23 Thanksgiving Food Facts - mental_floss List Show (Ep. 232)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube. And did you know

that according to corporate legend, TV dinners were invented thanks to leftover Thanksgiving

turkey? In 1953, the Swanson Company had an extra 260 tons of frozen turkey, so a salesman

came up with the idea to put the turkey, along with peas and potatoes, into aluminum trays

They were originally sold for 98 cents. And that's the first of many facts about American

Thanksgiving foods that I'm going to share with you today. Alright, let's continue with turkey

Ben Franklin called the turkey a much more respectable bird than the bald eagle, which

he thought had bad moral character, because it's a scavenger. The average American eats around 16 pounds of turkey per year, and I will remind you

we have many vegetarians in this country, so the rest of us have to eat a ton of turkey

It's not uncommon for turkeys to have heart attacks. In fact, about 843,000 turkeys die of heart attacks every year

It's a leading cause of turkey death. Of course, the leading cause is Thanksgiving

You know that loud gobble-gobble sound that turkeys make? Yeah, only male turkeys make it

It actually so loud that people can hear it from a mile away Speaking of male turkeys a young male turkey is known as a Jake An adult is a Tom Young female turkeys are Jennys and adults are hens

But maybe turkey isn't enough for you on Thanksgiving. A shop in Louisiana says that it sells over 5,000 turduckens in the single week preceding Thanksgiving

For those of you who don't know, a turducken is a chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into

a turkey. Hey Donald, quick riddle. says quack and is about to have a chicken inside of it. It's like a Matryoshka doll

but edible. Anyway, let's move on to stuffing. You can find recipes for stuffing in a Roman

cookbook from around the 4th century CE called the Dari Coconaria. The book teaches you how

to stuff things like chicken and hare and also dormouse. Instant stuffing, on the other

hand, wasn't invented until 1972. Kraft Foods released stovetop stuffing, which now sells

about 60 million boxes around Thanksgiving. But how many of them are used to stuff dormouses

My god am I happy to live in the age of instant stuffing and no dormouse eating

Depending on where you're from, stuffing may not be called stuffing. Like in Pennsylvania, many people call it filling

Southerners are more likely to refer to it, as my family did growing up, as dressing

Now let's turn to mashed potatoes. Did you know that every one of the 50 states in the United States grows potatoes Also Boeing used sacks of potatoes to test in Wi because potatoes interact with electromagnetic fields in a very similar way to humans Potato blossoms were once very fashionable for the French aristocracy

It's said that Marie Antoinette used to put the flowers in her hair while Louis XVI would

stick one in his buttonhole. That was buttonhole, right? On to corn

The part of the corn that we eat, the cob, is not the plant. It's actually the flower

Okay, that makes sense. But which part is the corn dog from? In Peru, archaeologists found popcorn kernels that were 1,000 years old

Researchers were hungry, so wanted to know if they would still pop, and they did

Mark wants me to say that the researchers weren't actually hungry. They were doing it for science, obviously

That was obviously a joke, Mark. Also, corn is in a lot more of what we eat than you might think

In fact, three out of four grocery store products contain some corn

It's almost as if corn is evolving us to plant more corn

Someone should write a zombie apocalypse novella about that. On to cranberries

The first known use of the word cranberry was by a New Englander in 1647

John Elliott asked the age-old question, why are strawberries sweet and cranberries sour

You can test whether a cranberry is ripe by tossing it. If it bounces, it's ripe. If not, it's not

That's why you might hear them referred to as bounceberries. Now to pies The first pies were meat pies and they were known as coffins In 2008 when Schwan Consumer Brands did a pie survey they learned that apple pie is the most popular pie in America with 47 of people calling

it their favorite. They also asked which TV mom would make the best pie, and Carol Brady

came in first place with 40% of the votes. Those are good choices, but I would pick pumpkin

pie and Carrie from Homeland. Now to peas. In the perfumed garden, a sex manual in Arabic

from the 15th century, peas are cited as an aphrodisiac, but only if they're boiled

along with onions and topped with cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom. Ripe peas are yellow. They're actually picked before they become ripe, a practice that started

around the 1600s. At the time, many French people referred to that decision as madness

And finally, I return to my salon to tell you that the average American eats between

3,000 and 5,000 calories at Thanksgiving dinner, but hey, I say enjoy it. It only comes around