(theme music)
- You ever think about how weird it is
that we fuel ourselves with masticated
dead plant and animal matter?
Food is pretty weird, actually,
when you think about it, and
here are a few reasons why.
Hippopotamus nearly became America's
other dark meat.
So let's flash back to around 1910.
The United States faces a serious problem:
a booming population and not enough meat to feed it.
So here's one proposal: import the hippopotamus, right?
Hippos could live in areas unfit for cattle,
so that's good.
Newspaper editorials at the time
actually called them "lake cows."
Hippos eat less than cattle by body weight.
That's also good.
But despite support from no less than
Teddy Roosevelt, himself, the idea gave way
to more efficient industrial farms
and their traditional, non-aggressive food animals.
Yes, we might be missing out on "lake cow" bacon,
but hippos actually kill more people in Africa
every year than any other animal, believe it or not,
aside from disease-carrying insects.
So we don't eat hippo.
The Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy
is the only place in the world that produces
real parmigiano reggiano,
and it houses the only bank, believe it or not,
that accepts this cheese as collateral.
The Credito Emiliano Spa,
it stores around 450,000 aging 80-pound wheels
of parmigiano reggiano at any given time.
That stacks up to around 160 million Euros' worth.
Accepting curd-based collateral is pretty much
a valuable service to local cheese producers
because they finance new milk-buying and storage
while their older products cure.
Loans from Credem, which is the bank,
can reach 80 percent of the cheese's market value.
That's one cheesy loan.
It was 1919 and molasses, which is the sticky
sweet liquid sweetener, produced from sugar cane,
was in high demand as an ingredient
in alcohol manufacturing due to impending
prohibition laws.
Big stuff.
People wanted to brew all the booze they could
before the legislation passed.
And that was a lot of booze; trust me.
It just so happened that a giant molasses
storage tank had been constructed in Boston
back in 1916.
This particular tank had been constructed
hastily, to say the least.
Modern researchers will say that
its steel walls were at least 50 percent too thin
to hold its full capacity and contained
enough manganese to make it likely to crack.
And that's exactly what happened.
When incoming shipments filled the tank
in January, 1919, the structure collapsed completely
spilling 2.3 million gallons of molasses
onto the streets.
Sounds kinda funny but it was actually deadly.
A 25-foot wave destroyed two city blocks
within seconds, crushing and suffocating
21 victims stuck in the mass.
Oy.
There is a serious black market for maple syrup,
people, believe it or not.
In the summer of 2012, the global strategic
maple syrup reserve in Canada discovered
the robbery of some 60 percent of its stock.
That's about 6 million pounds of syrup
and about 18 million Canadian dollars
wholesale, at the time.
That's a lot of dough.
Good quality maple syrup goes for about
13 times the price of crude oil per barrel,
believe it or not, and according to police documents,
an elaborate criminal ring convened to steal,
ship, and store, and sell the syrup surreptitiously.
As of fall, 2014, 26 people have been arrested
but only a quarter of the syrup and none
of the money from its sale have been recovered.
So tell me, what's your favorite weird food?
Let us know in the comments below.
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And to learn a lot more weird facts
check out "Ten Weird But True Food Facts"
on HowStuffWorks.com