Facts about food
Food facts sit right where biology, chemistry and history overlap. A fruit that is technically a berry, a spice worth more per gram than silver, a sweetener that never spoils in a sealed jar — the reasons usually come down to sugar, acid, water and how long humans have been moving plants around the planet. Each entry explains the mechanism in plain language, and links to a source if you want the longer version.
Honey does not spoil. Jars found in ancient Egyptian tombs were still edible.
Archaeologists have found sealed honey thousands of years old that was still perfectly preserved. Properly stored honey may crystallise, but it does not go bad.
Botanically, bananas are berries, and strawberries are not.
To a botanist a berry is a fleshy fruit that develops from a single flower with one ovary, like a banana, a grape, a tomato or even an avocado. A strawberry develops from a flower with many ovaries, so it does not qualify.
Carrots were purple, white and yellow long before they were orange.
The carrot was domesticated in Central Asia, and the early varieties were mostly purple or pale. Orange carrots were bred and popularised in the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Peanuts are not nuts. They are legumes that grow underground, like peas and beans.
After the peanut plant flowers, the stalk bends down and pushes the developing pod into the soil, where it ripens. Real tree nuts, such as hazelnuts and walnuts, grow on trees.
Birds cannot feel the heat of chili peppers.
The burning sensation from chili comes from capsaicin, which triggers pain receptors in mammals. Birds have a version of the receptor that does not respond to it, so they eat the hottest peppers happily.
In the 1830s, ketchup was sold as a medicine.
An Ohio physician, John Cook Bennett, claimed tomato ketchup could cure indigestion, diarrhoea and jaundice. His recipes were turned into tomato pills that were sold across the United States.
Fortune cookies are not a Chinese tradition. They were popularised in California.
The cookie most likely descends from a Japanese cracker called tsujiura senbei, and was served by Japanese-American bakers in California in the early 1900s. Chinese restaurants adopted it later.
White chocolate contains no cocoa solids at all.
It is made from cocoa butter, sugar and milk. The brown cocoa solids that give dark and milk chocolate their flavour and colour are left out entirely.
Cashews grow dangling from the bottom of a fruit, and their raw shell is toxic.
Each cashew nut hangs beneath a swollen, pear-shaped cashew apple. The shell around the nut contains an oil related to the irritant in poison ivy, which is why cashews are always sold shelled and roasted or steamed.
Coffee beans are not beans. They are the seeds of a red fruit.
Coffee grows as small cherries on a shrub, and each cherry holds two seeds. The seeds are removed, dried and roasted, which is when they turn brown and start to smell like coffee.
Worcestershire sauce is made from anchovies fermented for more than a year.
The original Lea and Perrins recipe combines anchovies, vinegar, molasses, tamarind and spices. The first batch reportedly tasted so bad that it was left in the cellar, and only became palatable after months of fermentation.
Vanilla comes from an orchid, and almost every pod is pollinated by hand.
Outside Mexico, the vanilla orchid has no natural pollinator, so each flower must be pollinated manually on the single day it opens. The method used today was worked out in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy on the island of Réunion.
Most wasabi served outside Japan is horseradish with green food colouring.
Real wasabi is a root that is hard to grow and loses its flavour within minutes of being grated. The green paste in most sushi restaurants is a mix of horseradish, mustard and dye.
A pineapple plant needs up to two years to produce a single fruit.
Each plant grows one pineapple at a time from the centre of a spiky rosette of leaves. The fruit is actually many small berries fused together around a central core.