Random Bizarre Food Facts That Will Make You Rethink Your Eating Habits (15 items)

• 

  (#1) The Popsicle Was Originally Invented By A Boy Who Was 11

  The Popsicle™ was invented by an 11-year-old boy in San Francisco in 1905. His name was Frank Epperson and he left a cup of powdered soda, water, and a stirring stick on the porch during a very cold winter. Epperson didn't remember the cup until after the cold weather had already frozen over his soda. When he discovered it the next morning, he did what any curious boy would do: he licked it. Thus, the Popsicle™ was invented.

  For eighteen years, Epperson sold the dessert around his neighborhood exclusively. He decided to expand his market in 1923 and debuted his popsicle at a park in Alameda, CA, and people loved it. He originally called it an "Epsicle," naming the food after his own stupid childhood mistake, but his kids called it "Pop's 'sicle," and they eventually convinced him to change the name to Popsicle™. 
• 

  (#10) Grape

  • Food

  That's right. The average person in America consumes eight pounds of grapes each year. That's approximately 26 servings of grapes per year. That's kind of a lot of grapes. So either you're not eating enough grapes, everyone else eats more grapes than you thought they did, or there are some people who are simply going HAM on grapes.
• 

  (#9) Chocolate

  • Food

  The Aztecs couldn't grow cacao leaves, but boy, did they love chocolate. In fact, they loved chocolate so much that the cacao plant alone became an important commodity. Aztec rulers even accepted cacao as "tribute," which was an early form of taxes. They would demand cacao of their conquered peoples and of ordinary citizens for the "tribute" owed to the rulers. 
• 

  (#2) Ranch dressing

  • Food

  If you love dipping just about anything into ranch dressing, then you should probably know that a lot of it contains some of the same stuff used to make sunscreen and paint. You wouldn't expect there to be titanium in your Ranch dressing, but it's in there. Titanium dioxide is used to whiten most ranch dressing, and it's also used to whiten things like sunscreen and paint. 

  Some studies have found that titanium dioxide may cause some toxicity in the brain, and has properties that are potentially cancerous. Titanium dioxide is also used in a lot of candy, mayonnaise, and cosmetics. It's used pretty regularly in lipstick and paper as well. 
• 

  (#4) Lobster

  • Family

  So this is how delicate and impressionable people are as consumers: prior to the American Revolution, dockworkers went on strike because they were burdened with the damning act of eating lobster more than three times per week. Some people even had a clause in their contract that they would not eat lobster more than twice every week. They even served lobsters in prison and the inmates hated it. A single tear for them, please.

  So how did the lobster go from being a peasant food to a delicacy? The North American lobster, at some point, was so plentiful that people actually used it as garden fertilizer. People were so ashamed to eat this peasant food that they would bury the shells, instead of throwing them away, so their neighbors wouldn't know. Lobsters weren't adopted as a popular food until the mid-19th century, when the "lobster smack" was invented to keep them fresh (a kind of boat used to transport live lobsters). People were then able to develop a taste for lobster by the mid-20th century, and now they're the fanciest thing you can eat that isn't caviar. 
• 

  (#5) Some People Think That This Phobia From A Peanuts Comic Strip Is Real

  Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip invented a fake phobia called "arachibutyrophobia," which is the "fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth." It is not considered a real phobia, as Schulz literally made it up. The root, "arachis," comes from the Latin word for "peanut," while the "butryum" is Latin for "butter." You pronounce it as, "are-ack-ee-but-tir-o-phobia." 

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking