they’re more expensive.) Lobster—the cooked-live variety—is the exact opposite. Lobster quality is rated based on the hardness of its shell, as lobsters that have recently shed their old shells (and are growing new ones) typically have the sweetest and most desirable meat. Unfortunately, they also have the least amount of meat and are the hardest to transport, because their shells are so new. So these lobsters are kept local to New England and are only served in places where lobster is relatively common. Lower-quality lobsters, with harder shells and with more meat, are shipped around the world, and are the only lobsters offered to the captive markets. Because of this a lobster in Europe will almost certainly be of lower quality than one in Maine, but will cost as much as ten times the price.
THE GREATEST THING SINCE 1928
THE HISTORY OF SLICED BREAD (AND WHY IT WAS ONCE BANNED)
The Internet. The automobile. Toilet paper. All these have been heralded as the greatest things since sliced bread. Which means that sliced bread, itself, has to be a pretty amazing thing.
Turns out, it is. But in order for us to collectively learn that lesson, the American government had to ban it.
Sliced bread—machine-sliced, that is—was almost invented in 1912, when a man named Otto Fredrick Rohwedder came up with a prototype and blueprints for an automated bread-slicing machine but lost his work to a fire. Undeterred, Rohwedder rebuilt the machine held in his mind’s eye. In 1928, he had a machine up and running, and by July of that year, sliced bread was being machine-produced for the masses. The marketing behind the product set the stage for the neologism used today, as Rohwedder’s bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” By 1930, Wonder Bread switched to a sliced-bread product, selling machine-sliced bread nationwide for the first time.
Sliced bread made bread consumption increase, as expected. But when World War II rationing came to the forefront of the American economic war effort, Food Administrator Claude Wickard targeted the greatest invention of the century (so to speak). Hoping to reduce the amount of wax paper used in general—because, Wickard presumed for some reason that sliced bread required more wax paper than its unsliced counterpart—and also hoping to reduce bread prices, Wickard banned the sale of sliced bread domestically, effective January 18, 1943. This was immediately met with protestations from housewives arguing that their household efficiencies were crippled by a short-sighted ban. Because, after all, sliced bread was the greatest thing in recent memory.
Local politicians took the matter into their own hands. New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia noted that bakeries could use their own bread-slicing machines, selling the freshly baked (and sliced) product direct to their customers. But the Food Distribution Association put the kibosh on that several days later, requiring the cessation of any commercial bread slicing, in order to protect those bakeries that either did not have bread-slicing machinery or wished to do their all for the country’s war efforts.
In any event, the ban was short lived. On March 8, sliced bread was once again allowed in the United States, its greatness preserved for generations present and future.
BONUS FACT
Toilet paper is not the greatest thing since sliced bread—it can’t be, because toilet paper predates sliced bread by more than fifty years. Commercial toilet paper was invented in 1857 by a New Yorker named Joseph Gayetty, who sold packs of 500 sheets (each containing a watermark with his name) for fifty cents. Its marketing language called the product “the greatest necessity of the age,” so perhaps, sliced bread is the greatest thing since toilet paper.
COLOR BY NUMBER
WHAT THE TAGS ON YOUR LOAVES OF BREAD MEAN
Go to any grocery store bread aisle and you’ll find—one hopes!—bread. Most of the bread does not just sit on the racks as is; typically, the loaves are wrapped in bags, held shut with a twist tie or a plastic tag. And you may notice that many of those ties and tags are colored—blue, orange, green, or a litany of other hues. In many cases, the colors vary even within the same brand; the shelf of Wonder Bread may have tags of five different colors.
Laziness? Rampant colorblindness in the factory? Or maybe bread makers just don’t care? Nope. For some, it’s a quality assurance tactic.
For more than a decade, Internet folklore claimed that the tags were quick visual clues that indicated the day of the week that the bread was baked. The urban legend held that stock clerks could easily identify loaves that were no longer fresh by looking for tags of a certain color. This would save a lot of time, as manually looking at expirati
on dates is labor intensive. In theory, so the legend goes, bread makers used these ties to make the supermarkets’ jobs easier, and thus making it much less likely that a customer would have a bad experience.
According to urban legend fact-checker Snopes, this piece of Internet folklore is—a rarity!—mostly true. Many bread manufacturers use different color tags each day, in order to help ensure that what reaches the end consumer is of high quality.
