More Fun Food Facts – 11/15/25

It’s been a while since I’ve shared fun facts with you, so I thought it was a good time to do so. 🙂 I love learning and sharing all kinds of things, and especially fun trivia. It lightens up our day, gives us some “food for thought” and brings a smile to us all.

Banana trees are really giant herbs and not trees. Banana plants are botanically classified as giant herbs, not trees, because they lack a woody stem. What looks like a trunk is actually a non-woody “pseudostem” made of tightly packed leaf sheaths. The banana fruit itself is technically a berry that grows from this large herb.

The word “salary” is derived from the Latin word “sal,” meaning salt, because Roman soldiers were once paid in salt. In ancient Rome, it was salt and not money that was used for commerce or trading. The soldiers who worked for the Roman empire got a handful of salt in return as their payment each day. This is where the common saying of “being worth one’s salt” comes from. Soldiers who did a good job were worth the salt they earned.

The first vending machine dispensed holy water, not snacks. In the first century A.D., a Greek engineer developed a device that would disperse holy water with the weight of a coin because too many people were stealing the holy water from the temples.

Scientists can turn peanut butter into diamonds due to its high carbon content. Dan Frost, a research scientist at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth, Germany. He placed some peanut butter between two diamonds (this is called the “stiletto heel effect”) and compressed the nutty stuff. Why the diamonds? They’re incredibly hard, thanks to their closely-linked carbon atoms, and can withstand the necessary amount of pressure for the experiment, which is about 1.3 million times that of our atmospheric pressure. The result is a diamond where a peanut used to be, albeit a paltry and not entirely pure one. “A lot of hydrogen was released that destroyed the experiment,” Frost told the BBC, “but only after it had been converted to diamond.”

The first recipe ever discovered was for a type of beer. Foodies have been enjoying beer since they first invented the language to talk about it. Ancient Egyptian brewers, who were known for their herbal wine, were making fortified beer around 2,575 B.C., but some historians speculate that beer might have been developed in different parts of the world by different peoples simultaneously. Still, while much of this dating is based on the educated compilation of known facts, concrete (or rather, clay) evidence was discovered from the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia. The oldest recorded recipe for beer-making is immortalized in a poem-slash-drinking song preserved in cuneiform on clay tablets from 1,800 B.C. called “Hymn to Ninkasi.”

So if you are playing trivial pursuit and these questions come up, now you will know you will have the answers. I am more than happy to help with trivial stuff like this. 🙂

Have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.