Food Weird-o-Pedia

The Ultimate Book of Surprising, Strange, and Incredibly Bizarre Facts about Food and Drink

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Skyhorse Publishing
Alex Palmer
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Hundreds of weird and wonderful facts in this massive encyclopedia of food and drink oddities! A perfect gift for foodies and trivia fans alike!

Food Weird-o-Pedia offers up hundreds of off-kilter bits of info about food that will make you rethink what you know about even those dishes you’ve been eating your whole life. Organised in sections such as 'Between-Meal Tidbits: Curious Facts about Snacks' and 'Spice Up Your Life: Unexpected morsels about condiments, sauces and spices,' each chapter offers an alphabetical encyclopedia of strange facts that will give you plenty to chew over whether reading from cover-to-cover or just flipping to a random page during a lunch break.

Learn weird and obscure facts about fruits, vegetables, baked goods, meat, dairy, seafood, junk food, condiments, sauces, spices, beverages, desserts, and more, such as:

  • Cherries may have killed the twelfth president of the United States.
  • Why we call that vulgar sound we make by putting our tongue between our lips and blowing out a 'raspberry.'
  • Enzymes on the inside of a banana peel actually encourage splinters to move toward the skin’s surface.
  • Dark soy sauce contains ten times the antioxidants of red wine and contributed to a decrease in risk of cardiovascular disease.
  • The most egg yolks ever found in a single egg is nine.
  • Frank Sinatra was buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey.
  • Hershey’s Kisses get their names from the smooching sound and motion the machine made when it popped the candy onto the conveyor belt.
  • And many, many more!

Every one of us has a deeply personal relationship to the food we eat, each as unique as we are. But there is also a lot that can surprise us about what we put in our body — unexpected facts about staple fruits and veggies, strange backstories to our favourite sweets, and ways of whipping up a familiar dish that are downright weird. These odd aspects of the food we eat are what this book is all about. Food Weird-o-Pedia is sure to provide plenty of fodder to impress friends and family over your next meal — whatever it is you’re eating.

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Contributor Bio

Alex Palmer is a journalist and excavator of fascinating facts. He is the author of the original Weird-o-Pedia as well as books of surprising tidbits including Happiness Hacks, Alternative Facts, and Literary Miscellany. He is also the New York Times best-selling author of The Santa Claus Man and his writing has appeared in Lifehacker, Best Life, Mental Floss, Slate, and Esquire.

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