Jiggly, wiggly, and inexpensive — Jell-O has a reputation for being the ultimate affordable and fun dessert. But the moldable treat we’re familiar with today wasn’t always affordable fare for the masses. At one time, its key ingredient — gelatin — was difficult to come by, making any gelatin-rich dish a symbol of wealth and social standing. What’s more, the earliest gelatin dishes weren’t post-dinner treats; in medieval Europe, cooks used gelatin to preserve meats in aspics, making savory jellies similar to modern head cheeses. Extracting gelatin back then was time-intensive: Cooks spent days boiling animal bones and byproducts, then straining the liquid before letting it set into its gelatinous state. This lengthy, involved process meant that gelatin dishes were rarely served at the dinner tables of everyday folks who didn’t employ kitchen staff.

Gelatin is a common ingredient in vaccines.

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If you’ve been vaccinated against measles, chickenpox, or rabies, chances are your shot contained gelatin. The jiggly preservative is used in some vaccines to stabilize ingredients, protecting them from extreme temperatures during storage and transport.

Gelatin’s status as a high-class delicacy would only last a few centuries. Peter Cooper, an inventor who also designed the first American steam locomotive, created a “portable gelatin” in 1845 that was easily reconstituted with hot water. But Cooper was uninterested in marketing his invention, and his gelatin was largely ignored despite its potential success with cooks who yearned for an easier method for making gelatin — such as suffragette and cookbook author Mary Foote Henderson, whose 1876 Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving footnoted her gelatin recipe by saying she’d never again undertake the arduous task of making the stuff. Cooper’s creation was eventually sold to a New York cough syrup manufacturer, who added fruit flavors and branded it with its Jell-O name in 1897. By the early 20th century, Jell-O ads promoted the dessert as a low-cost, high-society wonder, and the Great Depression and World War II solidified Jell-O’s versatility as a budget- and rations stretcher — a reputation that has carried on for more than 100 years.

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Today, cultures around the world have specific rules and phrases for the common toast. In South Korea, one accepts a drink with two hands, and in Italy, locking eyes is absolutely essential. But how exactly does the word “toast,” as in dry bread, figure into all of this? Well, it turns out dunking literal pieces of toast into a drink during celebrations in someone’s honor was commonplace centuries ago. Historians believe the practice came from the idea that the bread soaked up unwanted bitter or acidic sediments found in wine, thus making the drink more enjoyable. By the 18th century, the term “toast” somehow became more entwined with the person receiving the honor than the bread itself, which is also where the phrase “toast of the town” originates. 

Jack Daniels is the top-selling liquor brand in the world.

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While less than 5% of its sales come from the U.S., the top-selling liquor brand in the world is Jinro Soju. The national drink of South Korea, soju is a liquor typically made from rice or sweet potatoes. It’s popular in other parts of Asia as well, especially China and Japan.

Although dipping crusty bread into your beverage isn’t a common custom today, you don’t have to look hard to find remnants of the practice in literature. In William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, the hard-drinking Falstaff quips, “Go, fetch me a quart of sack [wine]; put a toast in ’t,” a reference to the bread-dipping ritual. Lodowick Lloyd’s The Pilgrimage of Princes, written in 1573, also contains the passage “Alphonsus … tooke a toaste out of his cuppe, and cast it to the Dogge,” confirming that the alcohol-infused bread didn’t always go to waste after being dunked. Because general toasting in 16th- and 17th-century Europe was often an excuse to drink heavily, many temperance movements, including one in Puritan Massachusetts, banned the practice in the name of health. Of course, these bans didn’t stick, and today toasts — sans actual bread — are central to some of the biggest celebrations in our lives.

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Considering most fruits have a spherical or ovate shape, the average banana’s long, curved appearance is something of an anomaly. This unique curvature is due to a scientific concept called negative geotropism, where the stem flexes upward as the plant grows, rather than being pulled straight down by the forces of gravity. While most fruits simply absorb sunlight and grow downward toward or into the earth, bananas begin to curve as they strive to find sufficient sunlight to fuel their growth. This has to do with the unique presence of photosensitive hormones called auxins, which influence how bananas react to light. 

Bananas contain trace amounts of radiation.

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Bananas contain naturally occurring radionuclides, particularly the potassium-40 isotope. But eating a single banana provides an infinitesimal dose of about 0.01 millirems of radiation. In other words, you’d need to eat 274 bananas every day for seven years to develop radiation poisoning.

Some bananas grow in lush rainforests with dense canopies, which can obscure the fruit from getting enough light. In these cases, bananas will grow toward the sky to break through the light-blocking canopy. But negative geotropism still occurs even in other environments where there’s plenty of direct sunlight. The auxins are distributed unevenly along the side of the banana facing the sun, triggering accelerated growth on that side and causing the fruit to curve away from the earth’s gravitational pull. 

In the very early stages of development, bananas actually grow at a straight downward angle, only developing their signature shape later on. As the fruit matures, it will begin to flex upward in search of additional sustenance. But even as this happens, gravitational forces will continue to pull the banana down toward the ground and away from the sun. This combination is what ultimately gives bananas their distinct curve.

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Candy corn may be the most maligned confectionary — it’s rare that the tricolored treat ever tops the list of beloved Halloween candies. Yet somehow it returns with flair each fall, an unyielding symbol of the season. While the waxy, triangular kernels have essentially remained the same since their creation in the 1880s, one thing has changed about candy corn: its name. In its earliest years, candy corn was called “Chicken Feed,” a catchy name appealing to rural Americans during a time when nearly half the country’s population worked on farms.

Most corn grown in the U.S. isn’t meant to be eaten as a vegetable.

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Farmers in the U.S. plant around 90 million acres of corn each year, though most isn’t for human consumption. Just 1% of corn grown in the country is meant for table fare, with the remaining 99% used for livestock feed, ethanol production, plastics, and more.

Not much is known about candy corn’s origin, though credit for its creation often goes to the Wunderle Candy Company, a Philadelphia venture that first produced the candy during the 1880s. However, another manufacturer — the Goelitz Confectionary Company, which would grow into the modern Jelly Belly Candy Company — further popularized the treat around 1898, designing packaging featuring a rooster and the tagline “Something worth crowing for.” By then, the treat was called “candy corn.” At a time when most real corn was planted for animal feed, candy corn was a novelty play on the idea that corn could actually be enjoyable for humans.

Making the miniature kernels was a time- and labor-intensive process done entirely by hand. Workers called “runners” walked backward along a conveyor belt packed with cornstarch molds, lugging buckets filled with a hot, sugary slurry that slowly dripped out through a hole. Each pass contributed one of the candy’s iconic yellow, orange, and white layers, which cooled into shape. Today, the process is nearly entirely mechanized and much faster, allowing candy corn factories to produce about 9 billion of the kernels each fall, just in time for seasonal snacking.

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