Hoax Museum Blog: Food

Restaurant That Serves TV Dinners —
Status: Real
Daniel Folk writes in with this question: I was watching TV not too long ago and saw a little advertisement about a restaurant in New York that only has TV dinners (Swanson, Lean Cuisine, etc...) on their menu. Supposedly it is a real upscale restaurant and these TV dinners are outrageously priced ($40 - $50). I tried to do a quick Google search for this restaurant but with no success. Have you heard about this restaurant and do you know the name of it?

I've never heard of such a thing (nor has my wife, who's a devoted viewer of the Food TV channel), and I couldn't find anything in a Google search either. Honestly, it sounds like an urban legend. After all, why would someone want to go to a restaurant and pay $40 for a frozen TV dinner? But on the other hand, there are restaurants out there with weird gimmicks (such as that restaurant where meals are served in total darkness), so I wouldn't say that it's definitely not real. Anyone heard of such a place?

Update: Maegan found a restaurant called Ike, located on Second Avenue in the East Village, that serves Swanson's TV dinners, at twice the price you'd pay for them in the store ($6, though not $40-$50). So I've changed the status on this to 'Real'. (It should also be noted that the restaurant doesn't only serve TV dinners.)
Posted: Thu Jan 12, 2006.   Comments (14)

It’s Homemade! —
Status: Odd news report
I find this a bit hard to believe. According to this news report "Almost a third of young Britons have passed off a ready-made meal as their own creation in order to impress someone, according to a survey by the Department of Health on Monday." Sure, it's common to joke that something is homemade when it's not, but usually it's easy to tell the difference between ready-made and homemade. The same survey also found that "one in 10 had never cooked a proper meal for themselves because they 'don't know how'." I find that easier to believe.
Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006.   Comments (15)

Condom in a Hazelnut —
Status: Seems to be a prank
image Brian Geist was sitting at home on New Year's Eve enjoying some hazelnuts. But there was a strange surprise in one of them: a condom. As his wife reported to the Glenwood Springs Post Independent (may require registration):

"My husband cracked open a hazelnut and a condom popped out. He couldn't believe it. He just sort of sat there and stared at it and he said, 'You wouldn't believe what I found in this nut," Geist said Tuesday. She assumed he might have been talking about a bug. But it turned out to be a bright-yellow condom, still rolled up, she said.

The nuts were bought at a local Wal-Mart Supercenter. The Wal-Mart spokesperson had no clue what to make of the incident. Meanwhile, the police chief noted that he was aware of condoms being sold inside plastic walnuts, though the nut in this case wasn't plastic. The Wal-Mart spokesperson, and a pr representative for the nut company both "expressed surprise at a condom being able to fit into the relatively small shell of a hazelnut. Geist agreed it was a tight fit. She said her husband speculates that the shell had been cut in half and glued back together. Meisner [the police chief], who didn't see signs of sawing or gluing, said he doesn't doubt the Geists' story. Geist said it's not something she could have concocted if she tried. 'It's so bizarre, I'm not clever enough to make up something that crazy,' she said."

I don't suppose there's any way of getting a condom inside a hazelnut without breaking the nut open first. So if it was a prank, someone went to quite a bit of trouble to pull it off. And the Geists aren't threatening to sue, so it's hard to see what motive they would have for making up the story. (Unless they just wanted to get their name in the paper.) Very weird. Maybe a mad scientist has genetically engineered condom-growing nuts.
Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006.   Comments (17)

iPod or Meat —
Status: An unusual way of concealing a crime
image A Hawaiian news station has reported the touching tale of a boy who received a video iPod for Christmas. At least, he received the video iPod box. When he opened the box he found, to his disappointment, only a piece of meat inside of it. His mother, who bought the gift for him at Wal-Mart, where she works, had no idea how the meat could have gotten inside the box, and she's asking the store to give her an iPod instead of the meat. There are two possibilities here. Either the mother is pulling some kind of scam, or a prankster thief got to the iPod while it was in the store and replaced it with a piece of meat. Gizmodo reports hearing from an insider source that claims the latter to be the case (an unknown prankster thief was at work). According to this anonymous source, Wal-Mart investigators have found two other units with meat in them, and an ex-employee is suspected of the tampering. But since Gizmodo's source is unnamed, it's not fully credible.
Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2005.   Comments (14)


