Food Trivia | 50+ Random Useless Trivia & Facts about Food!

Brace yourselves, here comes the ultimate list of useless trivia & facts about food! A big thanks to the TIL reddit community for finding them out.

• “Enoteca Maria” is a Staten Island restaurant that only employs grandmothers to cook traditional food from their homelands! (goodmorningamerica.com)
• In 1969, Woodstock ran out of food after its first day and relied upon donations from the largely conservative residents of Sullivan County, New York to feed 400,000 hungry hippies. (smithsonianmag.com)
• Jesse James once paid off a widow’s mortgage and saved her from foreclosure because she gave him food. He made sure she got a receipt from the banker and then robbed the man a mile down the road. (truewestmagazine.com)
• In 2017, a German prison was forced to feed inmates McDonald’s after a food supply contract fell through. (dw.com)
• Many chewing gums are pink because the inventor of Double Bubble (the first bubble gum) only had pink food coloring in his factory, and others copied his invention. (wikipedia.org)
• Sam Panopoulos, is a Greek Canadian restaurateur who in 1962 at the Satellite restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, that decided to put ham and pineapple on a pizza, aiming for something sweet and savory. He called it the Hawaiian pizza and his food invention has earned wrath and praise ever since. (cbc.ca)
• Popeye the Sailor became so popular during the Great Depression that consumption of spinach increased by 33%. His popularity also led to American children listing spinach as their third favorite food, after turkey and ice cream. (telegraph.co.uk)
• Dave Thomas, the founder of the successful fast food chain, Wendy’s, worked at KFC prior to Wendy’s and was responsible for the red and white striped chicken bucket design. (thebalancesmb.com)
• Teff, the staple food crop of Ethiopia, is a highly nutritious “superfood” like quinoa. After US and European health food trends created a huge demand for quinoa, prices skyrocketed in Bolivia, where it is a staple food. Fearing their own food shortage, Ethiopia banned the export of teff in 2006. (edition.cnn.com)

• McDonalds lost their Big Mac trademark in the European Union after a legal battle with the Supermac’s fast food chain in Ireland. (theguardian.com)
• The food court at Costco makes so much money selling pizza to hungry shoppers, it’s ranked as the 14th largest pizza chain in the US – even beating out California Pizza Kitchen, among others. (businessinsider.com)
• When a batch of ice cream doesn’t turn out right, producers mix it with chocolate ice cream instead of throwing it away. It’s not noticeable due to chocolate’s dark colour and strong flavour and is known as “reconditioning” in the food industry. (nbcnews.com)
• Henry Heinz deliberately put his ketchup in clear glass bottles which was uncommon due to a lack of food safety standards. Unethical companies used colored bottles to hide shoddy product and he worked with a chemist who went on to find foods containing gypsum, brick dust, borax, formaldehyde etc. (nationalgeographic.com)
• When “Sleepless in Seattle” opened in 1993, TriStar Pictures got an average of 25-30 calls a day from viewers demanding to know about Tom Hanks’ tiramisu reference. When told it was just food; a lot of the callers didn’t believe it, others sounded a little disappointed & some just went ‘no way.’ (questia.com)
• Cooking food allowed the human brain to develop and become the most advanced among all species. It allowed the food to release more nutrients and hence allowed to meet the brain metabolic demand and even thrive. Gorillas spent 80% of their time eating although they have 1/3 of our neurons. (npr.org)

• Eating Oreos may cause your poop to turn black. Due mostly to the artificial food coloring and chemicals in packaged cookies. (healthtap.com)
• British aristocrats often went broke after royal visits. Queen Elizabeth I spent her holydays at her titled noblemen’s country estates. The problem was that Tudor monarchs didn’t just travel alone and hosts had to find housing, food and entertainment for over 300 people, often at short notice. (history.com)
• One-third of the world’s food supply is made possible by bees’ pollination, and that includes your fave produce — from apples and oranges to onions and avocados.(nationalgeographic.com)
• Μolecular gastronomy. Also known as molecular cuisine, it basically is manipulating food using chemistry. (wikipedia)
• Yogurt was invented in 5000 BC and the combination of yogurt and honey was called “the food of the gods”. (wikipedia)
• 95% of the world’s food needs are provided by just 30 species of plants. At least 12,650 species names have been compiled as edible. (wikipedia)
• Germany lost the First World War in major part because of underdeveloped agriculture and over reliance on import of food (the British Navy blocked it when the conflict began; learnt from the book “Cities” by John Reader) (everydaylivesinwar.herts.ac.uk)
• Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him so he had 15 girls taste the food before he ate it himself. “”The food was delicious, only the best vegetables, asparagus, bell peppers, everything you can imagine”, food taster Margot Woelk recalled. (cbc.ca)
• Tempura was introduced to the Japanese by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century observing abstinence rules for Catholics surrounding the quarterly ember days (Quattuor Tempora). Earlier Japanese deep-fried food was either simply fried without breading or batter, or fried with rice flour. (wikipedia)

