Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (11 page)

Who first put a dead worm into a bottle of tequila…and why?

Corn is an ingredient in all of these products. Bonus question: Of all the corn grown in the U.S., what percentage ends up being eaten by people? Answer: About 1 percent. That’s the type known as sweet corn. The other kind, field corn, is used to feed livestock and make ethanol…plus a slew of other things.

Ancient Mexican tradition? Hardly. And technically, it’s not even tequila that gets the worm; it’s
mezcal
, another type of liquor that’s also made from the agave plant. The practice of placing worms inside the bottles began in 1950 when Jacobo Lozano Páez, a savvy businessman from Mexico City, was faced with a problem: The
gusan rojo
worm, which is not a true worm but the larva of the
Hypopta agavis
moth, lives inside the agave plant. During the manufacturing process, worms occasionally found their way into the bottles. Although the worm is edible and even considered a delicacy in Mexico, many American tourists were grossed out by finding a bug in their booze.

Páez’s big idea: Put a worm in
every
bottle of mezcal and boast that it improves the taste of the liquor. Macho drinkers were all too eager to prove him right. And as the worm found its way north across the border, along with it came some juicy urban legends: that the worm is an aphrodisiac, or that it’s hallucinogenic (some people confused mezcal with mescaline, a psychedelic drug made from an entirely different plant). Neither is true.

Why do doughnuts have holes?

There are at least three theories, but one thing’s for sure: Doughnuts didn’t always have holes. Fried balls of dough have been around for centuries in several cultures. The earliest literary mention of “doughnuts,” though, comes from Washington Irving’s 1809 work
History of New York
, in which he described “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called dough nuts.”

Who was the first person to put a hole in a doughnut? One legend is that Native American hunters showed off their skills by piercing doughy pastries with arrows. Another story comes from New England in 1847, when a sea captain named Hanson Crockett Gregory claimed that he invented the doughnut hole while steering his ship. He had no place to put the doughnuts his mother had given him, so he impaled them on the spokes of the ship’s wheel. It worked so well that he ordered his cook to put holes in all subsequent doughnuts.

Captain Gregory’s claim, however, is full of holes. Food historians believe the real reason for doughnut holes has to do with surface area. When chefs dropped their dough balls into boiling oil, the outside cooked first. The bigger the ball, the harder it was to cook the inside before the outside got burned, so the balls had to be quite small. The first modern doughnut-makers created the now-familiar ring shape to give us a larger, more evenly cooked doughnut. And for that, we thank them.

If you’re an average American adult, how many pounds of food will you eat this year?

This famous personality wears more makeup than a Vegas showgirl, speaks dozens of languages, and has the job title of “Chief Happiness Officer,” but many people are
not
happy with that job. Who is it?

The average American adult eats close to 1,700 pounds of food per year (about the weight of a compact car), which works out to 4.7 pounds per day. If that sounds like a lot, it is. In the last few decades, U.S. annual food intake has increased by 25%. Health officials cite this phenomenon as the cause of the “Great Obesity Epidemic.” Of the average adult’s annual intake, meat makes up 195 pounds, 57 pounds more than during the 1950s. Good news: Fruit and veggie consumption also went up. Bad news: So did grain products (flours, breads, cereals); Americans eat 200 pounds of them annually, 45 more than in the 1950s. And most of it is refined flours instead of healthier whole-grain products. Not surprisingly, nearly two-thirds of American adults are classified as overweight, up from less than half in 1980. And more than one-fourth today are classified as obese.

Ronald McDonald. He’s so well known in so many countries that he’s among the most recognized figures in the world. And while health-advocacy groups criticize the clown for advertising less-than-healthy food to kids, he evens out the score (somewhat) thanks to his 305 Ronald McDonald Houses, which are located in 52 countries. Started in 1974 by McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, the Houses help more than 4.5 million kids each year with everything from dentalhygiene tips to cancer treatment.

Up to 75,000 of what living thing must be harvested in order to make a pound of saffron?

Throughout much of the 20th century, the _______ industry pressured lawmakers to ban _______. That attempt failed, so they tried to get a law passed that required the naturally white food to be colored pink. That failed, too. The industry’s only success: getting a law passed that the food couldn’t be the color _______. Fill in the blanks.

Crocus flowers are the main ingredient in saffron, the most expensive spice on Earth—up to $5,000 per pound. That pound of saffron requires thousands of crocus
stigmas
, the part of the flower that receives pollen. Botanists have bred saffron crocuses to have extra long stigmas, so long that they’ve become useless for receiving pollen naturally, rendering them sterile. The only way they can reproduce: Farmers must dig up their bulbs, break them apart, and replant them manually. This painstaking work requires hundreds of hours of labor and a football-field-sized crocus bed to yield one pound of saffron. So what does the world’s most expensive spice taste like? We’re told it’s kind of bland.

The industry is
dairy
, the food is
margarine
, and the color is
yellow
. Invented by French chemists in the 1860s at the behest of Napoleon III, who wanted a cheap butter substitute, this hydrogenated-oil copycat has long been the bane of the dairy industry. It’s naturally white and was originally called
oleomargarine
; yellow coloring was added to make it look like butter. In the U.S., Canada, and Australia, the dairy industry pushed through laws to make sure consumers wouldn’t mistake the substitute for the real thing. To that end, yellow margarine was banned in Minnesota until 1963, and in Wisconsin until 1967. Today, margarine outsells butter by two to one.

A more accurate name for the Chinese delicacy known as bird’s nest soup could be bird’s _______ soup.