Reasons Behind Strange Things You See In Food & Drinks

Ever wondered why donuts have holes? Or why some liquors intentionally come with an insect problem? From how Swiss cheese gets its holes, to the meaning of hidden codes on food packaging, and even exploring Oreo’s connection to the world’s largest secret society, let’s tuck in to the reasons behind strange things you see in food!

The Reason Donuts Have Holes

Doughnuts have a wonderfully unique shape, a torus, to get technical, and strangely, the story goes that the snack acquired its distinctive hole on a boat in the 19th Century. According to legend, a sailor from Maine named Hanson Gregory was captaining a ship in 1847 while eating a plate full of traditional European doughnuts, which are essentially big balls of deep-fried dough.

Hanson wanted to keep hands on the wheel while eating, so, he started skewering his cakes onto the spokes of the ship’s wooden steering wheel, allowing him to easily grab his snack. The fried cakes were far easier to eat with the hole in the middle, so, Hanson started skewering all of them from that point on, accidentally inventing the ring donut.

This origin story is popular in Maine, but it’s almost completely false, and Hanson Gregory personally debunked it during a newspaper interview in 1916. He still claimed to have invented the ring doughnut, but he explained that he did it for more practical reasons relating to the way that doughnuts are fried. Making doughnuts involves deep-frying them in oil. So, when you deep-fry a doughnut without a hole, the outer layer will often be fully-cooked before the heat even reaches the middle.

Traditional European doughnuts often had an undercooked center and excessively-tough exterior. However, Hanson realized that if you cut a ring into the doughnut before frying it, the oil will cook the outer and inner layers simultaneously, frying the snack perfectly. Hanson cooked these ring doughnuts on his voyage, and when he came home, he shared the recipe with his mother, who shared it with her friends, and so on.

Soon, donuts with holes were the most popular choice in Maine; a preference which spread across America. In the 1940s, a doughnut company called the Doughnut Corporation of America verified Hanson’s claim and named him the official inventor of the ring doughnut, confirming that the famous treat was officially invented out on the high seas!

Stargazy Pie

Let’s take a trip to England: home of beans on toast, marmite, and Stargazy pie. It's a savory dish that features several heads of large sardines called pilchards protruding through the crust. The fish inside the pie have been skinned and deboned, but the pilchard heads are arranged to make it look like they’re "gazing" up at the stars.

Stargazy pie looks like the work of a maniac, but it actually has an incredibly interesting origin story that’s 500-years-old. Back in the 16th century, the English village of Mousehole had an incredibly stormy winter, so none of their fishing boats could head out to sea without risking being destroyed. Fish was Mousehole’s main source of food, so by Christmas, the entire village faced starvation until a fisherman called Tom Bawcock decided to brave the storm.

The people of Mousehole anxiously waited for Tom’s return, and when his boat safely pulled back into harbor, he’d caught enough fish to feed the entire village. According to local legend, the villagers cooked his entire catch into one giant pie, and it contained so many fish that their heads and tails poked through the crust.

While the degree to which the story is factually accurate is almost impossible to prove, seeing as all evidence was hungrily chowed down, there’s no doubting that Mousehole still celebrates the story with an annual festival called Tom Bawcock’s Eve. This festival takes place on the 23rd of December, and the entire event is centered around eating Stargazy pies, which act as a symbolic version of the dish that saved Mousehole 500-years ago. This gives the bizarre-looking dish an awesome origin story but it still doesn't sound appealling to a pie that stares back.

Swiss Cheese Holes

According to cartoons, the iconic holes in Swiss Emmental cheese are created by hungry mice. However, the real explanation is a "hole" lot more scientific. Dairy farms use hay to feed their cattle, and when the cows are milked, microscopic specs of hay will often float into the milk buckets. This hay often contains a naturally-occuring bacteria called propionibacterium and when the milk is aged to make Emmental, the bacteria starts giving off carbon dioxide, creating gas bubbles that leave holes in the cheese.

Without this propionibacterium, Swiss cheese is completely smooth, and today, Emmental actually has less holes than it used to, as modern dairy farms use more sanitary milking methods, which in turn stop hay and other contaminants from getting into their milk. Some ultra-sanitary modern cheesemakers even have to add powdered hay impurities back in, just to get their hole fix!

