CoolFacts--Food&Drink
- 40% of McDonald's profits come from the sale of Happy Meals.
- 400 quarter pounders can be made out of one cow.
- 5,517,200 cases of soft drinks produced in the next year will be flatter than a bad tire.
- 7% of Americans eat McDonalds each day.
- A bowl of Wheaties contains twice as much sodium as a bowl of potato chips.
- A can of SPAM is opened every 4 seconds.
- A chili pepper isn't a pepper. In fact, more than two hundred kinds of chili peppers aren't peppers.
- A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate.
- A full seven percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.
- A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not.
- A man named Ed Peterson is the inventor of the Egg McMuffin.
- A Saudi Arabian women can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.
- A typical American eats 28 pigs in his/her lifetime.
- A-1 Steak Sauce contains both orange peels and raisins.
- Almonds are a member of the peach family.
- Almonds are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.
- Almost 425,000 hotdogs and buns, 160,000 hamburgers and cheeseburgers were served at Woodstock '99.
- Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza everyday.
- Americans spend $10 million each day on potato chips.
- An average of 13 boxes of jello are purchased every second in the United States.
- As much as 50 gallons of Maple Sap are used to make a single gallon of Maple Sugar.
- Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
- At McDonald's in New Zealand, they serve apricot pies instead of cherry ones.
- Beer foam will go down by licking your finger then sticking it in the beer.
- Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.
- Bubble gum contains rubber.
- California's Frank Epperson invented the Popsicle in 1905 when he was 11-years-old.
- Chefs started using onions 5,000 years ago to spice up their cooking.
- Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
- China produces 278,564,356,980 eggs per year.
- China's Beijing Duck Restaurant can seat 9,000 people at one time.
- Coca-Cola owns the world's second largest truck fleet.
- Coca-Cola was originally green.
- Coffee is the second largest item on international commerce in the world.
- Coffee is the world's most popular stimulant.
- Cranberry Jello, is the only jello flavor that comes from the real fruit, not artificial flavoring.
- Dairy products account for about 29% of all food consumed in the U.S.
- Did you know there are coffee flavoured PEZ?
- Diet Coke was only invented in 1983.
- Dogs and cats consume over $11 billion worth of pet food a year.
- Dry cereal for breakfast was invented by John Henry Kellogg at the turn of the century.
- Dunkin' Donuts serves about 112,500 doughnuts each day.
- During your lifetime you will eat 60,000 pounds of food, the weight of six elephants.
- Each year, Americans spend more on cat food than on baby food.
- Fanta Orange is the third largest selling soft drink in the world.
- Five jello flavours that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple and chocolate.
- Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung.
- France has the highest per capita consumption of cheese.
- Fried chicken is the most popular meal ordered in sit-down restaurants in the U.S.
- Gatorade was named for the University of Florida Gators where it was first developed.
- George Washington Carver invented peanut butter.
- Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
- Honey is used as a center for golf balls and in antifreeze mixtures.
- Ice cream was originally made without sugar and eggs.
- If China imported just 10% of it's rice needs- the price on the world market would increase by 80%.
- If you had enough water to fill one million goldfish bowls, you could fill an entire stadium.
- If you put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will keep floating to the top and sinking to the bottom.
- In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast.
- In Australia, the number 1 topping for pizza is eggs. In Chile, the favorite topping is mussels and clams. In the United States, it's pepperoni.
- In the summer, walnuts get a tan.
- It is estimated that Americans will consume 10 million tons of turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Due to turkey's high sulphur content, Americans will also produce enough gas to fly a fleet of 75 Hindenburghs from L.A to New York in 24 hours.
- It takes about 142 licks to reach the center of a tootsie pop.
- It takes eighteen minutes to cool hot chocolate into a Hershey's kiss.
- It takes more than 500 peanuts to make one 12-ounce jar of peanut butter.
- Japan is the largest exporter of frogs's legs.
- Jelly Belly jelly beans were the first jelly beans in outer space when they went up with astronauts in the June 21, 1983 voyage of the space shuttle Challenger.
- Jelly is fruit juice with added sugar, cooled and congealed, usually by the addition of gelatin or pectin.
- Laws forbidding the sale of sodas on Sunday prompted William Garwood to invent the ice cream sundae in Evanston, IL, in 1875.
- Less than 3% of Nestle's sales are for chocolate.
- M&M's stands for the last names of Forrest Mars Sr., the candymaker and his associate Bruce Murrie.
- M&M's were developed so soldiers could eat the candy without getting their fingers sticky.
- Martini is the most popular cocktail in the U.S.
