Strange History Shorts: Semen is the Crack Cocaine of the Fly World and other odd food facts

0:01 Welcome to strange history shorts. Today we're going to be talking about food. In eighteen ninety three, the Supreme Court had to rule whether tomatoes were fruit or a vegetable. This happened not long after people finally decided that tomatoes weren't poisonous, and that was a belief that lasted hundreds of years. Owing largely to their botanical relationship to Mandrake's and deadly nightshade, people used to think potatoes cause syphilis and leprosy. This was chiefly because of their resemblance to the impacted body parts of the afflicted.

0:33 Now, of course, potatoes are America's favorite vegetable, largely thanks to French fries. Tomatoes come in second place, owing largely to their use and frozen pizza and canned tomato sauce. Vanilla isn't very vanilla. While vanilla has unfortunately become a synonym for ordinary, it's really anything but for starters. It's the only edible fruit to come from orchids, even though that the largest family of flowers. Vanilla gets its name from Spanish gnquistadors, who named it after the Spanish word for vagina.

1:05 It has to be pollinated by hand using a technique developed by an enslaved twelve year old named Edmund Albius, and it's the world's second most expensive spice behind saffron. The first breakfast cereals were intentionally bland. Ready to eat breakfast cereals were created in the eighteen hundreds by religious health reformers who believes sugar and spices were sinful and that consuming them incited bodily temptation, leading to such sexual urges as chronic masturbation and adultery, and ultimately resulting an internal damnation.

1:40 So for all you lucky charm lovers out there, take note. Our affinity for certain foods begins in the womb. Researchers suggest that many of our adult food preferences are influenced by flavors like vanilla present in breast milk and amniotic fluid, which absorbed flavors and odors in the parent's diet, while other food preferences, such as people's polarized responses to cilantro, go back even earlier to the genetic inheritance of specific taste receptors. People used to believe personality, traits and intellect were passed on through breast milk.

2:14 As a result, early wet nurses were screened for things like breast shape, manners, and vices such as day sleeping and gambling addiction to ensure their milk was child friendly. An entire ear of ancient corn used to be about the size of a cigarette. Over thousands of years, corn was selectively bred from a nearly inedible weed into the modern staple many cultures depend on. Now, there is a decent chance that the honey in your cupboard comes from lawn weeds or poison ivy, and that's okay. Apparently cinnamon, it was said, came from a giant bird's nest and had to be transported using rafts without oars on a treacherous journey that took five years and was powered by courage alone.

2:58 We're gonna have to cover that time in another podcast that sounds interesting. Fidel Castro was obsessed with American dairy. He spent decades funding the genetic manipulation of a dairy supercow named ubre blanca, which means white utter. She produced four times the milk of American cows and was assigned a security detail in an air conditioned stable, and her funeral was held with military honors and a life size marble statue after her death. No one wanted to eat Patagonian toothfish until they were rebranded as Chilian sea bass in nineteen ninety four.

3:35 Now they sell for thirty dollars a pound at Whole Foods. Spice traders used to make up stories about the exotic origins of spices so they could sell more for money. Cinnamon, it said what came from giant bird's nest and had to be transported using rafts without orison treacher's journeys that took five years and was powered by courage alone. Black pepper was said to grow in forest guarded by serpents that had to be scared way by setting the trees on fire, which explained why the black pepper pods were the color of ashes.

4:05 The adige you'll catch more flies with honey isn't really true. Rather, catching flies depends on a host of complex variables, including the age, gender, sex, drive, mating status, thirst, and stress level of each fly, as well as the concentration of the vinegar, the time of day, and the season. Even then, some researchers suggests you'll catch more flies with beer or human semen with one scientist calling semen the crack cocaine of the fly world. This has been another episode of Strange History shorts