Woman Swallows Cell Phone —
Status: Partially true
Yahoo News! has posted this odd story about a woman who, in a fit of rage, swallowed an entire cellphone:

A lovers' dispute over a cell phone ended suddenly when the woman swallowed the phone whole, police said. Police said they received a call at 4:52 a.m. Friday from a Blue Springs man who said his girlfriend was having trouble breathing. When they arrived at the house they found the 24-year-old woman had a cell phone lodged in her throat. "He wanted the phone and she wouldn't give it to him, so she attempted to swallow it," Detective Sgt. Steve Decker of the Blue Springs Police Department. "She just put the entire phone in her mouth so he couldn't get it."

I'm not the only one to whom this sounds like an urban legend being reported as news. Real Tech News wonders "what kind of phone it was since I can think of plenty that won’t fit into your mouth that easily." Seriously, it would have to be an incredibly small phone to fit down someone's throat, though I suppose there are people with the ability to swallow large, rigid objects. In the past they might have enjoyed careers as circus performers. This case reminds me of the story I posted about over a year ago of a dog who swallowed a cell phone.
Update: Looks like the woman may have involuntarily swallowed the phone. In other words, it's a case of assault. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that someone would voluntarily swallow.
Posted: Mon Dec 26, 2005.   Comments (15)

Holy Bottled Water —
Status: Real water, but it's not holy
image This is an odd marketing gimmick. This company is selling Holy Bottled Water. Of course, the label could easily be mistakenly read as Holy Water Bottled. But it's not holy water (in the sense of water that's been blessed by a priest). It's just regular old bottled water. The closest they come to explaining why their water is holy is this cryptic claim:

From the River of Living Water flows 'Holy Bottled Water Inc.' Produced by man under the inspiration of God.

They also make the strange claim that "WATER IS TWICE AS VALUABLE AS OIL" (as if that should make you want to buy their water), but wouldn't that depend on the type of oil? (via J-Walk)
Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2005.   Comments (4)

Powdered Alcohol —
Status: Apparently it's real
image I've posted before about chewy vodka bars, which are real not real (I included them as a question on my April Fool's Day test), although chewable rice wine is real. But now a German company is going a step further by making powdered alcohol, which it's marketing to teenagers. From an article in Deutsche Welle:

The powder inside contains alcohol, and a lot of it -- about 4.8 percent by volume. That is the equivalent of one to one-and-a-half glasses of liquor. The product is called subyou, manufactured by a company in North Rhine-Westphalia, and is marketed squarely at teenagers with slogans like "taste for not much dough" and "gets a good buzz going." Add the powder to cold water, and consumers have an alcoholic drink containing either vodka or rum.

I find it pretty bizarre that it's possible to convert alcohol into a powdered form, but apparently this product is real. Word of this began to spread on the internet a couple of months ago (though I only become aware of it this week), and a posting on Gizmodo.com (which sounds believable to me, as a non-scientist) comfirms that it is possible, in theory, to create powdered alcohol. The trick seems to be to mix it with sugar first:

subyou could be say 95% filler (sugar?) which has been mixed with a small amount of ethanol (your link suggests 4.8% ethanol by volume). Given that this amount of alcohol, even if one were to eat the powder straight, is only 9.6 proof “alcohol”, I’m skeptical that it’s as powerful as the website would like us to believe.

