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.”

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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. 

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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."

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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.”

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