Random Facts About Food and Drink

I don't know about you, but I love to read funny/informative/weird little facts from around the world. I decided to make this hub to share just that, odd or informative little bits of info that either make you smile, go: what?! Or just plain, "I didn't know that!"

If you're looking for more random facts, here's a few to choose from:

Random Facts About Animals

Random Facts About People

Random Facts About The Human Body

One of the most famous English sauces is Worcestershire Sauce and it's origin stems from Britain's colonial period. It is not served seperately with the meal, but is used for seasoning during the cooking process. The story of how it was created is quite remarkable.

Lord Sandys, who was governor in Bengal for a while during the reign of Queen Victoria found the local cuisine to be very much to his liking. He persuaded his cook to give him the recipe for the 'magic' sauce he was constantly using. Back home in England, Lord Sandys entrusted two druggists with the preparation of the sauce.

John Lea and William Perrin from Worcester made the sauce following the Bengal cook's recipe to the letter, but when they sampled the result together with Lord Sandys, they found the what they had prepared was unedible. Lea and Perrin put the barrels containing the sauce in the furthermost corner of a stockroom where they forgot about them.

Several years later whilst clearing the stockroom they discovered the dusty barrels and tried the sauce anew. To their great surprise, the concoction had matured into a wonderfully spicy sauce. The two men immediately began producing the sauce on a commercial basis.

That was in 1837. The original Worcestershire Sauce is still prepared according the the original recipe today and is sold all over the world to lend it's piquant flavour to a wide variety of dishes. The recipe remains a secret,but it is known that malt and spirit vinegar, sugar, molasses, salt, anchovies, tamarinds, shallots, chillies, soya sauce and garlic are all ingredients.

Today, Worcestershire Sauce is matured for three years before it is sold.

Only 2 out of 1000 people drink water straight from the tap in Seoul, South Korea, the rest boil it first.

Alternatively any kind of charcoal can be put into tap water to act as a permanent water filter and help get rid of chlorine and harmful contaminants.

You have to wash the charcoal's surface, let it dry and then place 20-30g of it into 1 litre of water. You can use it 10 times. After that let it dry out and then reuse it.

A cheap and easy alternative to water filters.

Dr Nakamat spent 10 years researching a range of cerebral nutrients. These include: Dried Shrimp, Chicken Livers and Eel. He claims that by eating his brain foods or drinking his brain tea, you can live to the age of 144.

Does anyone really want to live to 144?!

When Alfred Heineken, head of the Dutch beer company visited the Dutch Antilles, he noticed that people were living in shanties and that the streets were littered with Heineken bottles. This gave him an idea; why not create a bottle that could be used as a brick? So that's what he did. He made the 'World Bottle' which was square instead of round and could be used to build with.

Through supermarket loyalty cards, mulitnational companies obtain customer databases full of what we're buying, how much of it and when. Procter and Gamble has the names and addresses of over 3 quarters of the UK's families. The company Kraft is said to have over 40 million names on record.

Most bottled water is packaged in plastic. In the USA alone people empty over 2.5 million bottles an hour. These bottles take 500 years to decompose.

Agentinian inventors Mirta Fasci and Luis Pittau designed EMIUM, reusable bottles that look and slot together like Lego bricks. These can be recycled and used to make furniture, or applied within walls as insulation. They can even be filled with cement to be used as construction blocks.

German producers of Eiswein leave the grapes on the vine late into winter so that the icy weather will freeze them. after the water in the fruit had frozen, the grape is crushed between marble slabs.

Because it takes a huge amount of grapes to produce just 1 bottle, a vintage bottle of 80's Riesling Rheingau sells for over $500

When you're in love you feel euporic because the brain releases phenylethylamine, a chemical that increases happiness, raises your heart rate and gives you energy. Because the pituitary gland controls it's release, anyone who may have suffered damage to this gland in childhood may never feel the ecstasy of falling in love.

Chocolate also contains phenylethylamine, and that's why people crave if after a heartbreak as it mimics those warm fuzzy feeling of being in love.

At gypsy funerals in the Czech Republic, the deceased are often buried with cigarettes and alcohol. Most burials have one bottle of spirits, often the locally produced Bercherovka, the Czech national drink. They are also buried with Marlboro cigarettes as they cost $0.20, which is more than domestic brands and seen as a status symbol!

Beans contain oligosaccharides which are sugars. If they aren't broken down during digestion, they ferment in the intestine. The body gets used to the oligosaccharides in time, but you can choose beans that have less of these sugars to begin with. Chickpeas, lima beans and black eyed peas are your best bet.

You can boil dried beans for 3 minutes before soaking to reduce digestion problems, but you must keep changing the soaking water and disgard it after use.

10 million pints of Guinness are sold each day around the world and despite popular belief that it is more calorific than other beers, it's around the same at 260 calories. Guinness is brewed in 35 countries, you can check the packaging for where yours is from. It is said that the Guinness tastes different depending on where it was brewed. I'm not a fan so I don't know if that is actually true.

40% of all Guinness produced worldwide is brewed and sold in Africa.

A perfect pint must be pulled in 2 seperate parts that's how you get the smooth creamy head.