19 Shocking Food "Facts" That Are So Wild, They'll Change How You See Your Favorite Foods
1.Fruity Pebbles are literally just grains of white rice that have been flattened and then puffed back up.
If you've ever eaten a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, then you've basically just eaten spoonfuls of white rice. According to Post Foods, they use nearly 735 ~billion~ grains of rice each year to make the cereal. First they steam it, then they dye it, and then they use a massive steamroller-like machine to flatten the colorful rice, which creates the "pebble" shape. After they get rid of the leftover moisture to puff them back up again, the Fruity Pebbles are toasted, coated, dried, and ready to eat.
2.Green gummy bears are actually strawberry flavored.
According to Haribo's FAQ on their site, there is no green apple flavor in the original pack. Instead, their green gummy bears are strawberry-flavored. That means their red ones are actually raspberry-flavored. (And, of course, the translucent ones are pineapple, the yellow ones are lemon, and the orange ones are orange.)
3.The milk you see in cereal commercials isn't actually real. The bowl is normally filled with shortening or Styrofoam, and then white glue is added to make it look like milk.
Cereal commercials glue down the cereal to Styrofoam so it looks fresh and doesn't sink to the bottom. According to some marketing agencies, cream cheese is also occasionally used so they can position the cereal in "an appealing way before the glue is applied." Who knew?
4.Bananas and eggplants are actually berries, but strawberries aren't (despite literally having the word "berry" in their name).
Yes, eggplants are a fruit, not a vegetable. Even more so, they're also a berry. This all comes down to botany (and it's why tomatoes are also considered a fruit). Basically, all true berries have seeds and pulp that develop from the ovary of a flower. Strawberries are made from one flower but develop from multiple ovaries, so they're referred to as "aggregate fruits."
5.According to the FDA, a typical jar of peanut butter contains 10 or more rodent hairs.
That means each jar averages one or more rodent hairs per 100 grams (about 3.5 ounces).
In addition to those rodent hairs, the average jar of peanut butter may contain hundredssss of insect fragments. According to CNN, you'll find about eight insect fragments in every 2 tablespoons of peanut butter.
6.The insides of Kit Kats are...literally just ground-up Kit Kats.
That's right. Kit Kats are made from...other Kit Kats! The candy bar is concocted from layers of chocolate and wafers, and that wafer is made from broken-up bars.
7.Apple seeds and cherry pits are toxic. They release cyanide when metabolized and can literally kill you if you eat enough of them.
Chewing on these seeds and pits releases amygdalin into the body, which is then converted into cyanide. Studies found that a fatal dose can be "as little as 1.5 mg per kg of a person’s bodyweight" for cherries.
8.Baby carrots are just regular carrots that have been cut down.
Regular-size carrots go through a whole process to become baby carrots. First they're washed, then their green tops are removed, and then they go through a machine that cuts them into 2-inch pieces. Those smaller carrots are then peeled by a machine.
9.All Froot Loops are the same exact flavor, no matter what color they are.
10.Beavers have an anal sac that produces castoreum, which is used in popular food and beverages as a substitute for vanilla flavoring.
Castoreum's scent is suuuuuper strong (and apparently smells really good?), so humans have used it for everything from fragrances to artificial vanilla flavoring. The FDA does say it's safe to use in food products, but it's umbrellaed under the general "natural flavorings" category on ingredient lists.
11.Most figs actually contain the bodies of dead wasps...sort of.
First of all, figs technically aren't a fruit — they're inverted flowers. Each fig is pollinated by a female fig wasp that burrows itself inside. The wasps die inside each fig, ~but~ they ultimately dissolve by the time you're ready to take a bite: "The female fig produces an enzyme that completely digests the exoskeleton before hungry humans can take a bite."
12.Before 2012, Pizza Hut was the largest wholesale purchaser of kale in the United States.
Pizza Hut used to be a proper sit-down restaurant with a buffet. So before the whole ~kale craze~ started, it was the largest purchaser of kale in the whole United States. The extra-wild part? Kale was literally only used as a garnish for their salad bars, not as an actual edible option.
13.For every glass of water you drink, there's nearly a 100% chance that a portion of it has been peed out by a dinosaur.
Think about it: Humans have been around for about 300,000 years, while dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 165 million years before going extinct. Water molecules are super resilient, so while "most water molecules in an eight-ounce glass have never been consumed by another person, almost every single molecule has been drunk by a dinosaur."
14.Most sugar is actually bleached with bone char from animals, which is what gives it its white color.
Basically, in order to make the refined sugar that you're familiar with (in ice cream, soda, juice, and so on), sugarcane stalks are crushed up so the juice can be extracted. That juice is then heated up so it can crystallize, and after it's filtered, it goes through a bleaching process with bone char from cows. That bone char is what gives the sugar its white color.
15.All of your favorite candies are red because they're dyed using crushed-up bugs.
Cochineal insects are harvested, dried, and crushed up to create the "natural" red dye. In fact, it takes about 70,000 of these bugs to make 1 pound of red dye. The dye is even used in certain makeup products (like some red lipsticks).
16.According to the FDA, you can typically find 30 or more fly eggs in every 100 grams (about half a cup) of tomato sauce.
This is the FDA's full breakdown of pasta, pizza, and other sauces: "30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams, or 15 or more fly eggs and 1 or more maggot per 100 grams, or 2 or more maggots per 100 grams."
17.Remember that rumor about how the numbers on toaster dials represent minutes? Yeah, that's not really true.
In fact, someone actually tested this out a few years ago. They grabbed four toasters of different prices and set all of their dials to 2. One toaster popped the bread up in 57 seconds, another at 63 seconds, and another at 74 seconds. The final and most expensive toaster did pop the bread up around the two-minute mark, but those four different results proved that the dials aren't timed.
18.Hawaiian pizza wasn't actually invented in Hawaii. It was invented in Canada.
Believe it or not, Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada in 1962. Sam Panopoulos was born in Greece but ultimately moved to Ontario, and that's where he got the idea to add pineapple to pizza at one of his restaurants. The whole thing was just an experiment to attract new customers, and it worked: “We just put it on, just for the fun of it, see how it was going to taste. We were young in the business, and we were doing a lot of experiments.”
19.And finally, according to several cannibals, human meat tastes verrrrry similar to pork.
One cannibal in particular described human meat like this: "The flesh tastes like pork, a little bit more bitter, stronger."
However, if you're curious about the more ~acceptable~ type of human consumption (i.e., eating the placenta after childbirth), here's how one person described it: "It was like beef, only very delicate; soft notes that suitably matched its gentle textures. One spoonful was all I got and needed. There was nothing offensive about it. Actually, it was quite ordinary, sort of beefy, and not the exotic taste I was imagining." Wild!
