I don’t normally go in for click bait on Facebook, but occasionally something catches my fancy and I succumb. The headline was something like “27 shockingly disgusting things people used to eat.”
Of course, none of them were truly shocking. Some were pretty disgusting, however, and some were simply not true, as is to be expected in this era of fake news.
The one that captured my imagination most was that before widespread refrigeration was available Russian and Finnish peasants would put frogs in their milk to keep it from spoiling.
That is pretty disgusting. Even if it somehow did extend the life of milk, all of a sudden you would have frog feces in your milk. Likely the animal would die and decompose and surely that would negate any benefit.
Now, even without actual benefit, humans believe and do a lot of nonsensical things in the name of superstition, but I was immediately suspicious. I did a cursory fact-check and found a couple of reputable science sites that had repeated the story, or at least the sensationalist headline, in relation to a modern day study of Russian scientists finding peptides on amphibian skin that had anti-bacterial properties.
It seemed the frog-milk thing, although still gross, had some plausibility. I even repeated it to a few people.
Before publishing something, however, I reverted to full skeptical mode and did an in-depth search. A Russian study of amphibian skin peptides does exist, but contrary to reports that an archaic folk practice led scientists to affirm its validity, it appears the scientific research inspired clever fake news purveyors to invent the frog-milk myth.
Fortunately my better critical thinking instincts prevented me from perpetuating the myth in these pages.
Another item from the list that did not quite live up to the veracity test was ambergris, which the headline touted as “whale vomit” that people used to gobble up as a delicacy.
Ambergris is a waxy substance experts believe builds up in about one per cent of sperm whales’ intestinal tracts as a protective response to indigestible components of their diet.
What it is not, is vomit. In his 2008 book Floating Gold (University of Chicago Press) Christopher Kemp explains:
“Food passes from one stomach to the next and is digested along the way. Steadily, after repeated dives and bouts of voracious feeding a mile beneath the surface, the stomachs slowly begin to fill with nondigested squid remains: great drifts of sharp, black, durable squid beaks, which coalesce to form a large dense glittering mass. Every couple of days, a sperm whale will vomit them into the ocean. This is normal. Importantly, the product, a floating slurry of indigestible material, is not ambergris. It is whale vomit. The two could not possibly be confused with one another. Despite newspaper headlines to the contrary, ambergris is not vomited or coughed up by sperm whales.”
A find of ambergris, however, can be lucrative—especially now that most countries have placed a moratorium on hunting whales— because it is still an ingredient in some very high-end perfumes.
Ambergris is used as a fixative to bind fragrances together and help the scent stay on the skin longer, but most manufacturers now use synthetic fixatives.
Headlines have also, perhaps erroneously, but at least a little more accurately referred to ambergris as “edible feces,” because whales sometimes are able to pass it that way.
And, it has, in fact, been used historically as flavouring in food, but that is a far cry from the misleading idea that it was something people regularly ate, especially since the cost would have put it out of reach for all but the most affluent strata of society.
Finally, there was an item about “fake bananas.” Apparently this was actually a thing... kind of. Personally, I don’t even like real bananas, so the idea of faking them is not something I would be inclined to do.
Before World War II, bananas were very popular in the UK, but during the war they were notoriously hard to come by. When I read that someone had come up with a mock banana recipe to sate the British appetite for the fruit during the war, I had visions of warped cylindrical molds, but the reality was a little different.
What they did was boil and mash turnips, add sugar and banana essence and spread it on bread. Yuck.