But even if this stuff is real, I can't imagine powdered rum tastes anything like the real thing.
Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005.   Comments (22)

Glowing Pork Chops —
Status: Real
A few Australian consumers have apparently opened their refrigerator and discovered that their pork chops are glowing. This has caused concerns about radioactive contamination. To allay these fears, the New South Wales food authority issued a statement assuring everyone that the glowing is caused by a harmless bacteria called Pseudomonas fluorescens:

"The Food Authority understands that many people would be alarmed to discover their food glowing in the fridge, but we can assure NSW consumers that the bacteria responsible is totally harmless if consumed," Mr Davey said.
"Pseudomonas fluorescens is normally present on meat and seafood at low levels and proper cooking kills it.
"And while most of us would understandably be shocked to see our food glowing, it is important to remember that the micro-organism responsible for the glow is not known to cause food poisoning."


This is the first I've ever heard of glowing meat, but the food authority's explanation sounds logical. I don't think radiated food would glow unless it was so radioactive as to be instantly lethal.
Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2005.   Comments (26)

Salmon-Flavored Soda —
Status: Real
image Just in time for Thanksgiving, Jones Soda is debuting salmon-flavored soda. It's a publicity stunt, but it's real. They boast that "When you smell it, it's got that smoked salmon aroma." Yum. Just what I want my soda to smell like. They've also got other thanksgiving-themed sodas that come together in a holiday pack: Brussels Sprout with Prosciutto, Cranberry Sauce, Turkey & Gravy, Wild Herb Stuffing, Pumpkin Pie, Broccoli Casserole, Corn on the Cob, and Pecan Pie. You won't have to eat dinner at all. Just sample sodas all night. (Thanks to Big Gary for the link.)
Posted: Tue Nov 15, 2005.   Comments (14)

Hydra High Energy H2O —
Status: Dubious Product Claims
image The makers of Hydra High Energy H2O claim that most people in the world are chronically dehydrated. In fact, they claim that even people who are drinking up to half their body weight in water every day, are still dehydrated. They offer their product as the cure for this problem. They state that it "dramatically increases intra-cellular hydration – by an average of more than 22%"

So what makes Hydra H2O more hydrating than normal water? Well, according to the Hydra H2O website, normal water is comprised of large "H2O cluster aggregates" that have difficulty passing through the walls of cells. Hydra H2O, on the other hand, has been transformed via a proprietary process to become "micro-clustered." This micro-clustered water can pass more easily through cell walls, and thus hydrates the body more effectively. In fact, Hydra H2O is so potent that all you need do is mix two capfuls of it with one gallon of normal water "to make one gallon of super-hydrating Hydra Hi-Energy H20."

So what exactly is the secret proprietary process that transforms normal water into micro-clustered Hydra H2O? As far as I can tell, the secret is that they shake the water. However, they're not about to put it this plainly. Instead, they say that they use a "proprietary process of motion." They also note some mumbo jumbo about the use of "electromagnetic influences" and "pulsating vortexes."

In other words, my guess is that, except for its price tag, Hydra H2O is exactly the same as normal (shaken) water.
Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2005.   Comments (14)

Peanut Butter Slices —
Status: Real
image This really shouldn't surprise me, but for some reason it does. A company has developed peanut butter slices that come in packs (similar to packs of sliced cheese). I'm not sure how they made the peanut butter rigid enough, and non-sticky enough, that it could be formed into a plastic-wrapped slice. But somehow they did. I'd be worried that whatever they did to it would affect the taste. No word on whether anyone has developed sliced jam. [Update: they have; see the comments below.] I think if you're going to eat sliced peanut butter, you naturally should have it on Sara Lee's crustless bread. It would be the perfect meal for anyone too lazy to do anything on their own. (Thanks to Kathy for giving me a heads up about this product)
Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2005.   Comments (29)

Plastic Pumpkin Carving —
Status: Real (though the pumpkins are fake)
image The newest thing for Halloween is fake pumpkins. Made out of polyurethane foam, they can be carved just like the real thing. But don't try to eat the seeds. A guy quoted about this issue in the Loudoun Times-Mirror notes that: "There's something wrong with society if people start carving plastic pumpkins." I don't think I have anything to add to that statement. The article also notes that once you've carved your foam pumpkin, it wouldn't be wise to light it up with a candle. You need to use a flashlight.
Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2005.   Comments (25)