- Mr. Peanut was invented in 1916 by a Suffolk, Virginia schoolchild who won $5 in a design contest sponsored by Planters Peanuts.
- Muffins spelled backwards is sniffum.
- No two cornflakes look the same.
- Non-dairy creamer is flammable.
- North America's most popular snack food is potato chips.
- On July 31, 1994, Simon Sang Sung of Singapore turned a single piece of dough into 8,192 noodles in 59.29 seconds!
- One of the ingredients in ice cream is seaweed.
- Only 5% of salt produced end up on the dinner table. The rest is used for packing meat, building roads, feeding livestock, tanning leather, and manufacturing glass, soap, ash and washing compounds.
- Orange juice helps the body absorb iron easily when consumed with a meal.
- Over 15 billion prizes have been given away in Cracker Jacks boxes.
- Peanuts are cholesterol free.
- Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
- Pepsi is commonly used by wooden boat owners to clean mold from decks. You can spill it on for about 30 seconds, but it needs rinsing to make sure it does not erode your decks completely (it's powerful stuff..).
- Potato chips were invented in Lousiana in 186.
- Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than new cars.
- Reindeer milk has more fat than cow milk.
- Rice is grown on more than ten percent of the earth's farmable surface.
- Rice is the main food for half of the people of the world.
- Rice is thrown at weddings as a symbol of fertility.
- Salt is the only rock humans can eat.
- Saturday night is the biggest night of the week for eating pizza
- Sheep milk is used to produce Roquefort cheese.
- Shredded Wheat was the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal.
- Since 1978, at least 37 people have died as a result of shaking vending machines, in an attempt to get free merchandise. More than 100 have been injured.
- Small flat icebergs have been fitted with sails and piloted more than 2,400 miles from the Antarctic to Valparaiso, Chile, and to Cakkaiub, Peru.
- Strawberry Pop Tarts may be a cheap and inexpensive source of incendiary devices. Toasters which fail to eject Pop Tarts cause the Pop Tarts to emit flames 10-18 inches in height.
- Tabasco sauce is made by fermenting vinegar and hot peppers in a French oak barrel which has three inches of salt on top and is aged for three years until all the salt is diffused through the barrel.
- Table salt is the only commodity that hasn't risen dramatically in price in the last 150 years.
- The average American chews 190 sticks of gum each year.
- The average American drinks 600 sodas a year.
- The average American will eat 19 pounds of cereal per year.
- The average child will eat 15 pounds of cereal in a year.
- The average person consumes about 135 pounds of sugar per year.
- The average person drinks 800 gallons of water during their lifetime.
- The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter Ruth.
- The chocolate chip cookie was invented in 1933.
- The color of a chile is no indication of its spiciness, but size usually is - the smaller the pepper, the hotter it is.
- The dark meat on a roast turkey has more calories than the white meat.
- The English word "soup" comes from the Middle Ages word "sop," which means a slice of bread over which roast drippings were poured.
- The estimated number of M & M's sold each day in the United States is 200,000,000.
- The first Lifesaver flavour was peppermint.
- The first U.S. consumer product sold in the old Soviet Union was Pepsi-Cola.
- The highest lifetime yield of milk for a single cow is 465,224 lbs.
- The hottest chile in the world is the habanero.
- The largest apple pie ever baked was 40 x 23 feet.
- The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma in an emergency.
- The McDonalds at The Skydome in Toronto, Ontario, is the only one in the world that sells hot dogs.
- The most popular ice cream flavour is vanilla.
- The number 57 on a Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had.
- The U.S. Government spent $277,000 on "Pickle research" in 1993.
- The wheat that produces a one-pound loaf of bread requires two tons of water to grow.
- The world's number one producer and consumer of fresh pork is China.
- There are 2,000,000 different combinations of sandwiches that can be created from a SUBWAY menu.
- There are more donut shops per capita in Canada than in any other country.
- There are more than 1,000 chemicals in a cup of coffee. Of these, only 26 have been tested, and half caused cancer in rats.
- There are more than 15,000 different kinds of rice.
- Toronto, Ontario has approximately 7,000 eating establishments.
- Vanilla is used to make chocolate.
- When a coffee seed is planted, it takes five years to yield consumable fruit.
- When honey is swallowed, it enters the blood stream within a period of 20 minutes.
- Wine will spoil if exposed to light, hence tinted bottles.
- Wonder Bread does not contain any cholesterol or saturated fat.
- Wonder Bread is the best-selling bread in the United States.
- Yogurt intake among North Americans has quadrupled in the past 20 years.
- You'll eat about 35,000 cookies in a lifetime.
