Spaghetti-Tree Hoax

My uncle pulled this one on me when I was a kid. There was a willow tree out in the yard and he'd have me go to the "spaghetti tree" and "harvest some spaghetti" for dinner, which I went and did... and lo and behold, we had spaghetti for dinner. It's pretty hard to argue with that kind of delicious cause and effect when you're a little kid!

I had the privilege of seeing this documentary as a kid, when it first aired in the US on the Jack Paar show around 1960.<p>Of course, growing up in an Italian family in Oregon, I knew perfectly well what spaghetti was made of, which made the documentary even more hilarious.<p>When we visited my grandmother near Portland, there would always be two big platters of spaghetti, one with the usual red sauce, and one with pesto!<p>We called that &quot;spaghetti with green stuff&quot; and always dug into it first. My aunt made her pesto with a mortar and pestle the old fashioned way.<p>One of my projects for this year is to get a marble mortar and olivewood pestle, and make pesto like that. Here&#x27;s the recipe I&#x27;m starting with:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seriouseats.com&#x2F;best-pesto-recipe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seriouseats.com&#x2F;best-pesto-recipe</a>

&gt; Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy.<p>Spaghetti as an exotic delicacy, rare enough that people could believe this story. The past truly is a far off and alien land.

I heard a variation of this once, but I never knew where it originated. An older fellow in a rural part of Spain made the obligatory pass at my girlfriend while we were standing for drinks and tapas at the village bar. He told her he was a farmer and he&#x27;d grown up growing spaghetti. Big, waving fields of spaghetti that reached over your head; they would cut bushels of it with a scythe. A few minutes later, tears welled up in his eyes and he burst into song. I love Andalucía.

Amazing how modern genetic engineering has let us take the simple spaghetti tree and create other trees such as: rotini, penne, bucatini, ravioli, lasagna noodle, small shell, bow tie, macaroni ;)

BBC reporting on the spaghetti harvest.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU</a><p>It’s a family affair in Switzerland, unlike “large spaghetti plantations” in Italy.

See also the day gravity was reduced producing a floating feeling on earth. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gravitational_effect#:~:text=The%20Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian%20gravitational%20effect,2%20on%201%20April%201976" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gra...</a>.

The disconnect is fascinating, but it truly was a different era -- though the Brits had a long &amp; glorious history of taking a while to get familiar with new foods (insert the story, which may be apocryphal, regarding the arrival of potatoes - lacking an instruction manual, people were eating the leafy bit, feeling very sick indeed, and then swearing off the awful plant).<p>Twenty years after the Spaghetti Tree broadcast, a vox pop of some gorgeous Brits painfully misunderstanding how, well, <i>everything</i> works, is my favourite &#x27;I can&#x27;t believe people thought that...&#x27; historical video.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BBCArchive&#x2F;status&#x2F;1092120538259038209" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BBCArchive&#x2F;status&#x2F;1092120538259038209</a><p>I wonder if there&#x27;s any contemporary examples of otherwise seemingly modern societies resisting something like metrication due to a basic comprehension failure.

&gt; At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water<p>It seems absolutely wild that as recently as 1957, something as mundane as spaghetti was &quot;relatively unknown in the UK&quot;. (Unless we are being meta-pranked...)

&quot;Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his classmates for being so stupid that if they were told that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it.&quot;<p>Turns out, his teachers might have been on to something.

I don&#x27;t remember which channel did it in the UK but there was a deadly serious report about a place that was suspected of breeding dinosaurs including attempting to get into the site and interviewing a local butcher about the huge orders of meat being made by the scientists.<p>Ah, found it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reprobatepress.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;jurassic-mansion-the-bbcs-maddest-april-fool-spoof&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reprobatepress.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;01&#x2F;jurassic-mansion-the-b...</a>

Y’all might be interested in California‘a Velcro production:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;misc.rural.narkive.com&#x2F;cEsySUGR&#x2F;california-s-velcro-crop-under-challenge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;misc.rural.narkive.com&#x2F;cEsySUGR&#x2F;california-s-velcro-...</a>

Actual vid at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tVo_wkxH9dU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tVo_wkxH9dU</a>. Come for the legendary and perfectly executed hoax. Stay for the plummy accent. Then watch for bad news on the North Carolina marshmallow harvest, probably inspired by it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;yflTu150QZw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;yflTu150QZw</a>

There used to be a man at a farmers&#x27; market in Southern California that played this trick. He decorated a small tree with draped spaghetti and set it on the table. People would ask and he&#x27;d explain that it was a spaghetti tree. Every week there&#x27;d be a new gullible person that would take the bait. He saw it as community service to get people to think more critically about where their food came from.

The idea by Douglas Adams in Hitchikers guide to the galaxy that in an infinitely large universe most things are grown might well have been inspired by this.<p>The description of the life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruits remains a masterpiece.

Something to recall about the UK of the time: it was so parochial that James Bond was having his exotic international adventures all the way on the other side of the Channel, in the Dept. of the Somme (80).

When I first read the title I was parsing it as some sort coding thing. Like a decision tree but with spaghetti code. I was not correct.

Spaghetti drying racks can sometimes be called spaghetti trees so it&#x27;s not like there isn&#x27;t a reasonable way a person reading about pasta production could get confused.

&quot;place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best&quot; is very funny

In 1991, the Bulgarian national television aired a prank that the nuclear plant in the country has exploded [0]. Initially, a lot of people were very scared and believed that it really happened.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1991&#x2F;12&#x2F;23&#x2F;world&#x2F;nuclear-prank-in-bulgaria.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1991&#x2F;12&#x2F;23&#x2F;world&#x2F;nuclear-prank-in-bu...</a>

The closest thing I can think of is spaghetti squash (do a web search and look at photos), which when you cut it in half, you create &quot;spaghetti&quot; by scraping out the insides with a fork. A viable pasta alternative if you&#x27;re trying to reduce carbs.

Just about <i>all</i> the <i>best</i> and <i>most amusing</i> April Fool&#x27;s pranks I&#x27;ve genuinely enjoyed over the years have nearly all been BBC &quot;hoaxes&quot;. A while back they did an absolutely convincing little documentary short about the discovery of a little gang of flying penguins that you can probably still find floating around YouTube and other video sites to this day. Truly hilarious stuff.

There are Italian restaurants in the UK called “spaghetti tree”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaghettitree.co.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaghettitree.co.uk&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk&#x2F;</a><p>Apparently in Oz too<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spaghettitree.com.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spaghettitree.com.au&#x2F;</a>

Reminds me of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapatopi.net&#x2F;treeoctopus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;zapatopi.net&#x2F;treeoctopus&#x2F;</a>

San Giorgio had a commercial with this same gag <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;q-ZtGoXkI58" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;q-ZtGoXkI58</a>

My parents watched this. It was a running joke in our family when I was young, about going out to the woods to get the spaghetti for lunch.

Tom Glazer’s On Top of Spaghetti parody debuted 10 years after this.<p>I wonder if he was influenced by this hoax.

&quot;the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled&quot;<p>Wew, that’s a false claim if I’ve ever seen one.

Does this help analogously explain how crypto has lured in so many people?<p>Edit: rom-antics: Duly noted, thanks for the advice.