Spaghetti-Tree Hoax | Hacker News Reader

Spaghetti-Tree Hoax

en.wikipedia.org

174 pointsstjo93 comments

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.

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.

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!

We called that "spaghetti with green stuff" and always dug into it first. My aunt made her pesto with a mortar and pestle the old fashioned way.

One of my projects for this year is to get a marble mortar and olivewood pestle, and make pesto like that. Here's the recipe I'm starting with:

https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe

PSA: pesto is incredibly simple to make at home, and way way way better than store-bought pesto. At minima you need olive oil, garlic, some green leafy things (basil, spinach, parsley... I've done some with only parsly stems), some sort of hard cheese, salt and some sort of mixer. Adding nuts, using good EVOO, multiple cheeses and a pestle&mortar gives even better results, but even without that it'll be delicious!

Just to play unfold-that-acronym, here "EVOO" is simply extra virgin olive oil, i.e. the good stuff. Pretty obvious if you're into cookery I guess, but it did pause me for a few seconds anyway. :)

Home pesto maker here. It's not for the faint of heart. Each year I grow four basil plants - it takes close to an hour to completely de-leaf and de-stem just one plant. I end up with a stock pot full of leaves. Those are then ground with pine nuts (close to $7 for a small jar - I need 4-5 jars), close to a gallon of olive oil (the brand I use comes in gallons, so about $30), and lots of cheese (I honestly don't remember how much I spend on cheese). The result is great, but it's definitely a day's work plus close to $100.

Yeah but how much do you end up with? A gallon of OO makes it sound like a lot…

To balance your comment: I just use whatever basil I happen to have bought from the shop, whatever nuts or seeds I have lying aroung (almond, pumpkin seeds...), I always have extra-virgin olive oil and parmesan. It takes me maybe 5min start-to-finish to make enough pesto for a couple people, or I can buy more basil to make a bigger batch to freeze.

It's not super-cheap (I use good olive oil), but I'd definitely call that "for the faint of heart": pesto is one of the easiest sauces you can make for pasta and is very forgiving (you can vary ingredients, texture, it's ). You don't need to make pesto by the kilogram :)

> way way way better than store-bought pesto

Try LeGrand pesto. It can be a bit difficult to find, but Whole Foods usually has it. Seriously, it's head and shoulders above any other pesto I've had (store bought, restaurant or homemade). We've been using it for like 15 years now.

All store bought things with intensive tastes suffer from the same phenomena, the flavours leak into one another, creating a uniform flavour distribution, which lacks the variety a fresh mixed set of ingredients still posses.

> 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.

Spaghetti as an exotic delicacy, rare enough that people could believe this story. The past truly is a far off and alien land.

Spaghetti from a can, no less.

Oh, the inhumanity

I found some 1950's womens' magazines in the cellar of my rented house a few years ago, one recounted the story by a woman who's husband returned from the Indian subcontinent with a taste for "curry and rice", so she prepared the same by adding curry powder to rice pudding ...

It's not as if Hawaiians of the same decade believed that Spam grew on bushes, did they?

Looks like war time rationing is the reason it took a while to be established in the UK and it sounds like by the end of the 1950s pasta restaurants were a thing in Britain or at least London.

https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,371547,00.html

> from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce

It really seems that English cuisine improved a lot since then.

Spaghetti in tins (and I won't even dare to think about the quality of the "tomato sauce") is a crime against nature.

It's so ubiquitous now, that it's hard to believe it didn't achieve proliferation hundreds of years ago. I suppose tacos are heading in that direction, too.

I wonder, though, if the 1950s Brits were mostly thrown off by the specific Italian word, "spaghetti", or if the entire concept of pasta/noodles would have been lost on them.

> Over the course of a century, the pasta and cheese casserole traveled from Italy to France. By the 14th Century it is a French dish of parmesan and pasta that was brought to England. A cheese and pasta casserole known as “makerouns” was recorded in a the famous medieval French cookbook “The Forme of Cury”, which was written in the 14th century. It was made with fresh, hand-cut pasta which was sandwiched between a mixture of melted butter and cheese.

-- https://qnholifield.com/culinary-history/the-hidden-history-...

Its also very dull, i guess somebody falling out of a time-machine would be incredibbly overstimulated in our environment. Then again, this is quite the show of force, when it comes to adaption to circumstances..

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'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.

I don't think it originated with this broadcast, however, as the individual who did it was inspired by a comment from their own school teacher. It seems people have been making similar jokes about spaghetti for a very long time.

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 ;)

Lasagna usually comes in sheets and is extracted from the bark of the spaghetti tree.