• Did you know there is also the Black Day? It’s the anti-Valentine’s Day, where S. Korean singles dress in black and gather together to eat dark colored food. Jajangmyeon, a savory black bean sauce over noodles, is the preferred dish for those resenting Valentine’s to commiserate over. (wikipedia)
• The drawer under your stove is not originally intended for storing extra cookware, but for keeping cooked food warm during meal preparation. (businessinsider.com)
• The majority of bees dance to communicate with each other the location of sweet nectar. Yet there is a significant minority of bees that ignore the dance instructions and choose to explore their own paths. These contrarian bees are better at finding food than those that follow the crowd! (inverse.com)
• Carrots are not standard rabbit food. We think they are because Bugs Bunny ate carrots, but that’s because his creator loved the film “It Happened One Night”, where Clark Gable eats carrots while talking quickly. Also Gable gets called “Doc” throughout the film. (wikipedia)
• Deinocheirus, a dinosaur with no teeth, swallowed rocks to help digest its food. (nationalgeographic.com)
• Sausages have been commonly referred to as “dogs” since the 1800s due to a belief that sausage makers used dog meat in their sausages. Consumption of dog meat was common in Germany up to the early 1900s so these suspicion was “occasionally justified”. (wikipedia)
• The common spelling of doughnut as “donut” is not proper English, and was invented and popularized by the food chain Dunkin’ Donuts in the late 20th century. (time.com)
• The chicken was first domesticated as early as 10,000 years ago for fighting, not food, and humans only started eating chicken about 2,400 years ago. (smithsonianmag.com)
• In 1959 NASA contacted Pillsbury to create food safety management system for space travel. It is now industry standard and in practice in food establishments around the world. (nasa.gov)

• Ninjas avoided garlic or any pungent food to prevent their body odour from being detected by the enemy when hiding. (atlasobscura.com)
• Despite being a popular fad, Gluten-Free diet is not healthier for people who do not have gluten intolerance or allergy “For the general population, the presence or absence of gluten alone is not related to diet quality. What’s important are the overall food choices made within a diet”. (gluten.org)
• 54 oenology (wine science) students were secretly given white wine dyed with tasteless red food coloring and they overwhelmingly described the flavors as if it were red wine. (realclearscience.com)
• Food powder is the most common format of food material in the market. (wikipedia)
• A German study found that wine tasted better if the drinker thinks it’s more expensive. Subjects inside an MRI scanner tasted a $14 red wine 3x but were told each sip was from bottles costing $3, $7, & $21. The brain’s motivation & reward center was more active for the “more expensive” wine. (nypost.com)
• The louder your environment, the less flavor and texture your food has. (bbc.com)
• 8.2% of Norwegians eat tacos every Friday night. (pri.org)
• Slurping your noodles serves a purpose. It cools off your food and develops the flavor. (food-hacks.wonderhowto.com)

• A former Michelin Guide inspector said an inspector’s life is lonely, underpaid drudgery, driving around France for weeks on end, dining alone, under intense pressure to file detailed reports on strict deadlines, the guide had become lax in its standards, & some famous chefs are “untouchables”. (wikipedia)
• The first recorded pizza delivery was in 1889 to Queen Margherita of Savoy. Reportedly, she was tired of courtly fare and requested a local peasant meal; they delivered a white, green, and red pie to symbolize the newly unified Italy’s flag. She called it “delicious” and the rest is history. (foodandwine.com)
• Dish soap doesn’t kill bacteria, it just lifts the food and grime off so that it can be rinsed away. (realsimple.com)
• Altitude can effect how we perceive taste. Thus airlines alter food pallets specifically for high altitude enjoyment. (cnn.com)
• Bees can produce coloured “honey”. Beekeepers in northeastern France noticed that their bees were producing honey in unnatural shades of green and blue. The reason turned out to be that the bees had been eating remnants of M&M candy shells from a nearby factory. (nationalgeographic.com)
• Hedgehogs are a food source in many cultures. Hedgehogs were eaten in Ancient Egypt and some recipes of the Late Middle Ages call for hedgehog meat. (wikipedia)
• Most of us have eaten a lot of insects. Carmine also known as Red no. 4 is one of the most common food dyes and is made from the crushed up shell of the cochineal beetle. (businessinsider.com)

• The potato and tomato are both native to Peru. Though commonly associated with Eurasian culinary traditions, both plants were unknown to the eastern hemisphere until 500 years ago. (andeanlodges.com)
• The British Heart Association created a chart to expose and keep track of the many ways food manufacturers try to hide the sugar content of their products. (bhf.org.uk)
• There is also the Jelly bean rule, a rule put forth by the FDA saying that companies can’t claim their food to be healthy simply because it’s low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium, and must contain at least 10% of Daily Values of nutrients like Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium, protein, fiber, or iron. (wikipedia)
• A team of international scholars have been working to recreate recipes from 4000 years ago from tablets. One Mesopotamian dish resembles a chicken pot pie, with layers of dough and chunks of bird smothered by a sort of Babylonian béchamel sauce. (bbc.com)

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