5 Shocking Thanksgiving Food Facts

Ready for Thanksgiving America!? Before you start stuffing your face-hole with buttery wads of starch and turkey, you might want to check out these #5facts on Thanksgiving food. Warning: These facts will both shock and disturb you.

01) Forcemeat!

Before stuffing was called… stuffing, it was called “forcemeat.” Grandma, please pass the forcemeat. Yum! Where does the name come from? Good question. If you know, please tell us in the comments.

02) Corn Nation

America is the #1 producer of corn in the world. But Americans (aka the “Other Animals” in the chart below), only eat 1% of the corn that we produce. The other 99% is used to feed livestock or create fuel, like ethanol.

03) Giant Turkey Boobs

Unlike the wild turkeys consumed by our pioneering ancestors, today’s turkeys need a lot of help getting pregnant. We’ve genetically modified farm-raised turkeys to have bigger breasts. As the result, these turkeys can’t physically reproduce on their own. 100% of all farm-raised turkeys are now artificially inseminated. These larger breasts are perfect for the grocery store. But they are so big that it “physically gets in the way when the male and the female try to create offspring” according to Julie Long from Freakonomics Radio. The one exception is the Kramer Turkey.

04) Real Wild Potatoes Can Kill You

The next time you find yourself hungry and stranded in the wilderness, don’t forage for wild potatoes. Why? Unlike farm-raised potatoes, wild potatoes are poisonous, unless you dip them in clay “gravy.”

Wild potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but solanine and tomatine are unaffected by heat. In the mountains, guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants. The toxins stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles in the animals’ stomachs, passing through the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water. Eventually, they bred less-toxic potatoes, though some of the old, poisonous varieties remain, favored for their resistance to frost. Clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

Source: Smithsonian Mag

05) Thanksgiving Food: Lies & Conspiracies

What if almost everything about your Thanksgiving meal was a lie?

• What about Thanksgiving dessert. After a big Thanksgiving meal, do you prefer to have pumpkin pie or butternut squash pie for dessert? Read the ingredients. Shockingly, most canned pumpkin pie mix is actually flavored butternut squash.
• Do you normally have a side of cranberry sauce with your Thanksgiving meal? Sadly, the “cranberry” itself is another lie. Botanically speaking, the cranberry isn’t even a berry.
• The sweet potato is a Thanksgiving staple. However, biologically, sweet potatoes are closer to a Marigold flower than a potato. “Grandma, how many scoops of mashed sweet Marigold flowers would you like with your artificially inseminated turkey?”

Sources: thekitchn.com, clovegarden.com, Wikipedia: Cranberry, Wikipedia: Berry

Thanksgiving Food: The Ugly Truth

Poisonous starch, false ingredients, and artificially inseminated meats aside, we hope you have a nice Thanksgiving holiday. Also, we’re thankful you are reading this. Out of all of the websites on the Internet, somehow you ended up here reading this article. Thank you! And please have a Happy Thanksgiving!

 Source: Matt Silverman (@matt_silverman) and Annie Colbert (@anniecolbert).