So, Swiss cheese isn’t made holey by hungry mice and this is just one of the many lies that the dairy industry is feeding us. While every kid worth their cheddar knows you color in cheese using the yellow crayon, it may shock you to learn that some of your favorite types of cheese are dyed yellow. The natural color of cheese is dependent on the diet of the cows that make it.

In the summer, cows left out to pasture graze on grass, which is filled with a chemical called beta carotene. This gets released through their milk, and becomes visible through the cheesemaking process, resulting in cheese with a natural yellow tint. However, in winter cows eat grass that‘s been dried and turned into hay. The drying process destroys the beta carotene in the hay, so the cheese that winter cows produce will be a pale, off-white color.

Back in 16th Century England, summer cheese was considered far more desirable than winter cheese until cheesemakers realized that they could dye their pale winter cheeses yellow to trick their customers. They used carrot juice, saffron and a red dye called annatto to color their products. As a result, cheese became more colorful, and consumers started to believe that the more vibrant the cheese, the better the quality.

This led to the invention of orange cheeses like Red Leicester, Colby cheese, and Orange Cheddar, as cheesemakers attempted to make their naturally-pale cheeses as colorful as possible. Over time, these products became incredibly popular, and our grocery stores are still stocked with cheese that’s been dyed orange or yellow. As a result, if your favorite cheese is brightly colored, you’re really the victim of a con that was started by a group of English farmers, over 500-years ago.

Cellulose And Sawdust

Sometimes, reading an ingredients label is like reading a chemistry textbook, often being full of additives with complex chemical names. However, we eat these mysterious additives on a daily basis, and one of the most common ingredients in our food is a molecule called cellulose. This additive can be found in everything from tomato sauce and cookies to hotdogs and bagels, and shockingly, the molecule is taken from sawdust!

Before you start to panic, you aren’t eating pure sawdust when you eat cellulose. Cellulose is found in all plants, including vegetables like broccoli. So, it’s completely safe for human consumption once chemically extracted from waste sawdust, and food manufacturers add it to their products to improve texture, or increase the amount of fiber in our food.

Cellulose isn’t the only eyebrow-raising additive found in our food. Ammonia is a poisonous chemical compound that causes burns when it’s exposed to human skin. However, it’s been widely reported over the past 15 years that some food manufacturers will blast their ground beef with ammonia to kill harmful bacteria on the meat.

Some of the ammonia dissolves into the meat’s moisture, and this chemically-treated ground beef is then sold in grocery stores. Feeding poisoned meat to the public sounds pretty diabolical. However, the FDA have stated that these products are completely safe as they use small amounts of ammonia mixed with water, and there are barely any traces of the poisonous chemical left when the process is done.

However, this practice still highlights how many chemicals are pumped into our food, and additives aren’t exclusively used in ground meats. When you buy a cheap steak from a grocery store, there’s a chance that it’s been filled with a substance called transglutaminase, or, "meat glue". This is a naturally-occurring enzyme in animals that connects different tissues together, and meat manufacturers can use it to take lots of small pieces of meat, and seamlessly bond them together to create larger steaks and chops.

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These franken-steaks are far cheaper to produce than legitimate cuts of meat, however, the European Union banned the enzyme in 2010, as when you stick multiple pieces of meat together from different sources, it increases the risk of dangerous bacteria being introduced to the food. As a result, meat-glue is completely banned in Europe, but in America, our shelves are still stocked with glued meat, and we can eat transglutaminase whenever we want.

The Origins Of Halloween Pumpkins

Carving pumpkins into Jack O’ Lanterns is a classic Halloween tradition. But incredibly, the practice started thousands of years before Halloween existed, emerging from Ancient pagans, in what we know as Ireland and Britain today, celebrating a Celtic holiday called Samhain.

Samhain marked the beginning of winter, and the Celts believed that during this period, the doorway to the spirit world was opened, allowing demons and spirits to freely walk the Earth. The pagans needed to scare these evil spirits away, so, they started dressing up in spooky costumes, lighting bonfires and carving scary faces into turnips during Samhain.

The Irish Celts in particular widely celebrated this festival for millennia, until the 5th Century C.E., when European Catholics began converting Ireland to Christianity. The Christians knew that this conversion would be gradual, so instead of erasing Celtic culture completely, they incorporated Pagan celebrations into the Catholic calendar.

