Food Facts for Kids
Tasty facts about the food we eat
Chocolate is designed to melt just below human body temperature — about 34°C — which is why it melts so perfectly in your mouth. This is due to cocoa butter, the fat naturally found in cacao beans.
Ancient Romans were obsessed with a fermented fish sauce called garum. They put it on almost everything — from vegetables to desserts — the same way people today use ketchup or salt.
Broccoli, kale, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and kohlrabi all come from the exact same wild plant species — wild mustard. Farmers selectively bred different parts of the plant over thousands of years to create them all.
Icewine is made from grapes that freeze on the vine before being picked. The freezing concentrates the sugars, producing a tiny amount of incredibly sweet, rich wine from each bunch.
The blue-green veins in blue cheese are a type of mould called Penicillium roqueforti. It's closely related to the mould that produces penicillin — but eating blue cheese will not treat infections!
Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and even apples and pears are all members of the rose family, Rosaceae. If you look closely, the blossoms of these plants look very similar to wild roses.
Cotton candy was co-invented in 1897 by a dentist named William Morrison. He partnered with a candy maker to create the sugary floss and introduced it at the 1904 World's Fair, selling it as 'Fairy Floss.'
Avocados were once commonly called 'alligator pears' in the United States because of their bumpy, dark green skin and pear-like shape. The name was changed in the 1900s to help make them more appealing to buyers.
La Tomatina is an annual festival in Buñol, Spain, where thousands of people throw tomatoes at each other for exactly one hour. Around 150,000 tomatoes are used, and the streets run red by the end.
Many people believe celery is a 'negative calorie' food because chewing burns more calories than it contains — but this is a myth. Celery does have very few calories (about 6 per stick), but digesting it uses far less energy than it provides.