My grandmother had a spaghetti loom to make lasagna sheets.

Honestly, none that would have been possible without the invention of the turbo encabulator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag).

BBC reporting on the spaghetti harvest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gra....

> Soon after 9:47 on that morning, the BBC began to receive hundreds of telephone calls from people reporting they had observed the decrease in gravity.[5] One woman who called in even stated that she and eleven friends had been sitting and had been "wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room".[7]

I have to wonder what her mind conjured up once it came out as a hoax, as she'd surely told everyone close to her by then.

The disconnect is fascinating, but it truly was a different era -- though the Brits had a long & 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).

Twenty years after the Spaghetti Tree broadcast, a vox pop of some gorgeous Brits painfully misunderstanding how, well, everything works, is my favourite 'I can't believe people thought that...' historical video.

https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1092120538259038209

I wonder if there's any contemporary examples of otherwise seemingly modern societies resisting something like metrication due to a basic comprehension failure.

That guy ~40 seconds in is such a stereotypical boomer.

"We ruled the world once didn't we?" is a depressing attitude and an attitude that has only got more entrenched as they've aged leading to brexit and the awful consequences.

> 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

It seems absolutely wild that as recently as 1957, something as mundane as spaghetti was "relatively unknown in the UK". (Unless we are being meta-pranked...)

There is often a meta-hoax which vastly overstates how many people believed a hoax in the first place. For example the myth about the War of the Worlds radio show causing mass panic.

The article mention "hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees". Of course it is unclear how many of these "hundreds" called to call bullshit, and how many called to get spaghetti-growing tips. Given Aprils Fools was a well known tradition at the time, it is possible some of the callers was in on the joke.

We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax.

"We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax. "

This is true, but I regulary read a satire magazin - and the readers letter are quite funny and scary, because I could not believe how many people do take BS seriously. Now of course, they could all be satire, too (but elaborate one, because from seemingly real FB accounts), but maybe keep in mind, how many people did (and still do) believe Covid was a hoax. And that there is an actual flat earth society.

> Unless we are being meta-pranked

We are not. I grew up in Denmark in the sixties. We really weren't lacking for anything, but spaghetti strictly came out of a tin together with some strange orange tomatoish sauce.

I graduated highschool in 1977. Everybody went to Copenhagen for a night on the town. That's were I saw the first pizza of my life.

What was late-night food in Denmark before the advent of pizza and schwarma wraps?

Sausages! Even small towns had a pølsevogn.

Nothing late night, of course. Everybody was soundly in bed by 22:30.

I thought the only thing you eat in Denmark was on top of a slice of rye bread

In the 1950s, olive oil could only be purchased in the UK from chemists (since it was and remains a treatment for excessive earwax).

Given how powerful association is it isn't surprising it took a long time for it to catch on. Pouring a treatment for excessive earwax on your food just sounds disgusting.

It was actually in culinary use in the UK in the 19th century, but seemed to fall out of favour in the 20th (at least until the revival credited to Elisabeth David). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29220046

Pizza was even more unknown and took of in the US only after WW2 when soldiers stationed in Italy came back:

https://www.historylink.org/file/20557

> By September 1949 The Seattle Times was touting the joint and its palpable history: "For a sentimental journey to an almost-vanished Seattle, and some fine Italian food, try ... Daverso's Palace Grill ... The huge old mahogany back bar, the tiled floors and walls, and the checkered tablecloths will make you nostalgic, and the king-size menu will make you hungry. A couple of specialties: Pizza, the hot pastry that looks like a phonograph record, covered with mushrooms, cheese and tomatoes ..." (Lund, "A La Carte").

> The fact that a writer for The Seattle Times in 1949 felt obligated to describe what a pizza looks like was simply because few in the area had ever seen or tried one. As Frank Daverso would later recall: "We had to give it away for the first four years. Nobody had ever heard of it. Customers liked our spaghetti and ravioli, so we'd give 'em a sample of pizza with each order. They seemed to like pizza but just wouldn't order it. Finally, we tried advertising. Sailors and other servicemen, who had eaten pizza in the East, began coming in and soon it caught on -- but it took four long years"

They must have repeated it, because I remember seeing it, but probably in 1977 - maybe Panorama made a 20 year rerun.

Anyway, despite the amused look on my parents' faces I think I was probaly fooled, but I was only 5.

"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."

Turns out, his teachers might have been on to something.

I don'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.

Ah, found it: https://reprobatepress.com/2022/04/01/jurassic-mansion-the-b...

Y’all might be interested in California‘a Velcro production:

https://misc.rural.narkive.com/cEsySUGR/california-s-velcro-...