This process partially involved taking the Christian holiday of All Hallow’s Eve, this being the evening before All Hallow’s Day, otherwise known as All Saint’s Day, and tweaking it to include some elements of Samhain, like telling ghost stories and carving turnips or rutabagas.

This somewhat eased the transition from paganism to Catholicism, and as Ireland became a predominantly Christian country, they came up with a new myth to explain the pagan practice of turnip carving. This story follows a devious drunkard called Jack, who was visited at a pub by Satan, who offered to buy him a drink in exchange for his soul. Jack convinced Satan to turn into a coin to pay the barkeep, with Jack suggesting they could then disappear to cheat the barkeep out of the money.

This impressed Satan, and he obliged with the plan, but Jack tricked the devil himself, by quickly putting the coin in his pocket next to a silver crucifix. The holy symbol trapped the devil inside the coin, and Jack only released him when he promised not to take Jack’s soul to hell when he died. When Jack passed away years later, the Devil fulfilled his promise, and didn’t drag him to hell.

However, Jack wasn’t a good man, so he wasn’t let into heaven either. As a result, Jack’s soul was forced to roam around the Irish wilderness for eternity, carrying a lantern made from a hollowed out turnip. This story offered a Christian explanation for the tradition of carved turnips, and it also prompted Irish people to start calling them Jack O’ Lanterns.

In the 18th century, large numbers of Irish settlers started moving to America, and they brought their All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween, traditions with them. Upon their arrival, they discovered that pumpkins were far more abundant and easier to carve than turnips. So, they tweaked their traditions slightly, and the modern Jack O’ Lantern was born, creating a Halloween icon that’s linked to paganism, turnips and the wandering spirit of an alcoholic called Jack!

Oreo Symbols

Oreos are the best-selling cookie in the world, and each one is marked with the same distinctive pattern. Most of us don’t pay any attention to this design, but some conspiracy theorists are obsessed with it, and they believe the symbols and shapes hide a dark secret. Oreos are made by a company called Nabisco, and conspiracy theorists have noted that both Nabisco’s logo and the Oreo pattern display an ancient symbol called the Cross of Lorraine.

This symbol features on every Nabisco product, and incredibly, it’s also used by the Freemasons, the largest secret society in the world. This secret brotherhood has over 6-million members worldwide, and although no outsiders know exactly what the Freemasons do behind closed doors, they’ve been rumored to interfere with political elections and permanently silence people to stop their secrets from getting out.

The society use lots of ancient symbols to represent their different ranks, including the Cross of Lorraine and the Cross Pattee, another symbol that’s supposedly represented on the Oreo, though that’s probably a stretch.

Either way, some people believe that this proves that Nabisco and Oreos are connected to Freemasonry. However, the theories have some holes. The Freemasons were founded in 1599, but the Cross of Lorraine is so old that it was used all the way back in 1095 AD by the Knights Templar, a Catholic military group that fought during the Holy Crusades.

The symbol’s been used by hundreds of different organizations over the years, and the specific design of an oval topped with the cross was regularly used as a mark of quality-checking by 15th Century printers in Venice. In 1898, Nabisco’s first chairman Adolphus Green discovered this while flicking through an old Venetian book. He found the cross of Lorraine stamped on the pages, and he immediately adopted it as Nabisco’s logo, without any knowledge of its connections to freemasonry.

As for the modified version of the pattern seen on Oreos, that was designed in 1952 by a Nabisco employee called William A. Turner. In 2011, Turner’s son set the record straight by stating that his father wasn’t a freemason, and his designs didn’t contain anything nefarious. Apparently, he included the Cross of Lorraine to reference Nabisco’s logo, and the supposed Cross Pattee is instead actually a flower.

All this suggests that the connections between Oreos and Freemasons are purely coincidental. So, when you twist, lick and dip your Oreos in milk, you aren’t pledging allegiance to the largest secret society in the world!

The Tequila Worm

It’s pretty common for an alcoholic beverage to be decorated with an olive or a tiny umbrella, but there’s a Mexican spirit called Mezcal that contains a far more ghoulish garnish. Plenty of Mezcal brands contain a worm floating inside the bottle, and this devious decoration has an intriguing origin story.

Mezcal is made by fermenting the juice of the roasted heart of the Agave, a plant that’s commonly eaten by the maguey worm. According to legend, a Mezcal entrepreneur called Jacobo Lozano Paez was making some Mezcal in the 1940s, when he accidentally roasted an agave heart that still contained some Maguey Worms.