Marzipan Babies —
Status: Not Marzipan
I'm a big fan of Marzipan. In fact, I've made several pilgrimages to Lübeck, home of Niederegger, makers of the best marzipan in the world (in my opinion). So I was intrigued by these pictures of tiny babies supposedly made out of marzipan. I don't see why one couldn't make lifelike dolls out of marzipan, but that's not the case with these dolls. They're actually made by the artist Camille Allen out of polymer clay or resin, and they're not edible. Still, in the past it was apparently possible to buy jelly babies, as well as chocolate babies. So why not marzipan babies? (via Strong Chemistry)

image image image

Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005.   Comments (103)

Killing Fields Cafe —
Status: Weird, but true
If you've ever wondered what it would be like to subsist on a starvation diet, such as the kind millions of people endured during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, now you have your chance. A restaurant has recently opened in Phnom Penh called the "Khmer Rouge Experience Cafe." It serves up the kind of watery gruel people actually ate in the killing fields, with a "'theme menu' of salted rice-water, followed by corn mixed with water and leaves, and dove eggs and tea." To round out the ambiance, "the waitresses are barefoot and clad in the black pajamas and red-white scarves of the guerrillas. Speakers blare out tunes celebrating the 1975 toppling of U.S.-backed president General Lon Nol and the walls are adorned with the baskets, hoes and spades Pol Pot hoped would power his jungle-clad south-east Asian homeland to communist prosperity." This place could give Rainforest Cafe a run for its money.

Actually, the Khmer Rouge Cafe seems like yet another example of Reality Tourism, in which the idea is to offer tourists grim reality, instead of fun and comfort. Other examples include an amusement park planned for outside Berlin where people will experience life under communism, and a camp in Croatia where tourists get to find out what life in a communist-era hard-labor camp would have been like.
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005.   Comments (3)

Searing Meat Seals in Its Juices (and other food myths) —
Status: Urban Legend
I know a lot of people who swear by the notion that you have to sear meat "to seal in its juices." But I've always thought the idea was a bit far-fetched (though I agree that meat is best cooked hot and fast), so it pleased me to read, in a review of Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food, that most food experts agree that it is indeed an urban legend that searing meat will seal in its juices. About.com's barbeque expert agrees:

By definition, searing is to cook something hot and fast to brown the surface and to seal in the juices. Yet many of the leading cooking experts agree that searing does not seal in juices. Frankly the idea that you can somehow melt the surface of the meat into a material that holds in all the juices seems a little strange to me. But whether you believe searing seals in juices or not, a great cut of meat needs hot, dry heat to caramelize or brown the surface to give it that great flavor.

The same review of Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food lists a number of other food myths. For instance:

MSG Causes Headaches (aka Chinese Restaurant Syndrome): "Jeffery Steingarten, food editor of the Vogue in New York, debunked this myth pretty comprehensively. Given the widespread use of MSG in China, he asked why weren’t there a billion Chinese people with headaches? He then went around relentlessly researching the theory in his characteristically thorough way, and came to the conclusion that MSG, taken in normal quantities, was perfectly safe." (I know many people who swear they get headaches after eating MSG, so I'm reluctant to accept this as an urban legend. But some quick research reveals that a controlled study at Harvard University also concluded that MSG in food doesn't cause headaches.)

Croissants were invented during the 1529 Siege of Vienna, when a baker who foiled a Turkish plan to breach the city's walls was rewarded by being given a royal licence to produce crescent-shaped pastries: "Davidson debunks this romantic legend and informs us that in fact, the first reference to croissants did not appear until 1891, more than two centuries after the siege of Vienna."

In the Middle Ages spices were used to mask the flavor of spoiled meat: "Davison cites Gillian Riley to rubbish the notion... Indeed, in pre-refrigeration days, we had assumed that the role of spices and heavy sauces was to conceal the fact that meat had spoiled. Riley makes the valid point that in those days, spices were far too expensive to be used for this purpose."