This is a good reminder to mention the VELCRO® Brand educational video, Don't Say Velcro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY

This is the most wholesome thing I've ever seen a company make. I can't tell whether they're bluffing or double bluffing, but I appreciate a good self deprecating joke. The play with other brands also fits in very well.

It's one of my favorite videos. I watch it whenever I feel like I need to cheer up. Be sure to check out the two followup videos that Semaphor linked in a sibling comment.

In an odd coincidence, I had dinner last week with the brand protection attorney for Clorox!

From the VELCRO® Brand video:

  If you need something to clean up your socks,
  Do it with bleach, and not with [censored]

And here's an article with some other clever and compassionate "cease and desist" trademark notices:

https://www.cll.com/OnMyMindBlog/creativity-can-make-tradema...

Thank you, this was great. There’s also a feedback response video [0] (of course they are making fun of German, Klettverschluss is so easy to say!), and a behind-the-scene video [1] where they show you their two actual lawyers that somehow were roped into participating ;)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWMQLMiTPk

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP-fZdFfOGE

That was awesome.

But I don't get it.

How is being the default brand not good for them?

Do they really want everything to be called "hook and fastner"?

(I've heard that Heinz was prevented from using the name "Ketchup" in some country, as "ketchup" was considered generic for tomato paste, and Heinz didn't meet the legal definition - too much sugar or too few tomatoes.)

Because if a trademark gets genericised then the company can have trouble enforcing their trademark.

Like how in a lot of countries every brand of vacuum cleaner is a "hoover", or any brand of permanent marker is a "sharpie", etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Actual vid at https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU. 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: https://youtu.be/yflTu150QZw

He used the phrase "Bumper year" and I was curious where that came from:

> A bumper crop is a very large amount. Most often, the term bumper crop is used to describe a high yield of harvest in an agricultural endeavor, but it may be used figuratively to mean a large amount of something. The expression bumper crop came into common use around 1830, but the word bumper dates back farther. In the 1600s, a bumper was an extra large wine cup that when filled to the brim, held a great amount of wine. By the 1700s, the word bumper was used in conversation to mean a large amount of something. By 1830, this definition of the word bumper came to be used mostly in the expressions bumper crop and bumper year.

> Dickens wrote in 1839, “This charming actress will be greeted with a bumper,” meaning a crowded house at the theater.

There used to be a man at a farmers' 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'd explain that it was a spaghetti tree. Every week there'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.

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.

You fell for the spaghetti-tree hoax of your own making.

I was hoping it would be about the food but fearing it would be about code! Classic HN bait and switch. Happily I was wrong.

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

"place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best" 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.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/nuclear-prank-in-bu...

Jesus, that is really not funny. 45 years of communism can seriously fuck up your sense of humor.

In Czechia we have group called 'ztohoven' (can be roughly translated to both 'getoutofit' or '100shits') who replaced a webcam facing mountains with their own live stream of fake nuclear explosion.

I remember seeing that aired live on the national TV. Fun times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/arts/design/24abroad.html

While a lifetime of capitalist propaganda maintains an open and critical mind ?

What? A lifetime in a free country gives you 20-25 years to enjoy living as a communist before you have to make money. Don't believe my experience, it sounds like you're already living it yourself.

When you get to the other end, you'll be able to joke about both sides of the conversation.

[edit] I think it's a healthy thing to not want your mass media to come from one source, whether capitalist or communist, and especially not to be fucked with in terms of basic facts and cause mass panic as a result of capitalists or communists trying to prove a childish point. I'm no slave to either side's propaganda, I just recognize nasty people and nasty power plays disguised as politics when I see them.

Also, if you look at my posts for more than a passing moment, I think it's pretty unfair to say I don't maintain an open or critical mind toward every fucking thing. So snappy, thoughtless (and frankly uncritical) one liners like yours don't deserve the attention I'm giving it. You're welcome.

I was just making the opposite claim to prove a point.

I dislike communism as much as capitalism, but what I dislike the most is the brainwashed americans who blame everything on the communist boogieman.

> 20-25 years to enjoy living as a communist before you have to make money. Don't believe my experience, it sounds like you're already living it yourself.

haha, really now ?

>> brainwashed americans

I'm actually not this, but it is quite specific and telling that you have this American boogieman in your mind. I don't even know any Americans like this... most of them I think died by the early 2000s.

I do have a somewhat clear understanding of living under single-party rule and blanketed by state-controlled media in Vietnam, and can compare and contrast that to the liberal free market of information which you are free to label "capitalist propaganda" in the West. The difference of course is that it's not actually propaganda when it's chaotic and not organized by a state organ - in the capitalist case, it's just advertising. The difference is measured in menace and the threat of personal violence.

