National Fried Chicken Day

Five Food Finds about Chicken

  • The greatest height a chicken egg has been dropped from without cracking is 700ft.
  • This bird was probably first domesticated for the purpose of cockfights, not as food.
  • Chickens aren’t completely flightless—they can get airborne enough to make it over a fence or into a tree.
  • These birds are omnivores. They’ll eat seeds and insects but also larger prey like small mice and lizards.
  • With 25 billion chickens in the world, there are more of them than any other bird species.

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1615 Furuta Oribe died. His original name was Furuta Shigenari. He was a Japanese master of the tea ceremony who studied under Sen Riky. His ideas influenced the tea ceremony, teahouse architecture, tea-garden landscaping and even flower arrangement.

1766 Alexander Wilson was born. Scottish naturalist, ornithologist and poet. Founder of American ornithology. 1849 Minnesota’s first brewery is opened by Anthony Yoerg in St. Paul.

1869 Agoston Haraszthy de Mokcsa died. Agoston Haraszthy de Mokcsa imported 1,400 varieties of grapevines to California in 1862 and planted the first large vineyard in California in the Sonoma Valley. After the devastating phylloxera blight decimated the European vineyards, some of these same vines, now on resistant American root stock, helped rescue the European vineyards.

1886 Horlick’s of Wisconsin offered the first malted milk for sale to the public. Horlick’s developed the process to dehydrate milk, and patented it in 1883, calling it Malted Milk. The company originally produced a food for babies and invalid’s, that could be shipped without spoiling.

1985 ‘Raspberry Beret’ by Prince & The Revolution is #1 on the charts

1990 Nathaniel Wyeth died. Wyeth, an American chemist and inventor, received a patent for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) beverage bottles. These were the first plastic bottles strong enough to hold carbonated beverages.