Chop Suey was invented by a Chinese restaurant in California which threw together odds and ends ('chop suey' in Chinese) as a meal for drunken miners: "according to Anderson, quoted by Davidson, chop suey is a local dish from Toisan, a rural district south of Canton. In Cantonese, its name is tsap seui, meaning 'miscellaneous scraps'."
Posted: Mon Sep 26, 2005.   Comments (36)

Mentos + Soda = Explosion —
Status: True
image Given the urban legend about kids eating pop rocks and soda, and then having their stomachs explode, I wouldn't have believed that mixing Mentos and soda could cause such a violent reaction. But after watching the video posted on WLTX's website, I do. (You need Windows Media Player to view it, and I had to click the "Trouble Viewing" button to make it work.) To summarize what the video shows, three Mentos are dropped into a bottle of soda, causing a geyser of soda to shoot up about three or four feet high out of the bottle. This really makes me wonder what would happen if you drank a can of soda and then downed a pack of Mentos. Personally I'm not planning to find out. I'm sure it wouldn't kill you, but I imagine it would fizz up into your throat and nose. WLTX provides this scientific explanation for the phenomenon:

Mentos contains a chemical known as ARABIC GUM (this is the ingredient that makes the mint "chewy"). This ingredient causes the surface tension of the water molecules to break even more easily, releasing more carbon dioxide gas at an astounding rate! .....The gas causes pressure to rapidly build inside the bottle which thrusts the soda upwards in a wonderful fountain-like BLAST!
Posted: Fri Sep 23, 2005.   Comments (186)

Cheese Can Cause Nightmares —
Status: Old wives' tale disproven by science
At last I can return to my nocturnal cheese-eating ways, now that I know eating the stuff won't cause me nightmares... Actually I had never heard any rumor associating cheese with nightmares, but apparently researchers at The Dairy Council had, because they designed an experiment to disprove the fallacy. With the help of 200 volunteers they determined "cheese may actually help you have a good night's sleep." But stay away from Stilton, which caused an uptick in odd and vivid dreams. Cheddar made people dream about Jordan and Johnny Depp (which sounds to me like nightmare material).
Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005.   Comments (30)

Gross Candy — The Strange New Products blog has word of two new gross faux foods. First there's Harry Potter's Cockroach Clusters from Cap Candy. "The juicy gummy underbelly is covered with a crunchy candy shell, just like real cockroach wings." Yum. I definitely have to try some of those. Then there's ABC Gum. The ABC stands for "Already Been Chewed." "ABC Bubble Gum is a brand new novelty bubble gum that has been formed to look exactly like a piece of gum that's ALREADY BEEN CHEWED!!" I would love to offer that to unsuspecting guests.
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Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005.   Comments (11)

Kangaroo Testicle Hoax — The organizers of the world testicle-cooking championship in Serbia were all prepared for the arrival of Nigel Bevan, Australia's leading kangaroo testicle cook. They even had a supply of kangaroo testicles on hand, ready for him to cook up into a delicious dish. But Bevan never showed up. It's hard to tell from the text of the article, but it seems to imply that Nigel Bevan, master kangaroo testicle chef, is real enough, but that some prankster was pretending to be him. However, a google search turns up no references to a testicle cook named Nigel Bevan (except for the references made in this article itself).
Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2005.   Comments (12)

Hypnosis Diet — CNN reports that the latest weight-loss fad to sweep the country is the Hypnosis Diet. Therapists place hypnotic suggestions in their patients' minds, telling them to "picture themselves in a relaxing place whenever they feel the impulse to overeat." (Hopefully their relaxing place isn't a donut store.) I was going to chalk up whatever effect this therapy might have to the power of suggestion, but I guess that's the whole point.

Hey, if it helps some people, that's great. But I'd assume it would work best on highly suggestible people. I wonder if the hypnosis therapists have ever considered taking a cue from Elizabeth Loftus and tried hypnotically implanting fake memories to help their patients lose weight.
Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2005.   Comments (4)

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