Greatest Food Hoaxes of All Time - People have fallen for all kinds of culinary cons

[DGUtley]

The Greatest Food Hoaxes of All Time - People have fallen for all kinds of culinary cons.


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I do love a good prank. For six months, for example, I snuck increasingly improbable produce into my editor’s desktop fruit bowl, culminating in a coconut with a sizable branch still attached.

But during my first year at Atlas Obscura, our editor-in-chief forbade anything like a fake article, or even fake tweets, for April 1. I’ll admit, I sulked about it. I had grand aspirations: doctoring the homepage to make it look like we had transformed overnight into a publication covering Greek-letter shenanigans on college campuses. (In other words, “Fratlas Obscura.”)

But I’ve come around. Fake articles and even fake tweets have a way of lingering, misleading people long past April Fools. A few years back, my mother sent me an article about the world’s oldest break-up letter, supposedly written in the 6th century BC, in all seriousness.


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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/food-hoaxes

[DGUtley]

The Hoax That Claimed Thomas Edison Could Turn Dirt Into Food - Newspapers worldwide printed that he’d invented a miraculous machine.

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https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...d-machine-hoax

[carolina73]

But still suckers go for the stories.

30 years of spam and they are still getting ripped off by the Nigerian Prince that needs to transfer his money out of the country.

[carolina73]

But the winner has to be US food companies that sell low Cholesterol, low fat, low sodium...versions of foods that never contained them to begin with at a premium price.

[jigglepete]

Not food related, but, the best prank (April fools day 1990) I've ever witnessed was orchestrated by one of my professors. A few weeks before, she started putting up flyers and adds in the local papers advertising the wonderful international exchange program that was going to be culminating at the beginning of April at her farm/pre-school. The exchange was an American horse (being sent to Africa) for a "real African zebra" she printed out a blurb from a "scientific" article saying that you can tell a true African zebra by the fact that they have two different colored eyes. She painted black stripes on her white horse (with different colored eyes) Almost 100 people showed up LOL

No one was mad about the prank, mostly because her grill was running all day and the drinks were free, when I think about it, I still giggle about it to this day...