4 Everyday Foods With WTF Dark Histories

One thing that a lot of old-timey folks went wild for was pseudoscience 'home remedies,' with the most popular of these, by far, being the humble lemon. Major newspapers and politicians hyped lemons as a "fruit foe," which not only prevented people from catching the virus but could cure an infected person outright. This led to the Los Angeles Herald producing possibly the horniest public health announcement in history.

The consequences were inevitable. As lemons came to be seen as a literal lifeline, retailers responded by bumping up lemon prices to hyperinflation-esque levels. Desperate folks were forced to pay, having been convinced that lemons were the only thing that could keep them safe from the plague that had already killed millions of people worldwide.

However, you might be surprised to learn that lemons don't do jack shit to cure the influenza virus. So how did this cure-all come around? Because the good folks at Sunkist wanted to make a buttload of money. When the pandemic began in 1918, the fruit company quickly put out a series of advertisements, disguised as official-looking public health warnings, advising people about what they could do to avoid being plagued. They included steps like avoiding crowds, getting plenty of sleep, and oh right, drinking one or two glasses of hot lemonade. After these ads went out and reached an estimated TWENTY-TWO MILLION PEOPLE, sales of lemons rose by over 80 percent ... which not only made the company that Sunkist a buttload of cash, but helped cement lemons as a staple food in the American diet.

Ordinarily, this is where we'd go hard on calling these guys manipulative sociopaths, but credit where credit is due: at least they didn't hire a doctor who talks about "demon sperm" to scare your grandparents into drinking fish medication.

We aren't kidding about that "outbreak" thing, by the way. Before the invention of, um, knowing the basic tenets of the food, it wasn't uncommon for entire groups of people to find themselves at death's door after scarfing down potatoes that forget solanine, were sola'd up to eleven. That includes a group of soldiers in 1899 that left with jaundice and permanent paralysis. Also, the families in 1918 Scotland that shared a bag of potatoes so bad that the resulting illness caused a five-year-old boy to die from a strangulated bowel. Not to mention, at least 380+ North Koreans that fell ill when a countrywide famine in 1952 forced them to eat rotten potatoes. And two school loads of children poisoned, in 1979 and 1983, after the cafeteria staff fed them potatoes that'd been stored in a cupboard for too long.

Fortunately, thanks to the newfangled way we screen potatoes for solanine, modern-day poisonings are extremely rare. Although any potatoes can become lethal if they're stored incorrectly or kept in direct sunlight, so to be the safe side, we recommend never eating a vegetable again.

In 1919, there were three outbreaks of botulism, which left 18 people dead in Ohio, Michigan, and New York. The culprit? Some poorly-processed cans of black olives. And thanks to black olives being considered fancy person food back then, that meant each victim died after attending a banquet or important family meal. So some of these poor bastards spent their last few precious hours listening to their bozo cousin try to sell them an investment in a lemon farm. 

At the end of WWII, Japan was, to put it lightly, a bit of a mess. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead, entire cities were bombed-out hellholes, and production of the country's staple food, rice, had ground to halt following a devastating harvest failure. To combat this shortage, the U.S. began importing food into the country, alongside massive amounts of wheat to make bread.

Only, this distribution system was incredibly slow, so soon enough, black-market food stalls began sprouting up across the country -- particularly in Tokyo. By October 1945, an estimated 45,000 such stalls were serving various foodstuffs to the desperate sea of humanity that lay before them. Sensing an opportunity, the Yakuza started diverting these imports of wheat flour from bread mills to street vendors who would then buy and turn the flour into ramen, which these vendors would then take to their stalls and sell by the bucketload.

It wasn't without risk, though. After the war, it was illegal to buy or sell restaurant foods because it disrupted rationing. As a result, thousands of ramen vendors were arrested until the restrictions on food stalls were lifted in 1950. At the same time, these vendors also had to pay protection money to the Yakuza, to prevent their stalls from, uh, "accidentally" falling down the stairs one day.

As previously mentioned, though, these restrictions were soon lifted in 1950, meaning that vendors didn't have to rely on organized crime anymore. Which is just as well considering all that ramen broth is already doing a good enough job at raising their blood pressure.

Adam Wears is (allegedly) a comedy writer. Want to read other articles he's written for Cracked? Click here! Want to follow him on Twitter? Click here! Want to check out his website? Click here!

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