But there is no need to try and crack the code—and, in fact, it probably isn’t possible for the average consumer, because there isn’t only one system. Although news reports about the bread tags (and even more often, the e-mails forwarded around) suggest that savvy consumers can avoid getting a stale loaf simply paying attention to the tags, that isn’t the case. In general, the color system is intended for the supermarkets, whose employees should be removing the old bread before it goes stale. Similarly, the color-coding system is not standardized across all brands; each manufacturer can choose to adopt its own system, if it adopts one at all. For example, when a CBS San Francisco reporter followed up on the Snopes report, she found that at least one company simply printed the expiration date on their (always light blue) tags. As a consumer, therefore, it is always better to check the sell-by date.
If you want to have an extra level of comfort that your bread is fresh, you can follow Snopes’ advice: “Contact the manufacturer of your favorite brand and ask” about their color-coding system.
BONUS FACT
The color orange is named after the fruit, not the other way around. The fruit’s original name in English was probably something closer to its current name in Spanish, naranja. Over time, the first letter “n” disappeared from the word, most likely because when combined with the definite article—for example, “una naranja” in Spanish—the sounds run together. The “au” sound dominated the start of the word, finally turning into “orange.”
ORANGE GOES GREEN
WHY YOUR MORNING ORANGE JUICE MAY BE AT RISK
Oranges are orange. Some things in life are just that simple. But that fact is becoming increasingly untrue, and there may not be much we can do about it. The bacteria are winning, and orange oranges are their victims.
In 2006, some Florida citrus growers detected bacteria called Las (Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, for the armchair biologists) on their trees. Las causes a disease originally discovered in Asia called Huanglongbing, or HLB. Once a tree is infected with HLB, it cannot be cured and, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, dies within five to ten years. (A healthy orange tree can live for as long as a century.) Oranges from trees infected with HLB do not ripen the same way those from healthy trees do and end up misshapen. Further, most of them aren’t entirely orange. They’re mostly green.
A certain type of insect carries the disease, so even if farmers cut down infected plants, Las will still find a way to spread. According to Scientific American, the citrus industry invests about $16 million annually in the fight against the bugs, bacteria, and disease, but for the moment, it does not have a solution. The insect itself—called the Asian citrus psyllid—is a difficult target, because it is incredibly tiny; the USDA notes that it is “no bigger than the head of a pin.”
Although this is bad news for citrus growers, it isn’t a nightmare scenario for lovers of orange juice—at least not yet. The green, misshapen, and diseased fruits are perfectly safe to eat. Their chemical makeup is a bit different than typical oranges and they taste slightly more bitter because of that. However, as Smithsonian magazine notes, the taste difference is too subtle for the typical person to notice. Mixing the juice of the “bad” fruit with juice from uninfected oranges masks the bitter taste enough to make it almost entirely undetectable, so there is no immediate risk to the OJ market, so long as enough healthy citrus trees exist.
More good news is that by themselves the Asian citrus psyllids cannot travel long distances, so the disease is not able to spread too far—unless people end up assisting its spread. And that is exactly what is happening. The USDA has set up a website, www.SaveOurCitrus.org, that specifically advises people to “reduce the spread of citrus diseases by not moving your homegrown citrus fruit or plants across state lines.” Video and radio ads echo that request. For the sake of OJ drinkers everywhere, it hopes people will heed that call.
BONUS FACT
Brush your teeth and then drink some OJ, and you’re in for a rude surprise—the juice tastes downright awful. What causes that? Most toothpastes contain a compound called sodium laureth sulfate, which causes the foaming action when you brush. But it also blocks your tongue from being able to detect sweetness. So when you drink the juice, you’re unable to taste the sweet aspects; instead, you only sense the bitter/sour parts.
GONE BANANAS
YOU AREN’T EATING YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ BANANAS
Seedless. Nutritious. Portable. Tasty. Yellow. You pretty much know what you’re going to get with a banana. And you should get it before it’s gone.
Bananas—or more accurately, the Cavendish, a specific type of banana that most of us consider to be the banana—are, if nothing else, an incredibly consistent fruit. There’s a reason for that. All Cavendish bananas are clones and therefore genetically identical to every other Cavendish out there. (It’s not uncommon for fruits to be cloned. Navel oranges are also clones, for example.) But being clones has a big downside—if there’s a disease that affects one Cavendish, it affects all Cavendish.