Jacobo decided to drink the concoction anyway, and he discovered that the worm-infused drink tasted far better than his usual recipe. From that point on, Jacobo started adding maguey worms to all the mezcal he made, and he started putting a dead worm in his bottles as a signature.

During this period, Americans reportedly assumed Mezcal was just a cheaper form of the more-well-known agave-based drink, Tequila, so Mezcal manufacturers wanted to find a way to make their product stand out in the States. Seeing Jacobo’s worm infused Mezcal, they decided to copy the practice, while creating marketing campaigns that falsely claimed that the Maguey Worm was a traditional Mexican garnish, that acted as a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac and a good luck charm.

This marketing campaign worked, and today, lots of the Mezcal sold in America comes with an added worm. However, traditional Mezcal in Mexico rarely comes with a worm, and some folks even insist that the original legend of Jacobo’s happy little worm accident is little more than a marketing ploy in itself!

Amount Of Air In Bags Of Chips

Life is full of disappointments, and there’s nothing worse that opening a bag of chips and discovering that it’s only half-full. Opening a bag of air is pretty soul-crushing, however, you should know that the chip manufacturers aren’t trying to steal your money, and they have a pretty valid reason for not filling their bags to the brim at least partially.

It turns out, the "air" inside the bag isn’t regular air at all; it’s actually nitrogen gas that’s intentionally funneled into the packaging. If oxygen got into a bag of chips it would make them all stale, so chip manufacturers leave a space in each bag that they can pump full of nitrogen, which is an inert gas that won’t react with the food like oxygen does, giving the product a longer shelf-life.

This pocket of nitrogen is also designed to act as a cushion that prevents the chips from getting crushed in transit to your local grocery store. This protective air pocket is known as slack-fill, and although it feels unfair, it actually stops us from ending up with a bag full of stale, chewy crumbs.

Colored Circles On Food Packages

Let’s explore the secrets hidden on the packaging of the bag of chips. Most types of food packaging are marked with colorful circles, and they aren’t just there to look pretty. These are process control patches and they’re used to make sure all of the colors on the packaging are printed properly.

For example, if the blue process control patch comes out too pale when the bag is printed, the manufacturers know that all the different shades of blue on the packaging will be pale too, allowing them to adjust the printer and fix the mistake. These patches can be found on most food products, but they aren’t the only secret feature that’s hidden on packaging. In America, most pieces of fruit have stickers that contain coded numbers called price look-up codes.

Each product has a different identification number, and the codes are designed to help grocery stores keep track of their stock. However, consumers can use them to learn more about the fruit they’re eating. For example, if the code starts with a 9 it typically means the piece of fruit was grown organically. But if the numbers start with an 8, it means the fruit is genetically modified, usually for a longer shelf-life!

Clever Packaging Features

Other packaging features are implemented to make the experience easier for the consumer. For example, candy bars will often have a zig-zag pattern at the end, that makes the wrapper easier to tear open. Similarly, when you finish eating a lollipop, you might notice that the hollow sticks often have a small hole cut into the side.

When lollipops are produced, the candy is melted and partially pushed through the hole before hardening. This secures the head of the lollipop to the stick, making it less likely to fall off into your mouth. Furthermore, if an overexcited child accidentally inhales the stick, they’re less likely to choke, as they’ll be able to breathe through the hole in the hollow tube.

Other products use similar techniques to keep their customers safe. In America lots of milk containers feature inverted circles on the side of the jug. If your milk expires, the bacteria inside it will start to produce gas. This gas will push against the indented circle and cause it to pop out, showing the consumer that their milk is unsafe to drink.

The indented circle also acts as a shock absorber if you drop the jug, as when the carton hits the ground, the force will cause the circle to pop out. This will absorb some of the energy of the fall and stop the jug from exploding; saving you from mopping the floor and crying over spilt milk!

Egg Yolks With Red Blood Spots

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and for me, nothing beats waking up to a couple of fried eggs. But has your breakfast ever been ruined by cracking open an egg to find a red spot in the yolk? These sinister marks are called blood spots, and lots of people think that they mean that the egg has been fertilized.

However, the truth is a little less disturbing. During formation, the surface of every egg yolk is covered in tiny blood vessels, and if one of them ruptures during the egg production or laying process, it will leave a tiny spec of blood behind. This can happen to any chicken, though more commonly occurs if the egg is laid by an older hen.

