Some personalities are born, while others are cooked up. The latter was the case with Betty Crocker. In October 1921, the Washburn-Crosby Co. (which would later evolve into General Mills) advertised a contest giveaway in the back of The Saturday Evening Post. In order to get a pincushion shaped like the company’s principal product — Gold Medal Flour — 30,000 readers completed a cut-out puzzle of townspeople rushing past a Gold Medal sign. Lots of the finished puzzles were bundled with letters containing baking queries from women.

At the time, the Gold Medal advertising department had an all-male staff, while the home services personnel (initially charged with developing recipes and giving demonstrations) were entirely female. For a while, the advertising team responded to the letters, seeking insight from the home services staff. But advertising manager Samuel Gale thought the women writing in would rather hear from another woman, so he had his reports invent a chief of correspondence named Betty Crocker. The advertisers thought “Betty” sounded wholesome and friendly; “Crocker,” meanwhile, was a nod to the company’s recently retired director, William G. Crocker. 

Betty Crocker was once affiliated with a lifestyle magazine called “Zest.”

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fib

From 1972 to 1975, General Mills partnered with Forum Communications on “Sphere,” a monthly periodical featuring food, fashion, and crafts. The magazine eventually parted ways with Betty Crocker when it proved too hard to sell ads to other companies.

Beginning in 1924, a new Washburn-Crosby home economist named Marjorie Child Husted voiced (and wrote) the Betty Crocker character on daytime radio’s first cooking show, “Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air.” Although the show was based in Minneapolis, national distribution soon followed — as did hundreds of marriage proposals. Among the longest-running radio broadcasts in U.S. history, “Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air” lasted for 24 years, even overlapping with “Our Nation’s Rations,” a 1945 program Betty Crocker (Husted) hosted at the request of the U.S. Office of War Information (the show was devoted to helping home cooks make the most of rationed foods).

Betty Crocker then made her way to television with The Betty Crocker Show (1950–1952) and Betty Crocker Star Matinee (1951–1952). Actress Adelaide Hawley Cumming assumed the namesake role in both projects, and afterward provided in-character baking demonstrations in walk-on commercials during The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show for several years. While Betty Crocker was taking on the entertainment world, General Mills commissioned a line of Betty Crocker products, starting with a dried soup mix in 1942. Today, Betty Crocker groceries are sold on every continent except Antarctica. And if you call the General Mills headquarters in Minnesota, there’s always a “Betty Crocker” standing by, ready to answer your culinary questions. 

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Berry classification is a confusing business. People began referring to some fruits as “berries” thousands of years before scientists established their own definitions, some of which are still debated. Today, little effort is made to teach the public about what botanically constitutes a berry, so here’s a bit of help. It’s generally accepted that all berries meet three standards. First, they have a trio of distinct fleshy layers (the outer exocarp, middle mesocarp, and innermost endocarp); second, their endocarps house multiple seeds; third, berries are simple fruits, meaning they develop from flowers with a single ovary.  

The Beatles invented the namesake location for their song "Strawberry Fields Forever."

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fib

Located in Liverpool, England, Strawberry Field is a Salvation Army-owned property that once housed an orphanage. A young neighbor, John Lennon, used to climb over the courtyard's red gates to play with the resident children. In 2019, Strawberry Field opened to the public.

Blueberries and cranberries are true berries, as their names imply. Other berries may surprise you: Avocados, eggplants, grapes, guava, kiwis, papayas, peppers, pomegranates, and tomatoes are all, botanically speaking, berries. Bananas are berries, too, since they meet all three requirements. The exocarp of a banana is its peel, while the mesocarp is the creamy middle surrounding the seedy, also-edible endocarp. Now let’s parse what can constitute a non-berry (definitions sometimes differ). Apricots, cherries, dates, nectarines, peaches, and plums are drupes — simple fruits that have a hard endocarp comprising one seed (or, as we laypersons call it, a pit). Apples, pears, and quince are pomes, simple fruits that receive their own category owing to their core of small seeds and tough skin. With seeds growing on the outside, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries are, confusingly given their names, neither berries nor simple fruits. Instead, they are called aggregate fruits, because they grow from multiple ovaries of the same flower. No matter what you call them, fruits are still delicious enough to be nicknamed “nature's candy.”

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Today carrots are practically synonymous with the color orange, but their auburn hue is a relatively recent development. When the carrot was first cultivated 5,000 years ago in Central Asia, it was often a bright purple. Soon, two different groups emerged: Asiatic carrots and Western carrots. Eventually, yellow carrots in this Western group (which may have developed as mutants of the purple variety) developed into their recognizable orange color around the 16th century, helped along by the master agricultural traders of the time — the Dutch. 

Eating too many carrots can turn your skin orange.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

Carrots contain a red-orange pigment called beta-carotene. Carotenemia occurs when eating too many beta-carotene-rich foods turns human skin a yellowish orange. If you were to eat 10 carrots a day for weeks, you could develop it — but doctors don’t recommend trying it.

A common myth says the Dutch grew these carrots to honor William of Orange, the founding father of the Dutch Republic, but there’s no evidence of this. What’s more likely is that the Dutch took to the vegetable because it thrived in the country’s mild, wet climate. (Although the orange color may have first appeared naturally, Dutch farmers made it the predominant hue by selectively growing orange roots — scholars say these carrots likely performed more reliably, tasted better, and were less likely to stain than the purple versions.) The modern orange carrot evolved from this period of Dutch cultivation, and soon spread throughout Europe before making its way to the New World. Today, there are more than 40 varieties of carrots of various shapes, sizes, and colors — including several hues of purple. 

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email