Which is why the bananas most people eat—and we eat a lot of them, more than twenty-five pounds of bananas per American each year (that’s the most of any fresh fruit!)—aren’t the same bananas that were eaten fifty years ago. Prior to 1960, the standard commercial banana type was the Gros Michel (a.k.a. “Big Mike”), a larger banana type that, by many accounts, was also tastier. But the Gros Michel was susceptible to Panama disease, caused by a fungus that attacks the roots of banana plants. Panama disease spread rapidly through major banana plantations, crippling businesses and making Gros Michel cultivation commercially impossible. After billions of dollars of research and development, the Cavendish—which is genetically resistant to Panama disease—became the world’s top banana.
Could the Cavendish go the way of the dodo and the Gros Michel? Absolutely. A relatively new strain of Panama disease, Tropical Race 4 (“TR4”), can destroy Cavendish crops, and the only known way to stop it is genetic resistance, which the Cavendish (being a clone) won’t ever develop. TR4 has already attacked banana plantations in Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and has spread to Southeast Asia. According to Popular Science, experts believe that it is only a matter of time, perhaps decades, before TR4 sends the Cavendish down the same path as Big Mike. But there’s a very good chance that it could be longer. Plantation owners learned their lessons from the Gros Michel banana Apocalypse and take extreme measures to prevent this from repeating; there are even reports of plantations burning down entire fields due to a slight Panama disease infection, hoping to stop its spread.
BONUS FACT
Bananas are radioactive. Specifically, the potassium they contain is actually a rare radioactive isotope. The radiation is at low enough levels that it is not very dangerous: Eating 2,000 bananas will have the same toll on your lifespan as smoking one and a half cigarettes, according to Wikipedia. That said, the amount of radioactivity is real and measurable, so much so that bananas have been known to set off false alarms at U.S. ports where officials are looking for smugglers of nuclear materials.
RADIOACTIVE RED
THE RADIOACTIVE PLATES IN YOUR KITCHEN
In the 1930s, a certain brand of dinnerware was all the rage—Fiestaware. Unlike most dishes, which were mostly white, Fiesta’s came in a variety of colors—blue, ivory, green, yellow, and orangeish-red. The popularity of these dishes was beyond comparison (for dishes, at least)—even famed artist Andy Warhol was among Fiesta’s legions of fans. Two of the colors were also difficult to copy. Fiesta’s red and, to a lesser extent, i
vory dinnerware required a special, expensive ingredient in order to make the colored glaze.
That ingredient? Uranium. Fiestaware was radioactive.
Fiesta made its way into American homes in the mid-1930s, advertised as the first solid-color dinnerware available. (Some smaller brands made similar offerings but nothing on a national scale.) To obtain the red glaze, Fiesta used uranium oxide, which did the job but, of course, has the unfortunate side effect of needing uranium. In 1944, the presence of uranium in the dishes led its manufacturer, the Homer Laughlin China Company, to eventually pull them off the shelves.
But not for health reasons—the potential for harm caused by the radioactive dinnerware is still debatable. The red dishes disappeared from shelves due to national security needs. That year, the United States, under the Manhattan Project, was trying to develop an atomic bomb and needed uranium. The government seized any and all uranium it could find, including that owned by Homer Laughlin. The company pulled the red offering from its product line later that year.
In 1959, the red Fiestaware made a comeback, this time using less radioactive depleted uranium instead of natural uranium. As for the vintage, much more radioactive stuff? It may be okay to keep as a collectible, but the EPA lists it as emitting “elevated levels” of radiation—so collector (and certainly, everyday diner) beware.
BONUS FACT
Red M&Ms aren’t radioactive, but they, too, have a story. In 1976, the popular red food coloring amaranth was pulled from shelves due to fears of it being carcinogenic. Although red M&Ms did not use amaranth, Mars, Inc. nevertheless removed red M&Ms from the packaging to avoid confusion and fear. In 1987, red came back, using a coloring called Allura Red AC, which may cause hyperactive behavior in younger children. (The operative word there, though, is “may.” It probably doesn’t.) Because of this, in some areas—most notably, parts of Europe—red M&Ms are colored with cochineal dye. Cochineal dye is produced by a certain type of insect (the cochineal, from which the dye’s name comes), and to extract it, the insect is reduced to a powder and boiled.