Around 4% of eggs will have these bloody spots, however, barely any of them will make it to your local grocery store. This is due to candling, a process that involves shining a bright light through an egg to see inside the shell. Egg factories use this process to remove red-spotted eggs from the production line. However, they can’t catch them all, so some faulty eggs do get shipped out to grocery stores and end up in our frying pans.

Still, you shouldn’t let this ruin your breakfast. Red-spots are completely harmless, and these eggs are still totally safe to eat. So, even though most people prefer to scrape the blood-spots off their eggs before eating them, it’s totally healthy to start your day with bacon, eggs, and a tiny burst blood vessel.

Moldy Cheese

When it comes to food, nobody does it quite like France: a land where a meal can consist of one baguette, 4 cigarettes, 6 snails and a slice of moldy cheese. In all seriousness, French cuisine is delicious, and Blue cheeses from France are among the most popular types of cheese in the world. However lots of people don’t know why we started eating moldy cheese, or how we can eat the fungal fromage without getting sick.

Many common types of mold produce poisonous mycotoxins that make us sick when eaten. However, blue cheese is made with a very specific type of mold called Penicillium Roqueforti. This mold culture still produces mycotoxins that are poisonous to mice and dogs, however, they’re perfectly safe for humans to eat.

This allows cheesemakers to make blue cheese, and they do so by adding Penicillium Roqueforti to the milk at the very beginning of the cheesemaking process. As the cheese ages, the mold will grow too, and spikes are pushed into the cheese during the maturation process to create hollow veins that the fungus can grow into.

While the original inventor of this process is a source of debate among cheese-storians, blue cheese is widely believed to have been accidentally discovered in Central Europe as early as 800BC, having likely developed on cheeses stored in caves with temperatures and moisture-levels that were naturally favorable for harmless molds.

Ever since, blue cheese has become one of the most popular staples of cheesy cuisine, allowing foodies worldwide to safely stuff their faces with mold. That being said, remember that the mold used in blue cheese has to be penicillium Roqueforti, or another proven-safe penicillium species, so you can’t scrape the mold from your bathroom wall and spread it on crackers. That’s a recipe for disaster!

Mushroom Gills

When it comes to organic foods, most of the attention is placed on fruits and vegetables. However, they have a creepy cousin that’s just as interesting. Mushrooms can look pretty freaky, and lots of them have a strange gill-like structure on the underside of their caps called lamellae.

These weird-looking gills have been freaking out fussy kids for generations, but most people don’t know that the lamellae actually have a very important purpose. Fungi generally reproduce by firing millions of microscopic spores into the air, so they can land somewhere and germinate into a new mushroom-sprouting network.

The lamellae are where the spores are made, and the folds between each gill are covered with microscopic spore-producing cells, which regularly release their payload into the air. So, when we chow down on mushrooms with lamellae, we’re literally biting down on giant spore factories.

Fortune Cookies

Fortune cookies are a staple of Chinese restaurants in America, so most people assume that the prophecy-baring snacks are a traditional Chinese dessert. However, the cookies were invented in America, and their story actually starts in Japan!

In Japanese culture, an Omikuji is a written fortune prediction that’s handed out at temples and shrines, and in Kyoto, some stores sell Omikuji’s that are given to you with a traditional cookie. This snack is like a large, savory version of a fortune cookie, and when Japanese immigrants moved to America in the 1800s, they brought the recipe with them.

Over time, Japanese chefs in California tweaked this recipe to make a sweet dessert with the fortune paper baked inside, creating the modern fortune cookie. However, during World War 2, Japan and America were at war, and the US government placed upwards of two thirds of Japanese-Americans living Stateside in detention camps, causing the closure of most Japanese businesses.

As Japanese restaurants started shutting down, Chinese restaurants decided to start selling fortune cookies, and they became incredibly popular. By the time the war ended in 1945, most Americans believed the dessert originally came from China, and this reputation has endured.

Today, very few people know the cookie’s Japanese origins, and they’re still considered to be one of the most popular quote-unquote ‘Chinese’ snacks in America. That being said, I never bother ordering fortune cookies. If I go out for Chinese food, I already know my future, an evening of lying on the couch in a food coma!

If you were amazed at the reasons behind strange things you see in food and drinks, you might want to read more of our articles about food facts! Thanks for reading!