Why do you assume I was talking about you ? I do not resort to personal attacks. unlike others (oh wait I just did).

The second part of your reply is taxi level conversation, so I will leave it at that.

>> but what I dislike the most is the brainwashed americans

I assumed that was intended as a personal attack.

>> taxi level conversation

clearly a personal attack, given my bio.

None of your responses addressed my points - all of them were superficial, flaming, insulting and dismissive. I hoped to draw you into actual conversation, but there was nothing there.

It was a student prank and not people that had lived for 45 years or more, and national chauvinism was arguably a much stronger factor in the bulgarian sense of humour at the time.

So how did you come to your conclusion?

"War of the Worlds" aired on radio in America in 1938 and caused mass panic. Now, many years later, a place which had experienced free media and stuff like, oh, open reporting of the Chernobyl disaster for the intervening 4 decades would be more prepared to deal with absurdist jokes on national broadcast, but would have a broader immunity to bullshit by that point. Even so we are extremely susceptible to disbelieving journalism. My view is that it's just cruel to do that, to create mass panic as a joke, especially the moment that state media is finally being liberated to report actual facts for the first time - it simply undermines truth with nihilism. So if you find it funny I would say it's a very warped sense of humor. Probably one that stems from the sense of helplessness and nihilism created by living under a communist dictatorship.

That's where I got my opinion.

> "War of the Worlds" aired on radio in America in 1938 and caused mass panic.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/10/30/241797346...

> "Far fewer people heard the broadcast — and fewer still panicked — than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. 'To what program are you listening?' the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio 'play' or 'the Orson Welles program,' or something similar indicating CBS. None said a 'news broadcast,' according to a summary published in Broadcasting. In other words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938. This miniscule rating is not surprising. Welles' program was scheduled against one of the most popular national programs at the time — ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show."

Fine. Then I guess it doesn't matter. Is that your point? How many people watched the Senate hearing on yellowcake sourcing in Nigeria and metal tubes being sent to Iraq being a clear sign of Saddam Hussein's intent to build WMDs? Think anywhere close to 2%? It sent the country to war. What % of people do you need to panic to generate a pretty bad outcome?

And by the way, why are you defending the idea of scaring the fuck out of the population with made-up lies on mass media?

> Fine. Then I guess it doesn't matter. Is that your point?

I suspect parent's point is that the story is a myth, and is demonstrably wrong.

The suggestion, and this [0] Slate article repeats it, that it was a ploy by newspapers of the day to discredit radio as a source of reliable information. I also recall it coming up on QI (BBC) a few years back.

The rest of your invective doesn't invite a response.

[0] https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-wo...

"War of the Worlds" is the classic example, like shouting fire in a crowded theater - which also is, I know, not the true delineation of free speech considered by the Supreme Court. Take these as cultural touchstones or even fables which many of us in America still refer to in service of illustrating a moral (in the Aesopean sense), and so take the reference in the spirit in which it was meant. Maybe I should have implicated the Pied Piper or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. My original point stands, and debating about WotW doesn't change it. It is:

To whose benefit is it to commit arson in the sphere of public information, to cause panic and to obliterate trust in journalism?

Invective implies that this question is driven from some personal anger; it isn't. It's driven by a moral belief in the virtue of telling the truth, and not spreading rumors or lies.

Perhaps you should take a step down from your horse and regroup then, because you're spreading misinformation in the same breath with which you fight it.

Thank you; your comment sums up my thoughts perfectly.

"ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's Chase and Sanborn Hour, a comedy-variety show."

I'm guessing the ventriloquist's ventriloquism wasn't the star of that show since, ventriloquist, on Radio, Not. So. Funny.

> "War of the Worlds" aired on radio in America in 1938 and caused mass panic.

It was mostly a panic in the newspapers. There wasn't actually any real mass panic over the broadcast. It mostly just isolated people calling police stations to confirm whether it was real, and most of those were people who only heard a very small part and thought it might be a military invasion not space aliens.

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 "spaghetti" by scraping out the insides with a fork. A viable pasta alternative if you're trying to reduce carbs.

Just about all the best and most amusing April Fool's pranks I've genuinely enjoyed over the years have nearly all been BBC "hoaxes". 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”

https://www.spaghettitree.co.uk/

https://www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk/

Apparently in Oz too

https://spaghettitree.com.au/

Reminds me of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!

https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

San Giorgio had a commercial with this same gag https://youtu.be/q-ZtGoXkI58

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.

I wonder if he was influenced by this hoax.

"the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled"