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In New Orleans, Crawfish Boils Can Be a Jewish Tradition Too

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On the last Sunday in May, as happens so often in spring in Louisiana, a room fills with tables covered in red-checked tablecloths and set with endless rolls of paper towel. In the center sits a plastic kiddie pool with a quarter-ton of crawfish, awaiting service with big metal scoops, like the kind you’d find in a hotel ice machine. Bright red, boiled through with local spices, ready for their tails to be pinched and their heads sucked, the ripe crustaceans await some 150 or more diners. What sets this crawfish boil apart is the location and the audience: It’s a fundraiser for the Brotherhood of Temple Sinai, held inside the Jewish synagogue.

Kosher law, the Jewish dietary guidelines, expressly forbid the consumption of shellfish. “All creatures in the seas or streams that do not have fins and scales … you are to regard as unclean,” declares Leviticus 11:9-12. But as is so often the case, the Torah doesn’t account for everything, most certainly not the settlement of Jews deep in the heart of Catholic Louisiana, where shrimp, pork, and shellfish drive diets, dinners, and community.

Temple Sinai is Louisiana’s biggest and oldest congregation of the Reform Jewish movement, a form of the religion with very little focus on keeping kosher. Instead of Jewish law, their priority, per their website, is “serving the spiritual needs of its diverse membership.” In general, the Reform movement is more about retaining a connection to Jewish learning and community than adhering precisely to the commands of the Torah—a 2013 Pew Study found that only 7% of Reform Jews in the U.S. keep kosher.

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“New Orleans is a seafood town,” says Kenneth Hoffman, Executive Director of New Orlean’s forthcoming Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, “famous for delicious foods and the mixing of different cultures: Caribbean, African-American, etc. Throw in some matzo balls, and who knows what you're going to get.”

While the Jewish diaspora spread congregations around the world, Hoffman notes that the American South was a particularly tough place to keep kosher. “It’s the prevalence of pork and seafood: it’s everywhere,” he says. The ubiquitous treyf (non-kosher food) was compounded by how Jews settled in the South. In the North, Jews concentrated in urban centers, in numbers that supported a kosher butcher and deli. But in the South, Jews tended to be isolated—a handful of shopkeepers in agrarian towns. The pressure for the small minority to be accepted led Jews to assimilate and acculturate. “You don’t want to stand out too much,” says Hoffman. “You already have a different religion; the last thing you need is to not be able to eat at your neighbor’s house.”

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But there’s a difference between going next door for gumbo and hosting a crawfish boil in a temple. Stewart Yelton is a journalist and Alabama-born Jew. He’s now based in Hawaii, but he used to live in New Orleans and chair the Sinai Brotherhood’s euphemistically named “Seafood Bingo” fundraiser. He later wrote a novel called Crawfish Bingo, which fictionalized events and discussions around the annual dinner.

One plot point is based on a real incident: An NPR personality speaking to the congregation says, “Reform Jews might not keep kosher. But at the same time, no congregation today would ever think of having a shrimp boil at the synagogue.” Unaware of the Seafood Bingo tradition, he doesn’t understand the nervous titters from the audience.

The rest of the speech, however, is on point: It discusses the pendulum motion in the Reform movement, in which Jews are reclaiming traditions that they abandoned. Hoffman explains that the classical version of the Reform movement was very strong in the South, with its church-like organs, choirs, and lack of Saturday services. But now, yarmulkes and tallit (traditional hats and prayer shawls), once shunned, have begun re-appearing. Yet, so far, Seafood Bingo persists. “To reject Seafood Bingo,” observes Yelton, “would be to ask, ‘Were these people before us Jewish enough?’”

The rabbi who led the Temple during Yelton’s time recently retired. Yelton describes his thoughts on the event—which Yelton surmises is the synagogue’s second best-attended event after the High Holy Days (akin to trailing Christmas)—as quietly unenthusiastic.

Today, that seems to continue. The new rabbi and Temple officials, including the President of the Brotherhood (which runs the fundraiser), declined to be interviewed. The event has little internet presence, and even the name, Seafood Bingo, seems to purposefully obscure the flagrant violation of kosher law.

That said, New Orleans’ Temple Sinai is hardly the first Jewish entity to enjoy treyf. Following the ordination of the first class of rabbis of the Hebrew Union College (the oldest seminary of Reform Judaism), a banquet held in their honor kicked off with littleneck clams and continued with shrimp salad, soft-shell crab, and plenty of steak and cream—a violation of the kosher law that prevents the mixing of meat and dairy in one meal. But, explains Hoffman, the menu wasn’t meant to flaunt their non-observance. Scholarly discussion of the dinner notes that the organizers simply served foods typical for the time and place (1883 Cincinnati). It wasn’t all that different from celebrating spring in New Orleans with a crawfish boil.

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Southern Jews have long enjoyed non-kosher foods—both in everyday and religious contexts. In her dissertation, Shalom Y’all: The Folklore and Culture of Southern Jews, Carolyn Lipson-Walker describes gefilte fish made of catfish (which is treyf), Shabbat dinners with pork chops, and a Mississippi temple’s “High Holy Day Shrimp Fry.” These dishes, she writes, “became so accepted in Southern Jewish diets that many Southern Jews growing up in mid-century [America] did not know that these foods were historically forbidden for Jews.” That timing lines up with the beginning of Sinai’s tradition: According to the Temple archives, kept in the Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, the Men’s Club (soon after re-named the Brotherhood) held its first seafood dinner in 1952.

The collection also holds samples of invitations through the years, including handwritten invitations and crabs and crawfish crawling around on a typewritten flyer. Budgets outline payment for a quarter-ton of crawfish, along with corn, potatoes, garlic, and crabs. A few pans of jambalaya, lasagna, and chicken round out the food, plus a keg of beer and plenty of Tabasco sauce.

As suggested by the NPR speaker in Yelton's book—and the giggle that escapes most Jews when they hear of the dinner—the idea of a temple-budget line-item for shellfish is laughably absurd—which, in the grand Jewish comedy tradition of self-mocking, might be exactly the point. Lipson-Walker writes that “As Southern Jews became more savvy about Jewish culture and cuisine, they began telling humorous stories about themselves and their lack of knowledge about Jewish rituals.”

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Yelton agrees that the famous Jewish sense of humor might have played into the tradition, guessing that it began from good-natured satire and “poking fun at themselves and their Catholic friends.” But Jews aren’t the only ones who like to make fun of themselves. Yelton adds that the tradition seems in keeping with the teasing, parodying traditions of the city’s most famous (and famously Catholic) tradition, Mardis Gras. Hoffman agrees that there’s something particularly New Orleans-ian about the Seafood Dinner: “We like being unique.”

Yelton chose to fictionalize the Seafood Bingo in his book in order to encapsulate what it’s like to be a Jew in the South—hence, he says, “the wacky novel and silly title.” More importantly, he says the reason he wrote the novel meshes with the likely reason Seafood Bingo continues on today: “It’s New Orleans: People like to have fun, and it’s a fun event.”


Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food?

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As a pre-teen, I devoured fantasy book after fantasy book. One day, I was stopped short by a food description. In Diana Wynne Jones’s A Tale of Time City, the era-hopping protagonists eat a treat called butter-pie. It’s yellow ice cream on a stick, ice-cold on the outside and molten on the inside, and described as “buttery and creamy … with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes.” Butter-pie has never existed, except in the pages of Jones’s book and in the imaginations of readers. But it sounded delicious.

In those days, the internet was fairly new, so I couldn’t dig up the dozens of recipes that fans of Jones’s work have developed. But even as I moved from children’s fantasy novels to those meant for adults, I noticed that authors consistently incorporated lavish descriptions of food. It piqued both my appetite and my interest: Why do fantasy writers write so much about food?

As I doggedly read through the fantasy canon, I realized that the marvelous butter-pie was an outlier. Instead, heroes and heroines often ate familiar fare, even as they cast spells and rode dragons. For pages and pages, lucky characters feast on cakes and ale. Other characters only get stew, which is oddly omnipresent. In her satirical travel guide to fantasy literature, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Jones jokes that stew “is the staple food in Fantasyland, so be warned. You may shortly be longing for omelette, steak, or baked beans, but none of these will be forthcoming.”

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Food in fantasy dates back to early myths and legends, which are full of symbolic, often menacing fare. The Greek goddess Persephone ate six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, consigning her to spend six months of the year with Hades, the god of death. European tales and poems abound with mystical fairies or elves using food to lure humans. In the poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” written in 1819 by Romantic poet John Keats, a knight falls in love with a fairy girl, who feeds him “roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew.” But one day, the knight wakes up to find himself abandoned and half-mad for what he lost. In 1859, poet Christina Rossetti wrote “Goblin Market,” about eerie, otherworldly creatures that sell fruit that, once tasted, drive people crazy for more.

The trope of dangerous fairy food still exists in modern fantasy, says Dr. Robert Maslen. Maslen is a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he founded one of the world’s first master’s degrees in fantasy literature. He gives two modern examples: the film Pan’s Labyrinth and Ellen Kushner’s novel Thomas the Rhymer. When food comes with consequences, it’s a sign that “we’re in a world where the rules are very different."

The father of modern fantasy writing, J.R.R. Tolkien, was shaped by this tradition. As a child, he read the Andrew Lang fairy books, which reached 12 volumes and were organized by color, from Red to Blue and Pink to Brown.

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Tolkien’s inclination to write constantly of the importance of food was also influenced by his harrowing experience during World War I. He served as an officer, and was certain he would die. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's vision of the ideal village is a land of parties and plentiful mushrooms, seemingly untouched by war. The Hobbit’s first chapter features unadventurous Bilbo Baggins turned on his head by the wizard Gandalf and a posse of hungry dwarves, who raid his pantry. “A little red wine, I think for me,” Gandalf requests. The dwarves call out for raspberry jam, apple tart, mince pies, cheese, pork pie, salad, cakes, ale, coffee, eggs, cold chicken, and pickles. Even though Bilbo balefully empties his house to feed the dwarves, it’s a sign of bounty that he has all this food to hand.

Another famed fantasy writer was similarly shaped by World War II: Brian Jacques. Jacques was most famous for his children’s fantasy series, the Redwall books. Throughout the 21 books, anthropomorphized animals fight evil and hold lavish feasts. Just one pages-long feast includes 12 kinds of salad, eight types of bread, 10 drinks, “fresh cream, sweet cream, whipped cream, pouring cream, custardy cream,” and a giant fish. In interviews Jacques said that his book’s fictional meals stemmed from childhood food fantasies during the years of British rationing. Many early readers enjoyed them for a similar reason.

As a preeminent fantasy author, Tolkien's focus on food helped set the blueprint for fantasy writers. Middle-Earth’s ever-present cuisine and Tolkien’s style of food description also became standard due to its helpfulness in world building: Food works especially well at setting a scene.

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Both Tolkien and Jacques fleshed out their worlds with history, songs, and distinct languages and dialects. To Maslen, food is another way to make fantasy seem real. “A lot of fantasy is set in other worlds,” he says. “Say you are writing a secondary-world fantasy. In that case, you want to make it as rich, as believable, as available to all the senses of your readers as you possibly can.” Songs appeal to the ear, frontispiece maps appeal to the eye, and descriptions of food appeal to readers' stomachs.

Maslen believes food is one of the distinguishing features of fantasy literature. Whether its butter-pie or stew, food acts as an anchor against novels' horror and high stakes. Fantasy writers, he says, “are very keen not to just induce horror and terror, but also wonder, surprise, delight, and amazement.” When challenging readers with the frightening and strange, food “anchors their experience in something they know well.” Even George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, which is known for breaking many fantasy tropes and traditions, still retains the requisite elaborate food descriptions (especially of soup).

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Maslen offers an example from The Lord of the Rings, where Frodo and Sam share a meal on the border of Mordor, “right on the edge of the worst place in the world.” Even as their world-saving mission looms, Sam gathers bay leaves and sage to make rabbit stew. Amidst a beautiful, overgrown landscape, it’s a brief moment of wonder in the face of what Maslen calls “the most extreme example of the unfamiliar and the horrifying.”

In uncertain times, making comfort foods at the verge of calamity is certainly relatable. With such meaning imbued into the foods of fantasy, it’s no wonder that there are books and blogs galore devoted to painstaking recreations of lembas bread and cauldron cakes. This weekend, I’ll dig through them. Somewhere out there, I know there’s a recipe for butter-pie as wondrous as what I imagined 15 years ago.

The Beloved Pie Shop in an Amish and Mennonite Vacation Town

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On a sunny Saturday afternoon, two Amish-Mennonite women wearing pink and blue gowns and white kapps (prayer coverings) cruise down palm-studded Bahia Vista Street on oversize tricycles. They’re headed to Yoder’s Amish Restaurant and Village in Sarasota, Florida, a popular spot for fried chicken and homemade pies.

Out front, long lines snake around the corner. Cars in the Yoder’s parking lot have license plates from all over the United States. Amish and Mennonite families stand beside tourists from Miami to Manhattan. Yoder’s is in Pinecraft, a Sarasota neighborhood where the Amish go to have fun in the sun. Since the 1920s, it’s been a gathering point for Amish and Mennonite snowbirds, who stand out in their anachronistic attire (think modest dresses and suspenders) among the laid back beach crowd. Yoder’s sweet promise of delicious pie plays a unifying role, bringing together these disparate populations.

Inside, the bustling diner mixes homestyle country decor with hints of beach and Bible kitsch and vintage Florida postcards that wrap the perimeter. A wooden “Homemade Pies” sign hangs prominently at the entrance, alongside several pie-related awards and accolades. Waitresses in Amish gowns and blue aprons dash between booths, but the real star is a glorious, spinning display case of pies.

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Yoder’s bakers make up to 100 fresh pies a day of at least 25 different varieties. The chocolate peanut butter cream pie is an avalanche of fresh cream cascading over globs of chocolate, dusted with peanut butter and mini-chocolate chips. Sun-lit sweetness bursts out of the double-baked red raspberry and tangy strawberry rhubarb pies. The Florida key lime pie packs a tart punch with citrus blasts softened by a dollop of cream.

Amos Yoder, the 84-year-old brother of founder Levi Yoder, warmly greets fans at the door with family lore. “Well, ya see, my brother Levi came out here in 1973 from Indiana on doctor’s orders to help out with his Parkinson’s,” he says. Levi Yoder joined a growing community of Amish and Mennonite snowbirds who’ve had a continual presence in Sarasota since the 1920s, when pioneers first came to grow celery. It was a bit too soggy for celery, but they stayed for the sun.

The Amish and Mennonites are known for their simple living, plain clothes, and opposition to modern technology, as well as their Anabaptist, pacifist beliefs. They continue to speak traditional Pennsylvania Dutch (alongside English) and follow strict religious and cultural customs, making a living in the modern world through agriculture, woodwork, and culinary arts. In chilly Amish country, the Amish and Mennonites ride horse and buggies. In Pinecraft, they opt for tricycles. Four to five Pinecraft Pioneer Trails buses leave daily from Ohio and Indiana between October and April.

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The shuffleboard courts in Pinecraft Park are popular; Miriam, who traveled 21 hours by bus from Indiana, tells me that it “sort of gets into your blood out here!” Her playing partner adds that she enjoys live music and that “fish fry’s draw at least 1,500 people to the park.”

In 1975, when the economy tanked and jobs were scarce, Levi surprised his wife Amanda Hochstetler Yoder when he came home and announced, “I opened up a restaurant on Main Street. I need your recipes!” Yoder’s became an overnight success and eventually moved into a bigger space on Bahia Vista. Pie became big business and a standout at the restaurant.

When Yoder’s first opened, Levi and Amanda baked 25 Thanksgiving pies for friends and family. In 2017, Yoder’s produced nearly 9,000 pies in a major operation that began three weeks before Thanksgiving. “It’s a blast,” says general manager Becky Battles, who has worked at Yoder’s since age 14 and married into the Amish-Mennonite community. “We literally hire two refrigerated trailers and fill them up with crusts, pies, puddings, and whipped toppings.” Battles and her team of 20 stay up for 72 hours producing pies while reminiscing and reuniting with friends who fly down for the pie-making jamboree. Her eyes light up: “Three ladies come just to top and clean strawberries.”

A reigning champion of Sarasota’s yearly pie contest, Yoder’s flaky, buttery pie crust recipe is top-secret. “The only recipe unseen even by our chefs,” Battles explains. “No one else makes it except our head baker, Steve, because he’s a member of the family.”

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Yoder’s is indeed a family affair. When Levi and Amanda passed away, their children inherited the establishment and then passed it onto their grandchildren. Yoder has now expanded into a village of 150 employees who run a restaurant, gift shop, deli, and produce market. The gift shop sells jams, jellies, and trendy tees that feature the famous Pinecraft tricycle (“It’s how we roll”) and the mathematical pi symbol ("I love Pi”).

Yoder’s Restaurant and Amish Village is a central meeting place for Pinecraft’s Amish and Mennonite families as well as visitors who rock in handmade wooden rocking chairs out front or picnic in the community gardens that feature murals of Amish country life. Battles says there’s no need to pay for marketing because “Yoder's is like one big village. [And] our pies speak for themselves.”

On any given day, the Amish gather in the bustling diner alongside glamorous Jewish grannies from Manhattan and sun-tanned couples exploring the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone is united by a mutual love for pie. After the last slice, visitors are welcome to rent a tricycle and roll alongside the Amish through the sun-soaked, palm-studded grid of bungalows and trailers. Or stroll to nearby Pinecraft Park, where the Amish women at the shuffleboard court in women-only Lane 8 will happily play a fierce game with anyone who asks, talking life and pie until the Sarasota sun goes down.

The Cyanide Tooth Is a Cold War Fairy-Tale

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Fictional heroes, from James Bond to Captain America, have had enemy captives check out—sputtering and foaming at the mouth, taking their secrets to the grave—thanks to secret cyanide pills hidden in false teeth. While the weird world of espionage has plenty of examples of real-world emergency cyanide pills and fake teeth with hidden compartments, they've never actually been put together. The cyanide tooth is little more than a pop-culture myth and, in fact, the prevalence of emergency suicide measures in spy culture is likely overblown in general.

“I think the reason it’s become such a popular pop culture trope is because there have been a number of people who have hidden cyanide capsules in their mouths, and certainly they use their teeth to use it,” says Vince Houghton, curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. “Himmler’s a good example of this. Actually there are a lot of Nazis that chose that way out.”

Houghton is referring to the May 1945 suicide of high-ranking Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who bit into a cyanide pill while in custody. A laundry list of his Nazi colleagues chose the same way out at the end of the war. Some Allied forces also carried lethal kill pills, in case they were trapped behind enemy lines. Use of cyanide pills, or at least their specter, continued through the Cold War.

Cyanide is a fast-acting, lethal poison that’s become almost synonymous with the concept of a suicide pill. In a 2013 Wired article that takes issue with the portrayal of the effects of cyanide in the Bond movie Skyfall, science writer Deborah Blum described it as “a famously fast-acting poison due to its ability to induce extreme chemical suffocation of cells and to disrupt enzymatic processes.” As she points out, it can kill a person in minutes, so it makes sense that it continues to bear a lethal mystique in pop culture. The cyanide pill itself is that rare cloak-and-dagger trope that has a solid basis in history (even if it wasn't exactly in common use).

Surprisingly, fake teeth with hidden compartments also have a basis in reality. “There are hollow teeth that have been used in espionage, but most of the time it’s been used to conceal film, microdots, those kind of things,” says Houghton. These teeth, he says, would usually have been implanted in place of a molar, somewhere in the back of the mouth where they would be hard to detect. The Spy Museum even has one in its collection. But has anyone ever actually concealed a suicide pill in a fake tooth?

“There’s a short answer to that question, and it's: 'Nope,'” says Houghton. “There’s no evidence that I’ve seen that there is anyone who had any kind of hollow tooth made for any kind of cyanide capsule. It would have to be a massive tooth. Most of these cyanide capsules are pretty large, so it seems more anecdotal or apocryphal.” In addition to the danger of accidentally swallowing a pill hidden in the mouth, the cyanide pills of World War II were around the size of a pea, which would be too large to hide safely or securely within a false tooth. There are confirmed instances of suicide pills hidden in the temples of glasses and the ends of pens, where they could be inconspicuously chewed, and even of pills being hidden in someone's mouth, but seemingly never in a tooth.

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Even if the trope of the suicide pill in general is based in the reality of espionage history, its sheer prevalence in popular spy fiction strains credulity. According to Houghton, rarely did captured spies actually use suicide options, even if they were available. “It’s so rare that it’s just not something that happens in the real world.”

The next time you see some movie villain’s henchperson chomp down on a fake tooth to avoid being interrogated, keep in mind that it's not him taking the easy way out—it's the screenwriter.

Inflatable Saxophones, Novelty Fedoras, and the Allure of Plastic Party Favors

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For years in my preteens, jewel-toned maracas, dead glow necklaces, sombreros, and an array of plastic Blues Brothers–style sunglasses were strewn on the floor of my basement in the suburbs of Boston. Stuck in an infinite loop of getting tossed away and then replaced the following weekend, the bar and bat mitzvah party favors that took up residence among a lifetime’s worth of random detritus were reminders of the hours spent in synagogue social halls, dancing to “Cotton-Eye Joe,” and running back and forth on the dance floor in a free pair of ankle socks as a DJ barked orders.

Giveaways—specifically, the generic, ordered-in-bulk, usually plastic kind—are as much of a bar/bat mitzvah party tradition as the candle-lighting ceremony and the “Cha Cha Slide.” While wedding guests around the world have been receiving various mementos for centuries, bar/bat mitzvah attendees had to wait until the late 1980s before they too got a tangible, albeit useless, reward for showing up. Still, even after nearly 40 years, kids and adults continue to clamor for a stack of glow necklaces and an inflatable saxophone, knowing full well that their loot will get thrown in the trash and dumped in a landfill by the end of the week.

But where did they come from, when will they go, why do we want them, Cotton-Eye Joe?

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“In general [conspicuous consumption at bar/bat mitzvahs] is a coastal phenomenon,” says Jeffrey K. Salkin, the author of Putting God on the Guest List and senior rabbi at Temple Solel in Hollywood, Florida. “In California, the notion is you have to be famous, and in New York, the notion is you have to be famous and rich,” he says.

According to Rabbi Salkin, after World War II, American Jews were eager to showcase their newly acquired affluence, turning to bar and bat mitzvahs as a forum to display their upper-middle-class status. “One can say that this happens in every generation—as soon as a generation gets money, they want to demonstrate it,” Salkin says. And what better way to flaunt a “money’s no object” attitude than by dropping hundreds of dollars on enough tchotchkes to fill an Olympic-sized ball pit?

Even before party favors became mainstream in the late 1980s—the ETA given by Rabbi Salkin as well as the other DJs and sales reps I spoke with—the lavish bar/bat mitzvah party was already the subject of national interest and facing criticism. On April 29, 1963, the article “Jewish Leader Criticizes Bar Mitzvah ‘Vulgarization’” was tucked snugly among other city news on page 23 of The New York Times, featuring Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs president Philip Goldstein calling the increasingly extravagant celebrations “‘a form of social climbing’ with ‘mounting ostentation verging on bad taste.’” Another article, “Who Is Harvey Cohen and Why Is Everybody Saying Such Wonderful Things About Him?” from a 1978 issue of People magazine, included a quote from a rabbi who said that the Cohen family’s party, which cost upwards of $19,000 and was held at the 80,000 seat Orange Bowl in Hollywood, Florida, was “‘more bar than mitzvah.’”

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According to the Encyclopedia of American Industries, total party favor sales rake in approximately $360 million per year, but the category’s standing as a niche facet of the Gift, Novelty, and Souvenir Stores industry, which itself is a subcategory of the Miscellaneous subsector of the Retail industry, means that official statistics don’t dive too deep. While representatives from Oriental Trading Co. declined to comment, those from Rhode Island Novelty, Windy City Novelties, and even the Plastics Industry Association explain that giveaways are equally popular at school dances, corporate fundraisers, and other major milestone events, which means that no one’s keeping track of how many janky tambourines are handed out during the hora.

Mike Schrimmer, the founder and owner of Windy City Novelties, is probably the closest thing there is to a party favors thought leader. In the 1970s, Schrimmer invented the glow necklace after cutting open a 6” glow stick and then connecting it to the airline tube from his brother’s aquarium. Once he realized that he could connect both ends to make the straw into a necklace, he took his invention to Buckingham Fountain in Chicago, where he sold 400 at $3 a piece on the first night out.

“I sat at the fountain and made hundreds of necklaces during the day, waiting for the night crowds of tourists lured by the awesome night light show at the fountain,” he explains. However, “I was arrested the second night for vending without a city permit, which was not offered on that property.”

Five years later, he opened Windy City Novelties, first only selling glow necklaces before expanding its merchandise to include 18,000 other illuminated party goods, such as glowing shot glasses and footballs. “We have sold hundreds of millions of necklaces around the world,” he says.

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Debbie Dragon, a sales representative to DJs and event planners at Windy City, says that while the original favors, such as Blues Brothers glasses, plastic fedoras, and maracas, have maintained their popularity, LED products, such as light-up rings, bracelets, and wands, are becoming a mainstay.

Phil Cohen, founder of the Boston-based DJ company Cohen Productions, echoed the growing appeal of LED goods, adding that these days, ultraviolet black lights are all the rage. Still, he’s been doing this long enough to know that at the end of the night, most of what he gives out will be quickly forgotten. “They’re fun at the time,” he says. “But if someone goes to a sporting event and they get one of those foam hands that they hold up, they’re not going to bring it home and reuse it at the next game.”

While Cohen and other DJs I spoke with noticed a decline in excessive giveaways, none of them foresee their overall extinction. They do tell reluctant parents that party favors aren’t a requirement, but, according to New York-based DJ David Swirsky, “most parents get them even though they are not excited to.”

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As for why, that depends on who you ask.

Kristina Shampanier, along with Dan Ariely and Nina Mazer, researched how low prices and free giveaways impact consumers’ decision-making. Their paper, Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products, argues that the perceived benefits of a product are higher when it’s free than when it’s for sale.

“Free products elicit an unexpectedly high positive affect from consumers,” writes Shampanier in an email. “This affective reaction makes consumers chose these products even when standard economic theory would predict that other choices are better for them. Thus, it is not surprising that people will avail themselves of free glow sticks or plastic hats at parties even if they know that those choices are not ‘rational’ (e.g., not ideal for future storage space situation or for environment).”

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But for Rabbi Salkin, it boils down to a face-off between religion and capitalism.

“I think it came from a growing American sense of specialness,” explains Rabbi Salkin. “Upper-middle-class people have to be special so they have to cling to materialistic things that give them the sense that they have made it, and that they are important, and that their child is really important.” He also says, “[a glow stick] represents something that people can take away from the experience, that they will remember it by. Apparently it’s no longer sufficient for people to have nice memories of being at a bar mitzvah. They now have to have souvenirs. It’s just American materialism expressed on a new level.”

But in the eyes of Michael Nowack from Rhode Island Novelty, it’s not that complicated. “It’s pretty simple,” he says. “It’s impulse stuff. People like giveaway stuff. It’s just a part of what we do.”

Britain's Secret Theft of Ethiopia's Most Wondrous Manuscripts

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In the basement of London’s British Library I was led into a small well-lit room, marking the end of a journey that began in the Ethiopian Highlands at the Addis Ababa home of a remarkable British historian.

In that home, over strong Ethiopian coffee and English biscuits, Richard Pankhurst, who dedicated his life to documenting Ethiopian history, told me the story of the ancient manuscripts looted at the end of the Battle of Maqdala. In 1868, a British expeditionary force laid siege to the mountain fortress of Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros in what was then Abyssinia. A two-day auction of the spoils of war among the victorious troops resulted in more than a thousand predominantly religious manuscripts making their way to Britain—15 elephants and hundreds of mules carried them along with other cultural treasures to the coast—with 350 manuscripts ending up in the British Library. Pankhurst campaigned for the return of the manuscripts to Ethiopia but hadn’t succeeded before his death in 2017. Now other voices are continuing the cause.

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“It’s true that the level of care and quality in Britain is much better than ours, but if you come to the Institute of Ethiopian Studies where we have a few Maqdala items previously returned you can see how well they are kept and made available to the public,” says Andreas Eshete, a former president of Addis Ababa University—which houses the institute—and who co-founded the Association for the Return of the Ethiopian Maqdala Treasures (AFROMET). “These manuscripts are among the best in the world and one of the oldest examples of indigenous manuscripts in Africa, and they need to be studied carefully by historians here.”

But the British Library views its guardianship of the manuscripts for the sake of international research and access as equally necessary.

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“We have the responsibility, as a public institution and national library, to research, make accessible and preserve the collections under our custodianship for people and researchers from all over the world, as well as encouraging and promoting international cultural exchanges,” says Luisa Mengoni, head of the library’s Asian and African Collections.

What all sides agree on is the manuscripts’ uniqueness. When I met Pankhurst his health was deteriorating but his eyes lit up whenever the manuscripts were mentioned.

“It is not widely known what happened,” said Pankhurst, recognized as arguably the most prolific scholar in the field of Ethiopian studies. “The soldiers were able to pick the best of the best that Ethiopia had to offer. Most Ethiopians have never seen manuscripts of that quality.”

In the British Library’s viewing room I saw nothing to contradict Pankhurst’s praise.

“They are so lavish as they were made for kings,” Ilana Tahan, lead curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient studies at the British Library, told me as she delicately turned the manuscripts’ pages, explaining the art and craft that went into producing them.

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Tewodros had the country scoured for the finest manuscripts and collected them in Maqdala for a grand church and library he planned to build. Tewodros was actually a fan of the British, even hoping they would help develop his country and reaching out to them in 1862. But a perceived snub led to him imprisoning a small group of British diplomats in early 1864.

“Queen Victoria failed to respond to his diplomatic initiatives for increased ties between Great Britain and Ethiopia,” says Kidane Alemayehu, one of the founders of the Horn of Africa Peace and Development Center, and executive director of the Global Alliance for Justice: The Ethiopian Cause.

Diplomatic efforts to release the prisoners dragged on until 1867 when the British government finally lost its patience, tasking General Robert Napier to lead a rescue mission with a force of 32,000.

"There has never been in modern times a colonial campaign quite like the British expedition to Ethiopia in 1868. It proceeds from first to last with the decorum and heavy inevitability of a Victorian state banquet, complete with ponderous speeches at the end,” wrote Alan Moorehead in The Blue Nile. “And yet it was a fearsome undertaking; for hundreds of years the country had never been invaded, and the savage nature of the terrain alone was enough to promote failure."

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On Easter Monday, April 13, with the British victorious in the valleys surrounding his mountaintop redoubt Maqdala and about to launch a final assault, Tewodros bit down on a pistol—a previous present from Queen Victoria—and pulled the trigger.

In Ethiopia today, Tewodros remains revered by many for his unwavering belief in his country’s potential, while the looting of Maqdala continues to spur the activism of AFROMET and others.

“Though Richard was unsuccessful with the British Library manuscripts, there was the return of a number of crosses, manuscripts from private collections,” says his son, Alula Pankhurst, himself a historian and author. Alula Pankhurst notes that the family of General Napier recently returned a necklace and a parchment scroll to the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. “My father would have argued that the items should be returned as they were wrongly looted,” Alula Pankhurst says. “There is now the technology available to make copies [of the manuscripts] that are indistinguishable from the originals and microfilms mean that copies could be retained.”

But such technology is also seen by those at the British Library as a reason why the manuscripts can remain where they are.

“We have both a growing opportunity and growing responsibility to use the potential of digital to increase access for people across the world to the intellectual heritage that we safeguard,” Mengoni says. During the next two years the library plans to digitize some 250 manuscripts from the Ethiopian collection, with 25 manuscripts already available online in full for the first time through its Digitised Manuscripts website.

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“The artwork suffers when it is digitalized, plus many of the manuscripts have detailed comments in the margins—there are many reasons scholars need to attend to the originals and which are not met by digital copies,” Andreas says.

For the manuscripts to return to Ethiopia, those at the library note, new legislation would have to be passed by British Parliament. Alula Pankhurst notes there already is a legal provision that human remains should be returned, though it doesn’t appear to have had much impact. Former Ethiopian President Girma Wolde-Giorgis made a formal request in 2007 for the return of the remains of Theodore's son Alemayehu, who was taken to Britain aged seven to be looked after following his father’s death but died there aged 18 and is buried at Windsor Castle. The request was turned down, Alula Pankhurst explains, based on potential damage an exhumation might cause to the surrounding graves.

“The restitution of Ethiopian property is a matter of respecting Ethiopia's dignity and fundamental rights—looting another country's property and offering it on loan to the rightful owner should evoke the deepest shame on any self-respecting country,” Alemayehu says. “I'm optimistic that the British Government [will] take an exemplary action by undertaking the restitution of properties [taken] by its army at Maqdala to the Ethiopian people.”

In the meantime, other options treading a middle ground are beginning to be talked about more openly. Tristram Hunt, director of London’s Victoria and Albert museum, which is exhibiting 20 of its Maqdala artefacts to mark the 150th anniversary of the battle, says he is “open to the idea” of a long-term loan of the objects to Ethiopia, a move Alula Pankhurst says “would be a step in the right direction.”

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At the end of my viewing session at the British Library, the manuscripts were carefully boxed up and wheeled back to the secure basement—where they will remain for now, while the library looks at making them more accessible to the public through new exhibits and building the online repository.

“While some restitutionists may grumble that the majority of items have not been returned, much has been done to spread knowledge of their existence—and great artistry—to Ethiopian scholars, and to the world at large,” says Alexander Herman, assistant director of the Institute of Art and Law, an educational organization focused on law relating to cultural heritage. “This has been made possible by the willingness of the British Library to invest in this once-overlooked part of its collection.”

Nonetheless, says Kidane Alemayehu, “the return of the loot of Maqdala has been an ongoing battle for Ethiopians and others with a sense of history and justice."

The Story Behind New York City's New Egg House

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There's no need to follow signs or check Google Maps to find the Egg House in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Instead, follow the people dressed in sunny yellow, who are wearing egg-emblazoned shirts and egg earrings.

The eggy attire is intended for a new, egg-themed pop-up, which is open until the end of June. For those not versed in Instagram, pop-ups tend to be brightly-lit and lavishly decorated spaces that lend themselves to photography. Popular pop-ups include the Museum of Ice Cream, which previously popped into New York and dominates social media wherever it goes.

New York City is the Egg House's first stop. Occupying a 3,300 square-foot, two-story space, the installation is all about eggs. Fluffy clouds attached to the walls evoke whipped egg whites, and visitors receive glasses of eggnog. Selfie-seeking guests can crawl among the giant eggs in a massive carton, or lounge in a yellow-and-white ball pit.

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The person in charge of this exotic business venture is Biubiu Xu. Originally, she says, she imagined the space simply as a pretty space for pictures. (She came up with the idea during an egg-filled brunch last year.) But while Xu is a fan of art installations, she's not an artist herself: She studied accounting. So she recruited designers Anji Lu and Defu Kong of 3T Studio, who invented the Egg House's mythology.

Both Xu and Lu say they needed a narrative to distinguish the Egg House from other pop-ups, and they came up with quite the story. The House is the domain of Ellis, who is, naturally, an egg. While most of the House suggests that Ellis lives a swanky lifestyle with a pool and a garden, Ellis's bedroom tells a different tale. Inside, it's dark and filled with ambient city noises. A massive white egg (Ellis, of course) looms on the bed, and expressions flicker on its non-face with the help of a projector.

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According to Lu, Ellis is a stand-in for the New York story. After all, what is an egg except unrealized potential? Millions of young people have come to New York and lived in dark little bedrooms as they try to make a go of it in the city. Ellis's name even references Ellis Island, the gateway for many immigrants into America. Though the designers insist that Ellis is more of an every-egg, the name is especially evocative in a diverse city such as New York. "Initially, all of us are from China," Lu says, motioning at the Egg House team.

Dreams are another important component of the Egg House. In the eerie glowing display of Ellis's garden, Lu gestures to a simple white tent. Soon, he says, they will construct an even smaller bedroom and place a regular-sized version of Ellis the egg inside. The whole installation will be the dream of that Ellis, Lu explains. "If he wakes up, everything here will—" Lu sharply claps, a sound that echoes through the basement like a cracking egg.

The name Ellis, he points out, also sounds similar to Alice, the heroine of Lewis Carroll's surrealist children's tale that turned out to be all a dream. Like Alice's journey, parts of the Egg House are slightly creepy."Eggs are full of the unknown," Kong adds, his face lit by the green light of the egg garden. "Eggs can be cute, but also sexy," a member of the publicity team explains later. "Maybe we'll do fruit next."

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As social media influencers and their attendant photographers wander the installation, many linger in Ellis's bedroom to watch a film of giant egg sitting on a park bench. (To drum up interest in the show, Lu and the others took Ellis around town, as if he was wandering the city.) Away from the chatter and music, the quietest space is the garden in the basement, with its alien green-growing eggs. Lu says that the effect was created by inflating exercise balls to different sizes. In the middle of the display is a swing shaped like half a cracked egg. Terry, one of the Egg House's guides, proudly explains that it can hold up to two tons of weight.

The Egg House's concept might not be ready to hatch quite yet. Admission is a steep $18, and the space isn't all that large. But the Egg House team is dreaming big. Lu told me that after the Egg House visits Shanghai and Los Angeles, it will return to New York in a bigger space. Another organizer confides that the team pulled an all-nighter to arrange the House for its press viewing. Sacrificing sleep to chase dreams: What could be more New York?

Everything We Know About Birds That Glow

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Tony Diamond can't remember exactly why he first shone a blacklight on a puffin. It was around 2010 or 2011, and the ecology professor was helping a graduate student investigate some questions about beak coloration. "For some reason, a colleague had brought a UV light," he says now. "We thought, 'Well, why don't we see what happens.'" So they pointed the light at the bird in question—a preserved specimen—and switched it on.

"We got a big surprise," Diamond says. Under the blacklight, parts of the bird's beak glowed brightly, as though it had been striped with fluorescent paint. Earlier this year, when another researcher, Jamie Dunning, posted photos of a similar discovery on Twitter, a CBC reporter compared the puffin's shiny nose with "a freshly cracked glowstick." "Puffins are lit," wrote one fan. "The most scene animals," agreed another.

Such a glowy nose is certainly impressive. But if you threw a best-dressed contest at an all-bird disco, puffins would have some competition. As it turns out, a lot of avian species—from parrots and penguins to owls and nightjars—glow in ways we can't see. What's more, they do so using at least two different methods—and for a whole lot of different reasons, some of which remain mysterious to researchers.

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To properly understand bird glowiness, you have to first understand ultraviolet light, and the various ways in which it makes things visible. Because of how the human eye is constructed, we can only see light made up of wavelengths that fall within what we call the "visible spectrum." This ranges from about 390 nanometers, which appears purple to us, to 700 nanometers, which appears red.

Ultraviolet (or UV) light is shorter than that—it ranges from about 100 to 400 nanometers. We can't see it, but a fair number of birds can access at least some of this part of the spectrum. Studies have shown that seeing in UV helps birds with all kinds of tasks, from finding food to differentiating their own eggs from those of nest parasites. Some, like grouses, use it to more effectively forage for bilberries, which start reflecting UV light when they're ripe. Others, like kestrels, use it to track voles, which apparently mark their paths with bright yellow trails of UV-saturated urine.

This brings us to the first type of secret bird brightness: UV reflection. "There are probably thousands of species of birds that have UV reflective patches on their plumage," explains naturalist Scott Weidensaul. These include starlings, many tropical songbirds, and a whole lot of types of parrot. It's difficult for us to imagine exactly what this looks like to the birds—because we can't see in UV, the sensory experience is inaccessible to us—but researchers with spectrometers have determined that these patches play a huge role in bird society.

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A male and female parrot that look identical to us, for example, might have UV patterns that make them look vastly different to each other. This influences mate selection—female blue tits, for example, prefer males with crests shined up with UV. And such signalling remains helpful even after the babies are made: many chicks have ultraviolet markings around their beaks, so that their parents know where to put the worms.

This, however, is not what's happening with the puffins. They are displaying a different type of glowy phenomenon: fluorescence. There are certain substances that, when exposed to UV light, absorb it rather than reflecting it. They then emit visible light in response, often in a surprising color. When you shine a blacklight at something and it suddenly pops, that's because it contains materials of this kind.

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Fluorescence, too, is not uncommon in the bird world. King and emperor penguins have glowing beaks, says Diamond, as do at least a few other species. (This article features a UV-illuminated crested auklet, its nose a vibrant orange.) Many parrots have fluorescent plumage, which, when combined with their UV-reflective patches, add even more pep to their mating displays.

Most owl species have fluorescent wings, a quirk that was also discovered accidentally, by a rat researcher named Bruce Colvin in the early 1980s. Colvin—who had fed rats a fluorescent material as part of an unrelated experiment—was shining a blacklight on owl pellets looking for glowing rodent bones when he noticed that the owls glowed, too.

"He quickly figured out that the fluorescence in the wing feathers correlates with the age of the feathers," says Weidensaul (who, with Colvin and a few others, later published an article about the technique). New feathers glow brightly, while older ones have lost some of their pigments, and so appear darker or duller under the blacklight.

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Now most researchers who band and track owls take a moment to check their age under a blacklight. "It's a combination of serious ornithology and a cheap party trick," he adds. "You turn off the lights, you turn on the blacklight, you show the owl's wing, and it's glowing this raspberry pink." (Other owls, he he adds, shine a deep blue or lavender instead, and snowy owls, lacking the correct pigment, don't glow at all.)

We may be able to see fluorescence under blacklights, and marshal it for our own research purposes. But in most cases, we're not quite sure what the birds themselves use it for. Unlike, say, parrots, owls probably can't even tell that their feathers are glowing—the moon doesn't emit enough UV light to kick off the fluorescent effect.

The puffin beaks present a similar mystery, one that researchers have just begun trying to solve. "They will see this differently than we do," says Diamond. "But we don't know how they see it, because we're not puffins." No matter how hard we try to imitate them at Burning Man.


Turtles Have Led Us to Their Secret Seagrass Meadows

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Far from shore, the ocean floor is more than an unbroken swath of sand and mud: It can be blanketed with lush, green carpets of seagrass. These wavy expanses are biodiversity hotspots and have significant ecological benefits, but because so little of the ocean has been surveyed and mapped, scientists don't know exactly where all of these green spaces are. “We know more about the surface of Mars than the ocean floor,” said American Museum of Natural History ichthyologist John Sparks at a recent event at the museum.

There’s a general consensus that these undersea meadows are numerous and widely dispersed in shallow and deeper water alike, since seagrasses can survive on fewer nutrients than some other plants can manage. But grasses growing far beneath the waves often go unstudied compared to those closer to shore. Since green turtles (Chelonia mydas) are known to nibble on seagrasses, researchers at Swansea University trailed them, with the idea that they might lead the way to their sunken grazing grounds.

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The scientists tagged turtles with GPS devices when the reptiles clustered to nest on shore, 18 in total. Satellite tracking then helped the researchers follow them—eventually to the Great Chagos Bank, a vast atoll in the Western Indian Ocean. With information about location and depth in hand, divers went to check out where the turtles were headed.

In this remote tract of ocean, the scientists found previously unknown meadows of a seagrass known as Thalassodendron ciliatum. Writing in Marine Pollution Bulletin, the researchers describe the abundance of marine life they encountered there—nearly a dozen fish species, including a large shark.

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Seagrass is a natural carbon sink, locking it up like terrestrial trees and a host of marine photosynthesizers, including salt marsh grasses, mangroves, kelp, and phytoplankton. One acre of seagrass swallows around 740 pounds of carbon each year, roughly the same amount released into the atmosphere by a car covering 3,860 miles. That adds up to as much as 80 million tons annually.

The trouble is that some of these sunken meadows are in bad shape—ships, pollution, and heatwaves can spoil them, and then out comes the carbon. A 2010 marine heat wave near Western Australia, for example, did serious damage to one of the biggest seagrass meadows. Australia didn't count these emissions in any official tallies of greenhouse gas emissions—but if it had, it would have increased their carbon budget about 20 percent, The Guardian reported. "Given how these habitats are threatened around the world, it's great to come across a pristine example of what seagrass meadows should look like," said coauthor Richard Unsworth, of Swansea University’s biosciences department, in a release.

Chances are there are many other seagrass meadows out there, and that has the authors looking on the bright side. "In an era of global climate change and reports of decline of seagrass, the discovery of extensive deep-water seagrass meadows of T. ciliatum on the Great Chagos Bank provides an example of optimism that vast areas of seagrass meadows remain unknown and will assist in providing resilience to future climate change and sea level rise," they write. To find and protect those places, the researchers suggest that others follow their lead and recruit megafauna as help. Turtles make great guides.

Sewing Kits, Umbilical Cords, and Mold: Here’s What You Keep in Royal Dansk Tins

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Several weeks ago, we asked Gastro Obscura readers to send in accounts of what they have found (or now keep) inside their Royal Dansk cookie tins. We were investigating a curiosity: The tins always seem to hold odd trinkets, and more often than not, cookies are nowhere to be found.

Nearly 250 of you wrote in, from El Salvador to South Africa, from Hanoi, Vietnam, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with tales of unearthing knickknacks and oddities. This often led to initial confusion for children: Why was there a cookie tin with no cookies lying around? But the result was often a sort of at-home treasure hunt—linked to memories and family—whose marvels far surpassed the momentary delight of biting into a butter cookie.

The overwhelming majority of readers—100 total—described finding sewing supplies inside their family’s cookie tins. (We accepted tins from any brand, but Royal Dansk were by far the most common.) The tendency to store sewing supplies is shared by grandparents, parents, and children cross-culturally. It’s so common that it’s the frequent fodder of Reddit subthreads, memes, and much-retweeted tweets. And as this account proves, it seems to be a century-old tradition:

My mom stored sewing supplies in her cookie tin. I didn't know it was a cultural phenomenon—at the time, I just thought it was kind of weird. Then, one day, I was cleaning out my grandparent's storage under the stairs and found a tin that had belonged to my grandmother's mother. And what was inside? Sewing supplies from the 1920s! I think it's funny how something so ubiquitous can be reused and recycled as storage for all kinds of things, be it personal mementos or common household goods.

–Prisca, Toronto, Canada

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Many people remember feeling dismayed to find sewing kits rather than cookies as children—and yet, they often picked up the habit themselves. It's now clearly a cross-generation practice:

I found sewing supplies and was very disappointed … [But now] I keep sewing supplies, and I've had it for 15 years.

–Anna Butiashvili, Tbilisi, Georgia

My family has always kept sewing materials and buttons in ours. When I moved out, I did the same with a small tin of Royal Dansk.

–Iva Yates, Ireland but am from Puerto Rico

Another 71 readers found buttons in their cookie tins—the second most commonly stored item. Several respondents described entire tins bursting with just buttons. Others discovered them alongside other stitching supplies, such as classic tomato pincushions, which suggests an extension of the sewing kit phenomenon. And much like the sewing supplies, the buttons often achieved a second life after their original owners passed on:

I keep the “family” button collection, which includes buttons going back to the 1900s and my great-grandma Mary. She saved every button, especially from coats, and reused everything! After her, my grandmother Ethel and my mom and now I add to it. I never use the oldest ones; they’re too sentimental. As kids, my sisters and I would use the large buttons as pretend money. I suppose I'll pass the tin on to my sister's daughter someday, as I have no kids of my own. I hope she'll treasure it as much as we did.

–Cndy, Central Oklahoma

How and when this trend started is a mystery. But there are some convincing explanations floating around. While Royal Dansk began manufacturing their tins in the 1960s, they weren't the first company to do so: The English biscuit maker Huntley and Palmers did in the 19th century. When travel across the pond started happening more frequently in the 20th century, people's hunger for the tins increased, as Smithsonian notes. So when these striking blue tins arrived, people saw them not as disposable, but rather as natural storage containers:

My paternal grandmother saved every button and kept them in a cookie tin. She survived the Depression as a young widow with a son to support and elderly parents who needed care, so waste-not-want-not was her mantra. Buttons were clipped from worn garments (only after years of mending) and saved in perpetuity in her button tin. As a child, I loved to look through the collection, find matches, and admire the vintage styles.

–Judith H Sumner, Worcester, Massachusetts

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Filling the tins with other cookies evolved into an obvious re-use, and 20 Gastro Obscura readers recounted stories of finding replacement snacks (usually homemade cookies) in the tins. Others repurposed the tins for flan, tortillas, or—as three Indonesian readers told us—a specific kind of cracker. “Usually I found Rengginang inside,” writes Nita Permata Kusuma. “Rengginang is a rice-cracker native to Indonesia.”

Of course, the tins frequently become containers for regifted cookies and transporting other foods. Along the way, they kickstart traditions, too:

A friend of ours from Moscow, Russia came here on business. In the town of Canela, as we went shopping in a chocolate store, our friend decided to buy a heart-shaped piece of chocolate (which had no filling, so it was quite fragile). He wondered aloud how to take it back home to his beloved without shattering it ... I exclaimed: "Denmark!" I rummaged home for a Royal Dansk tin and handed it to him. We tried fitting the heart inside it, but the tin's height was insufficient. In the end, he found another way involving bubble film, and the chocolate heart arrived unscathed.

In February, it was my turn to go to Moscow, and I decided to bring them an unopened tin, full of Royal Dansk cookies! They invited me to have dinner in their home, and as dessert we all ate the cookies, emptying it in one night. She, despite having liked the cookies, was a little bit confused about my enthusiasm for it: It was only then that he explained to her that such a tin had been one of our first attempts to secure the chocolate heart for its transatlantic trip. Afterwards, I asked them to uphold the tradition. I already wondered what interesting stuff they would keep in theirs!

–Germano Martinelli, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Every response confirmed the cookie tin’s staying power. Much of it appears to do with the pleasing, round shape of the tin, which applies to both Royal Dansk and other cookie-makers:

Mine is a vintage round blue "Wedgwood" Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin, and I use it to store a stack of clean facecloths for washing the face and wrinkles of my little messy pug after he's had a meal. A bonus is that the tin looks great in my blue and white kitchen!

–Lisa Baker, Alameda, California

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Aside from sewing supplies, many people reported finding curiosities such as skeleton keys, and keys that led to nowhere, in their family’s tins:

The cookie tin can of my childhood lived in the Cuarto de San Alejo. (A closet named after a saint, full of old stuff.) I don't know if it was every key to every door to every room of every house that my grandparents and parents had ever lived in, but that tin held easily 50 keys. I tried every key on every door. None worked.

–Camilo Forero, Bogotá, Colombia

Additional bits and baubles included (but weren’t limited to) wooden cameras, shark teeth, art supplies, rock collections, band patches, batteries, Tarot cards, pumpkin carving tools, church gloves, matchbooks, cards, dice, wires, pocket knives, small fortunes, jewels, and antique hair care supplies:

My aunt was a hairdresser in the early 1930s. When she died, we found a cookie tin under her bathroom sink. It contained metal hair clips of the spring-back, curved type, used by beauticians in the early part of the 20th century, to make the defined parallel waves of the "Marcel" hair style. Also in the tin were three loose, fairly large diamonds that my aunt had removed from the very old, broken rings she had inherited from her own aunt decades earlier.

–Jeannie, Ashland, Oregon

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Some tins held never-before-seen troves of family photos that survived disasters and death:

My father handed me a cookie tin about a year after my grandmother passed away. More valuable than anything, it contained pictures of me and my siblings. We had a fire in our house when I was a kid, and all photos of us as young children were destroyed. These photos that my grandmother kept were more precious than gold. I had never seen a baby picture of myself until I opened that tin. I made copies of some of the photos for my brothers and sister.

–Susan Ericson, Red Bank, New Jersey

A "tin type" photo of my brother who died just before his first birthday. Doyle was my parents’ first child, born in 1920.

–Sheila, Washington State

Others encountered more illicit offerings. Ashley, from Illinois, writes of finding “a bottle of vodka and a Bible." And Bee, hailing from California, is one of the handful of readers who found the family cannabis stash in a tin ("I knew she smoked. But the cookie tin? Really, mom?" she writes). Some tins became the sites of peculiar personal experiments, too:

When I was a kid, around 1970 or so, I kept my mold collection in a tin. One Christmas, after the cookies were gone, I put a few pieces of bread, cake, and other perishables in one. Then I left it in my closet for a year. The next Christmas, I opened it to see what had happened. There were molds of many different colors. I remember bright orange mold in particular. I added a few small pieces and sealed it up again for another year. This continued for about five years, until one Christmas, I went to check on the progress, and the metal had corroded away in a large section. All the mold had turned to black dust, and I decided that this was a sign to move on.

–Jon Peterson, Minneapolis, Minnesota

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We heard from a few people who discovered entire caches of tins, each home to a world of individual wonders:

My papaw (father's father) died in April of last year. While helping my daddy clean and sort through everything Papaw left behind (and Granny, who preceded him in death by four years), we found many Royal Dansk cookie tins. Many different things filled these tins: buttons and sewing supplies left by my Granny; packets of heirloom seeds from the garden started by my great-great-grandmother in the holler of Kentucky, labeled in my Papaw's tight penmanship; a time capsule my daddy had assembled as a kid, filled with photos, baseball cards, a bouncy ball, jacks, and a kazoo. And the most thrilling and special find of all ... My granny's wedding ring. The thin gold band given to her by my Papaw the day they wed over 60 years ago, placed in a tin the day she was buried, and forgotten in the ensuing years. Finding those tins was one of the best moments of my life, and I was so blessed and overwhelmed to have been there for that discovery.

–Rachael, Chandler, Arizona

Other readers stumbled upon more peculiar heirlooms—sometimes of the corporeal variety. Kris McElwee, of Paris, recalls finding “my grandmother's braid, cut off when she married,” in one tin. And someone found something they hadn’t seen since birth:

[The tin held] a sewing kit and mementos from my birth: my umbilical cord, my tag in the neonatal room, etc … Another cookie tin held letters from my dad to my mom from the time they made long distance, before me and my sister. That was cute.

–Victoria Mallorga, Lima, Peru

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What we learned from these responses is that these tins are continuously passed down, regardless of their contents, to family members, friends, and even new homeowners or strangers. It's become tradition to inherit a tin, just like old jewelry, mugs, or other mementos. More than anything, we discovered that the Royal Dansk cookie tin isn't going anywhere—even though it has instigated family feuds:

Some of our tins are at least as old as I am (38). It was my grandfather's tradition to send us a tin of cookies for Christmas—and our tradition of fighting over who got to fill the empty container after.

–Sarah J Moore, Fayetteville, Arkansas

Here at Atlas Obscura HQ, we're down to the last butter cookie in our Royal Dansk tin. We can’t wait to decide how to fill it again.

Found: 1,500-Year-Old Burnt Onion Linked to 'Sweden's Pompeii'

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On the Swedish island of Öland, at a ring fort called Sandby Borg, archaeologists have uncovered a peculiar brown bulb tucked near an old fireplace of a house.

“It looked like a big nut or something and initially we couldn’t tell what it was,” archaeologist and project leader Helena Victor told The Local.

She and her team sent the bulb to archaeobotanist Jens Heimdahl at The Swedish History Museum, who analyzed it. He discovered that the big nut was in fact a 1,500-year-old onion, and the oldest one ever found in Scandinavia. The previous record holder, found on the Danish island of Bornholm, was dated to around 650. It's unclear how the onion burned, but there are two possibilities. "Either the onion was charred during cooking," wrote Heimdahl, or "the onion was stored in the house and was burnt during its destruction."

According to Victor, in the fifth century, the people of Öland “didn't use onions in Scandinavia in cooking, but they did use them in the Roman Empire. I think it must have been imported. They probably saw it as some unique extra spice.”

They traded gold coins and jewelry with ancient Romans, but it seems they also traded vegetables.

Nicknamed “Sweden’s Pompeii” by researchers, Sandby Borg was the site of a mysterious fifth-century massacre. In 2013, Sweden’s Kalmar County Museum and Lund University researchers found the slaughtered remains of its inhabitants. They had been ambushed and butchered by unknown attackers in the middle of the night. Some bodies were “lying by the door as if they were running for the door and people were coming in,” said Helene Wilhelmson, one of the archaeologists. They were not buried, and left in their frozen terrorized state for centuries.

It’s possible, says Victor, that the raiders were looking for Roman gold rings and coins found last year at the ring fort. The onion further shows that the people had close links to the Roman Empire. The closest trading area was a Roman town called Noviomagus, which is now present-day Nijmegen in the Netherlands and over 621 miles away.

Archaeologists are continuing to dig for more clues about Sandby Borg, but for now, the onion has added a few more layers to the story of the ring fort.

There's Now a Space Mountain Named for Octavia Butler

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In the classic fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it takes Dorothy Gale just a few clicks of her heels to get from the Land of Oz all the way back to her home in Kansas. If Dorothy wanted to visit the crater that has been newly named after her, though, she'd have to travel a bit longer. On its closest day, Dorothy Crater is located over 2.6 billion miles away from Earth, on the surface of Charon, one of Pluto's moons.

It's one of a dozen features of Charon's surface recently granted official names by the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. The features, which include craters, canyons, and mountains, were first spotted by the New Horizons space probe, which flew by Pluto and its moons in 2015.

In 2017, the New Horizons team began accepting name suggestions for Charon's landscape under a few different themes, including "fictional and mythological vessels," "fictional and mythological voyagers," and "authors and artists associated with space exploration." (The moon itself is named after the ferryman who, according to Greek legend, rowed souls across the River Styx and into the underworld.)

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The first batch of results has come in, and the surface of Charon is now a who's-who of explorers that spans cultures, time periods, fiction and reality. Go west from Dorothy Crater, and you'll hit Nasreddin Crater, named for a trickster folk hero whose exploits are known throughout the Middle East.

Then you'll come to Pirx Crater, christened after a fictional spaceship pilot invented by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. Next is Caleuche Chasma, a canyon that shares a name with a mythological ghost ship that sails off the coast of Chile.

Some features honor real people—there's Butler Mons, named for the science-fiction author Octavia Butler, and Kubrick Mons, for the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Arthur C. Clarke—who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, among other classics—gets a whole mountain range, called Clark Montes. (You can find a full list of the names, and their inspirations, here.)

"The New Horizons team had been using many of the chosen names informally," the release explains, but the International Astronomical Union's working group has finally made them official. Charon's pretty far away, but adventurers like these can't be too surprised about where they ended up.

A Reprise for a 19th-Century Language Based on Music

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In the summer of 2017, modern-day devotees of Solresol, an obscure 19th-century attempt to craft a universal language based in music, applied for an ISO 639-3 code. A successful application would add Solresol—under the three-letter code “sud”—to the standardized registry of all known languages organized by SIL International, a non-profit that studies and catalogues languages. These supporters were seeking the formal recognition for Solresol that its creator was never granted in his own lifetime.

But in January 2018, the bid was declined. Shortly before last year’s application submission, SIL established stricter criteria for registration. In their official response (which mistakenly lists the incorrect year of the rejection), the organization stated, “Solresol does not appear to be used in a variety of domains nor for communication within a community which includes all ages. Therefore the current request for a code [sud] for Solresol has been rejected.”

“I believe the rejection was mostly a result of poor timing and maybe a bit of high hopes,” says Dan Parson, a musician who in 2011 founded Sidosi.org, a hub for Solresol resources and discussion. There, as well as on social media and chat apps, the community connects over grammar analysis, translation projects, and historical research.

But what allure does Solresol hold in the 21st century for people like Parson? To better understand that, it helps to know about the constructed language’s history and rules.

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In recent centuries, those who have sought to craft a universal language have done so by a variety of methods. The a posteriori approach usually draws together the vocabulary or grammar of a few common tongues, developing something like Esperanto in the process. An a priori language—one created from scratch—is often more scientific in its aims, seeking a taxonomic system to organize letters, words, and sentence structure.

But for Jean-François Sudre, a music teacher in 19th-century France, the goal was to reredore solresol—construct a language—from music.

Sudre’s vision of a universal language transcended linguistic boundaries. From written and spoken word to melody, gesture, number, and even color, there are few ways that one can't express Solresol, the language that Sudre spent more than three decades developing. But after his death in 1862, it was largely forgotten.

Fittingly, the global connections made possible by the digital age have forged a 21st-century life for Solresol. While books, such as Andrew Large’s 1985 The Artificial Language Movement, preserved general knowledge of the language’s history and structure, only over the past decade have websites, online communities, and education apps emerged to link hundreds of modern linguistic adventurers and music lovers through Sudre's life's work.

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"When I became seriously interested in Solresol, I think it was really the result of the community that had just started building up again," says Parson. As social technology has shifted, so has today's Solresol community, migrating from a pioneering Facebook group to Reddit, Discord, and Sidosi’s own forums.

But while supporters have made efforts on these digital platforms to use the language in conversation, most discussion, though focused on Solresol's grammar and vocabulary, occurs in English and other languages. Parson believes that moving Solresol beyond an intellectual exercise is key after the ISO bid rejection. “Though being told 'no' is always tough,” he says, “the obvious solution was just to start using Solresol more, as opposed to just talking about it."

But the complex construction of Sudre’s system may explain the hurdles it can present for users.

Solresol began life as a sort of code. In his 2001 book Banvard’s Folly, the writer Paul Collins details the language’s earliest developments. Sudre set out in the early 1820s to link the 12 notes of the Western chromatic musical scale—A through G and the sharps and flats in between—with existing letters, as well as hand signals, in a system he called Téléphonie. Though he promoted Téléphonie's use for long-distance audio communication—at that time, the maximum span across which a sound could carry—and reduced the system to four notes to accommodate a battlefield clarion, it garnered little real support from academic institutions or the French government.

Undaunted, Sudre soon settled on a middle ground between the clarion and chromatic approaches: a language based wholly on solfège, the familiar do-re-mi system where short syllables represent the seven notes of the diatonic scale, concluding with Si (the Romance language name for the final note that English speakers know as Ti). These seven syllables, both alone and in a vast array of combinations, were repurposed to form Solresol’s vocabulary; the musically adept could play or sing these notes, while others could simply take them at face value as a set of letters to be read or spoken. Simple tunes would now have a concrete meaning to listeners capable of connecting the melodies they heard with Sudre’s language.

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Because the repetitive nature of a language with only a handful of letter and sound combinations could easily become confusing, Sudre planned to cap Solresol at five-syllable words, yielding a potential lexicon of 11,732 words, according to Large’s book, although that number has been disputed. Meanwhile, users would rely on a system of vocal inflection and modifying syllables to distinguish between tenses and parts of speech.

Soon, Sudre’s concern with truly universal communication led him to seek methods of expressing Solresol even beyond sound and the written word. Visual hand signals, already present in Téléphonie, could also be communicated through touch, similar to the signing system Annie Sullivan would someday use to teach Helen Keller. And as Isaac Newton analogized the rainbow's seven colors to the musical scale, Sudre also saw a similar use for ROYGBIV, with red representing Do, orange Re, and onward from there.

At both public shows and the occasional private event across Western Europe, Sudre and a few fellow musicians demonstrated Solresol, successfully translating and communicating spontaneous offerings from audience members. According to Collins, the press covered Sudre’s endeavor and even notables, such as the novelist Victor Hugo and the composer Hector Berlioz, lauded the project. Still, the costs of touring—and of devoting the bulk of his time and energy to the unpaid labor of language creation—proved a financial drain, and as of Sudre’s death, Solresol had failed to earn any kind of official recognition.

His widow Josephine, contributing her own notes, took the first step towards preserving her husband's legacy with the 1866 publication of his grammar and vocabulary manuscript, Langue Musicale Universelle. And in 1902, the Solresol devotee Boleslas Gajewski published a grammatical guide praising the language's simplicity, even for those with little musical ability.

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Over the 20th century, these volumes survived as little-read artifacts. Solresol's turning point came in the 21st century, when new enthusiasts created and shared digitized copies of the books, while others contributed easy-to-read translations and lexicons, now hosted at the Solresol Revival Project. The language slowly shifted from mysterious curiosity to real linguistic endeavor.

But having access to the primary resources is only the first step in mastering Solresol’s idiosyncrasies. While the one-, two-, and three-syllable words in Solresol are loosely grouped according to their common usage, with pronouns, articles, and time units among the earliest words incorporated, Sudre introduced another level of complexity with Solresol’s four-syllable vocabulary. Starting here, a word's "key," or first syllable, is used to classify these word groups into seven families—Do through Si—encompassing very general topics like human life, industry, and government and administration. Some oppositional concepts, like laziness (mifamifa) and activity (famifami), are cleverly illustrated by reversed syllables, though it’s no hard and fast rule—see, for example, sidosido (to centralize) and dosidosi (eggs).

Unfortunately, Sudre left behind only one set of five-syllable words—under the category "animal, vegetable, and mineral"—with no comment on his plans for the other six sets. Modern Solresol users working to grow the dictionary face two major questions: Should the remaining thousands of potential new words continue to be classified according to a key syllable, and should words with opposite meanings be reversals of one another? Parson notes a conflict between the principles, offering the example of domifasi (strength), under the four-syllable Do class of human life, versus sifamido (weakness), a stretch for Si's government category. With Sudre’s heavier preference for categorization by key syllable, says Parson, it's the more likely rule to stand.

Sudre's rigorous categorization also had the effect of crystallizing Solresol in time, specifically the 19th century. Despite the many five-syllable combinations remaining, his original lexicon has already maximized its shorter, simpler possibilities, in some cases reserving words for now outdated or obscure terms, such as various French government positions. Furthermore, commenters in Solresol's digital communities have highlighted its failure to address concepts fundamental to inclusive discourse today, like means of identifying one's race or sexual orientation.

Despite such conundrums, Solresol still can function as a whimsical code between its users, with social networks offering the first chance for many lovers of an eccentric language to meet others of a like mind. And community can lead to creation: Enthusiasts have crafted poetry, song, and even knitting patterns based on the notes and colors of the system.

For Parson, the opportunity to shed light on a forgotten life’s work propels his dedication to promoting Sudre’s language. “What drew me and has kept me drawn to advancing Solresol and its community is to give Solresol the second chance it deserves,” he says.

If 19th-century fans offered little more than praise for Sudre’s work, today’s enthusiasts are motivated to take more concrete steps. “I think Solresol can succeed in spite of those who offer[ed] only superficial support,” says Parson.

So now the community presses on with plans for more accessible Solresol resources, wider promotion and, of course, increased practical use. The goal is to better meet the new ISO 639-3 standards for a future bid.

And perhaps one day, as Sudre dreamed, many more will find understanding Solresol as easy as redodo-remimi-refafa.

The Forgotten Nazi History of ‘One-Pot Meals’

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On October 1, 1933, Germans sat down to an unusually frugal Sunday lunch. For decades, even centuries, the norm had been a roast dinner, usually characterized by a great, bronzed hunk of animal, flanked by potatoes. This was the crowning glory of the week—a meal to be savored and celebrated. But that day, nine months after the Nazis first came to power, Germans ate simple, inexpensive food. Some ate Irish stew; others steaming pots of pea soup, made with Speck and dried beans. Another common dish was macaroni Milanese, a stodgy predecessor to mac and cheese flecked with a confetti of rosy ham. All these dishes had three important things in common: They were inexpensive; they were made in a single pot; and they had been officially sanctioned by the Nazis.

This was the Eintopfsonntag campaign—a Nazi push to make German families eat one-pot meals. Eventually, it would endure well into the Second World War and popularize these stews, soups, and pilafs in Germany for generations to come.

The impetus was an annual charity drive, the Winterhilfswerk, run by the Nazis to feed and clothe veterans and the poor throughout the winter. Wealthier Germans were expected to pitch in as much as they could, but actually getting people to cough up cash had proven challenging. So, in October 1933, the Nazis developed a new campaign centered around these one-pot meals.

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On the first Sunday of every month, they decreed, every German family should replace their traditional roast with a thriftier one-pot meal—an Eintopf, from the German ein Topf, or “one pot”—and set aside the savings for the charity drive. On those Sunday afternoons, collectors around the country knocked on doors to recuperate the money. Even families who didn’t want to cook were expected to join in: Restaurants were legally obligated to offer appropriately inexpensiveEintopf meals at a reduced rate on the designated Sundays.

At least initially, Eintopfsonntagen were quite popular. People seem to have enjoyed the challenge of finding meals that fit the bill, and the campaign raised hundreds of thousands of Deutsche Marks for charity.

Its popularity was aided by extensive government efforts. As gatekeepers to the German kitchen, housewives and mothers were especially targeted. In time, a whole genre of cookbooks for these kinds of recipes appeared, bolstered by suggestions in magazines and newspapers for one-pot meals. Sauerkraut with lard and broad beans was a classic example—traditional, inexpensive German food that used scraps of meat to canny effect. The government even released children’s books about Eintopf and promotional photos of Adolf Hitler sitting down to a steaming pot of stew. The message was clear: Everyone is doing this, and participation is a national obligation.

In fact, while Hitler officially supported the campaign, he probably did not participate privately. By 1937, he was known internationally as a vegetarian, and had likely been eating a mostly plant-based diet for some time. While Eintopf meals were occasionally meatless, they often featured some bacon or beef. On top of that, Hitler vacillated between preferring a raw diet—he blamed cooked foods for cancer—or extravagant vegetarian meals, occasionally set off with spoonfuls of caviar. Eintopf recipes, on the other hand, were plain, stodgy, and always served hot.

But charity and thrift do not fully explain the Nazis’ zeal for one-pot meals. There was an equally important allegorical element: A single pot meal was democratic and accessible, blurring class lines and undermining bourgeois eating culture. All across the country, Nazi propaganda materials theorized, people of the same race would eat the same diet at the same time: common sacrifice for a common purpose. More than that, writes Alice Weinreb in Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany, “Cooking in ‘one pot’ (ein Topf) was supposed to symbolize the Nazi creation of ‘one people’ (ein Volk), the crafting of a delicious casserole by combining diverse ingredients analogous to the uniting of the various native German peoples into a single and self-sustaining whole.” (Of course, this so-called diversity—Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon—was as limited and homogenous as many of the suggested dishes.)

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To take part in Eintopfsonntag, Germans had to experience deprivation for the good of the collective—a common, unifying Nazi theme. In a 1935 speech, Hitler castigated those who did not take part or give as much as they could to the Wintershilfswerk: “You have never known hunger yourself or you would know what a burden hunger is,” he said. “Whoever does not participate is a characterless parasite of the German people.” Those who greedily refused a day’s abstinence were said to be “stealing” from the collective. As one regional report put it, “Just as faithful Christians unite in the holy sacrament of the Last Supper in service of their lord and master, so too does the National Socialist Germany celebrate this sacrificial meal as a solemn vow to the unshakeable people’s community.”

What went into the country’s pots was equally symbolic. Eintopf recipes favored indigenous ingredients—root vegetables, dried fruit, German pork—and Nazi nutritionists claimed that the best way to nourish the Aryan body was through a racially appropriate diet. In practice, this meant German-grown potatoes and produce. One officially sanctioned cookbook was entitled: “Housewives, Now You Must Use What the Field Gives You! Healthy, Nourishing Meals from Native Soil.”

The aesthetic of Eintopfsonntag similarly drew from a kind of manufactured nationalist nostalgia. Outside of certain northern regions, Eintopf meals had not been popular before the campaign, and the word was unheard of before 1930. Yet publicity campaigns included sentimental images of one-pot meals, eaten in the trenches of the First World War, and rosy-cheeked peasant families tucking into bowls of stew. In the simplicity of an Eintopf meal, Nazis presented a romantic, bourgeois view of some radical, agrarian future.

Over time, however, people grew disillusioned with the campaign. The rich wanted their lavish roasts back, and the poor resented the loss of income. In the underground press, countercultural cartoons criticized the Eintopf obligation. “Which Eintopf dish is the most widespread in Germany?” asked one. The answer: Gedämpfte Zungen. Zungen means “tongues,” and Gedämpfte means both “steamed” and “silenced.” Eventually, amid the chaos of the Second World War, the campaign petered out.

In the end, however, Eintopfsonntagen proved more consequential than the Nazis likely anticipated. More than 80 years later, Eintopf dishes remain popular in modern Germany, and the word is still commonly used—though with scarcely a thought to its strange, racially charged origins.

A Digital Look at Darwin’s Trove of Prehistoric Fossils

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The year was 1832. It was decades before Charles Darwin would compile his field notes into a treatise on natural selection, and the naturalist was obsessed with fossils. On the second day ashore at Punta Alta, Argentina, Darwin didn’t return to the Beagle until long after nightfall. He was busy poking and prodding at a cliff—and when he did finally board, it was with a new shipmate: the fossilized skull of Megatherium, a massive ground sloth roughly the size of a modern elephant.

As the ship drifted from one South American port to another, Darwin stockpiled mandibles, molars, skulls, and other bones. Many of these he extracted from rocks himself, or with the help of his shipmates. A few others were purchased. A shilling and a sixpence seemed like a fine price to pay for a skull from Toxodon platensis—a rhino relative—purchased from a now-unknown owner on a farm in Uruguay. When it surfaced in a stream after a deluge, “locals believed it to be giant’s bones,” says Jennifer Pullar of the digital collections team at London’s Natural History Museum. Afterwards, “children had been using the skull as target practice using stones to knock out its teeth.”

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Darwin’s haul of fossils made its way back to England, and fanned out to different collections. The Megatherium ended up at the Royal College of Surgeons, with a slice going to Down House, Darwin’s home. The Toxodon skull, along with 100 other bones or fragments, landed at the Natural History Museum—and now, the museum is putting it online, part of a series of high-res 3D images to be perused by visitors and researchers alike.

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The first scans went up this week. Richly detailed digital versions will open up an avenue for researchers or curious clickers to scrutinize the fragile fossils from a distance—and free up the museum to destroy small portions of the originals to perform DNA analysis.

The project also highlights just how wondrous Darwin found fossils to be. In a new book, Darwin’s Fossils: The Collection That Shaped the Theory of Evolution, Adrian Lister, a researcher in Earth sciences at the Natural History Museum, chronicles Darwin's fascination. “I have just got scent of some fossil bones of a Mammoth,” the naturalist wrote in a letter. “What they may be, I do not know, but if gold or galloping will get them, they shall be mine.”

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In a letter to his sister Caroline, Darwin marveled at the way fossilized bones “tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue.” Years later, under the gaze of more sophisticated imaging technologies, the fossils have fresh tales to tell.


Why Myrtle Beach Takes Mini-Golf So Seriously

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In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, you can check yourself into a campsite or RV resort with its own mini-golf course. You can drive for an hour along “the Grand Strand” on the state-long Highway 17 and hit a mini-golf course every few minutes. You can choose between 50 courses within the span of 30 miles.

Myrtle Beach may be the golf capital of the world, but it’s also the self-proclaimed mini-golf capital of the world. Not only are there more mini-golf courses per square mile than in any other city in the United States, but Myrtle Beach is also home turf for the ProMiniGolf Association’s annual “Master’s” tournament. For the past 20 years, the association’s president has even been working on getting the sport into the Olympics. Those are big dreams for a game that was initially considered “fake golf,” a diminutive version of “real golf” that was more attraction than sport.

Not many people visit Myrtle Beach solely for a mini-golf weekend as they do in heaps for regular golf, though they might consider it. There are storylines to follow, worlds to travel through, heights to ascend, and Easter eggs to surprise along the way.

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One of the first mini-golf courses came to Myrtle Beach on Highway 17 in the heart of the city, adjacent to the first hotel and the amusement pavilion, in June 1930. It wasn’t alone—it was around this time when courses were opening across the U.S. The sudden spark was thanks to Garnet Carter, who owned a golf course and inn at Fairyland, his property near Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In 1926, Carter and his wife Frieda built a mini-golf course to keep wives and children entertained while men were off on his larger course. However, this wasn’t just a miniature version of regular golf, as others had been up to that point: There were hollowed-out logs, rock tunnels, fairy statues, and obstacles. In the end, it was more profitable than his other offering. After he patented and franchised “Tom Thumb Golf” in 1927, named after the English folk character, thousands of similar attractions popped up across the country.

But as with all leisure activities popular with Americans in the 1920s—mahjong, flagpole sitting—the Great Depression squashed mini-golf into a short-run fad. While pockets of Tom Thumbs and mom-and-pop courses could be found where space was cheap, in Myrtle Beach, real estate developers saw mini-golf as an important part of their grand, long-term plan.

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Before the turn of the century, the development company Burroughs and Collins envisioned building a main street that would turn the sleepy fishing village into a “vacation playground” to rival Coney Island in New York or Atlantic City in New Jersey. It’d be close to the beach and full of reasonably priced attractions. In 1900, the company built the first railroad that connected Myrtle Beach to western and northern parts of the Carolinas.

Then, in 1926, the mogul John T. Woodside from Greenville, North Carolina, invested his millions to pave Highway 17, which was chosen as the burgeoning town’s main street. He also built Myrtle Beach’s first golf course.

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Word of this vacationland spread swiftly—thanks in large part to the efforts and investments of the same developers. A 1935 promotional magazine called Myrtle Beach, Today and Tomorrow touted the town as “one of those ‘unique’ resorts where there is always something to do; someplace to go; something different to see other than the usual beach activities.” Mini-golf was one of those hyped attractions.

For businessmen, it also glimmered of a great idea to get rich quick. Mini-golf courses could be built and maintained at a fraction of the cost of regular courses (you don’t need as much land or labor, and you don’t have greens to water and mow), and with the town in development, there were plenty of people in Myrtle Beach who could build one for you.

While the West Coast had elaborate courses influenced by Hollywood, the East Coast courses of the late 1940s and early 1950s were smaller and more straightforward because of their shorter playing season and climate. They were still prominent, though: A number of “carpet golf” courses, which were fairly flat and with few decorations, were built in Myrtle Beach’s oceanfront amusement pavilion, where “everything that is Myrtle Beach...all started,” according to Will Moredock in the book Banana Republic Revisited.

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But because the town had tourists pouring in and a longer vacation season than most places along the East Coast, course owners grew to have the revenue and reason to invest in flashy special effects. Take one of those oceanside carpet golf courses: Before it was torn down in the 1980s to make way for a shopping complex, the fairly standard course was remodeled with a global theme by the developers who brought some of the first jungle-themed courses to the area. Not only did Around the World in 18 Holes stand out because every few holes represented a different part of the world, but some holes, such as the one for Tibet, were elevated.

By the 1970s, a local style had been established that could be found in Myrtle Beach and south along the Eastern Seaboard. The architectural historian John Margolies describes “Myrtle Beach Style” in the book Miniature Golf as “characterized by large central rockeries made of sprayed synthetic rock over which water, dyed blue or gold, cascades dramatically... Invariably a jungle atmosphere is invoked, replete with palm trees, thatched huts, and fiberglass ‘wild animals.’”

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With so many courses densely packed into a small area, businesses have to stay competitive to stay in business. And in Myrtle Beach, staying competitive means building the largest, most imaginative, most over-the-top putting greens.

Take Mount Atlanticus Mini Golf, just a block north of the location of that bygone first mini-golf course, which likely closed to make way for the expanding amusement pavilion. Its sun-bleached sign reads Mount Atlanticus Minotaur Goff (as the story goes, the course was built 50,000 years ago by a minotaur named Goff) and juts in front of towering huts, an ocean-blue waterfall, and an oasis of palm trees.

The mini-golf course was built in 1999 for a reported whopping $3 million in what was previously the Chapin Company department store. Some holes are four stories up, and the last hole—down a long, impossibly narrow green surrounded by water—is so hard that if you ace it, you get a lifetime pass.

Mini-golfers start their game indoors, where they’re greeted by a rendering of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, in which God, with his hair coiffed and shirt unbuttoned, quite resembles George Michael. They then wade through the lagoon, which has sea monsters, lily pads, giant Venus flytraps, and real koi fish. After the lagoon and the ice cave, there’s the land of tiki: holes on elevated huts with raffia rustling in the wind, lily pad obstacles, even a view of the ocean.

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The snazzy special effect at Hawaiian Rumble, a course 12 miles down the Grand Strand, is a 40-foot volcano that shoots fire every 20 minutes. Even so, its owner, Bob Detwiler, president of the ProMiniGolf Association, says he’s constantly upgrading. All of his courses have exotic tropical birds (he rescues and rehabilitates them) and turtles (he raises and sells them). Every spring, he brings in two semi-loads of hibiscus. Other courses have employed boats, airplanes, plot lines, indoor courses, and booze.

One of Detwiler’s newer courses, Aloha, also has a shooting volcano, but this particular location’s main allure isn’t all eye candy. Detwiler, who designed the course himself, incorporated elements of professional golf courses, a budding trend he’s finding as mini-golf is taken more seriously. For Aloha, this meant sloping greens, rock barriers made of concrete, and carpet “that’s as close as you can get to grass.”

“You have to keep up,” he cautions.

Meanwhile, Captain Hook’s Adventure Golf lures you from the street: Mermaids wave at passersby, and a human skull has smoke coming out of its eye sockets. Once you start to play, the voices of Peter Pan and Captain Hook egg you along over the speakers. During the run of your game, you’ll journey under waterfalls and through caverns (Tinkerbell’s locked up in one), hike up a mountain to hang out with the Lost Boys (Peter Pan’s sitting in a tree), and even play one hole on Captain Hook’s ship. The course is often packed, even in the off season.

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Even with Myrtle Beach’s plentiful other attractions, mini-golf remains popular for tourists and businesses alike. Detwiler claims mini-golf in Myrtle Beach is a $25-million-a-year industry, and the annual US ProMiniGolf Association Master's tournament—“the Augusta National of mini-golf”—alone brings in one or two million dollars annually.

The success of the game in Myrtle Beach isn’t frivolous or a fluke—those developers’ plan from the 1920s has worked: Burroughs and Collins is now Burroughs and Chapin, which owns a huge amount of land in Myrtle Beach (including many mini-golf courses). They continue to create family-friendly attractions that pull in tourists of all ages. For two years in a row, a record number of visitors have flown to the area.

But mini-golf hasn’t thrived just because it’s a smart business move—it also brings wholesome escape to an otherwise slightly seedy, Ferris-wheelin’ beach town. According to a 2015 economic impact study, more people visit a mini-golf course in Myrtle Beach than amusement parks. Anyone—whether sunburnt, exhausted, terrible at golf, tight on cash, or stuck with Grandma—can play a round or 50 on constantly-improving courses. They can journey to Mt. Atlanticus, Neverland, Hawaiian paradise, or almost any other fantasy they can dream up, all along one stretch of highway in South Carolina.

Found: A Mummified Monkey in the Ceiling of a Department Store

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When you're renovating an old building, you expect to find some strange things hiding. Maybe there's an old report card someone slipped into the floor, or some cool out-of-date candy wrappers. Maybe there's a secret room or two. Or maybe there's an entire monkey, mummified by time, hanging out in the ceiling.

As the Old Minneapolis Facebook page first reported, construction workers remodeling Dayton's Department Store discovered the petrified primate earlier this week. Since then, people from all over the state, including the mayor of a nearby suburb and the governor of Minneapolis, have been clamoring to offer explanations for its presence. It seems this mystery—like the monkey—goes all the way to the top.

Dayton's Department Store was founded way back in 1902. While it eventually spread to 19 locations, its flagship store is "literally at the center of Minneapolis," explains Adam Freed, one of the administrators of the Old Minneapolis Facebook page. People who grew up in the city have plenty of memories there, whether it's of riding the escalators up and down or visiting Santa in the eighth-floor auditorium space during the holidays.

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So when Freed found the user-submitted photo and reposted it to the main page, asking members to help solve "The Mystery of the Mummified Monkey," they jumped into action. "Finding a carcass of a mummified animal in the bones of a well-loved old department store certainly is appropriate for the site," says Freed. "But it's not typical." Many offered theories. One recalled a circus on the building's top floor. Another mentioned her boyfriend's long-ago lost pet.

By Tuesday night, Freed says, they'd gotten a few stories that seemed to mesh. The first came from Steven Laboe, who had heard it from a Dayton's old-timer. "He told me about the monkey who had escaped from the 8th floor pet store," Laboe wrote. "They found the cage empty on a Monday… and finally determined that the monkey had escaped in the air conditioning duct work… Someone complained about a horrible odor a few hours later." And then, apparently, everyone forgot.

Soon after, other readers provided details. One was Regan Murphy, now the mayor of the nearby city of Robbinsdale. Murphy tweeted that his father, Larry Murphy, had "stolen a monkey from a Dayton's display back in the 60s." After it "shat all over my Dad's friend's bedroom," he continued, they "returned" their new pet by releasing it into the store. "This is probably that monkey."

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Larry has since passed away, as has the aforementioned accomplice, Tom Netka—but Netka's daughter, Bonnie Sheridan, sent Old Minneapolis a video of her dad talking about taking the monkey. According to the video, he snuck it out in his jacket and kept it in his room for a couple of days. "He ran around and wouldn't stop pooping," he says, twirling a finger above his head. "Just kept on going." ("Grandpa, did you really steal a monkey?" a small child asks at one point. "That's not nice.")

On Wednesday, the Governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, threw a bit of a wrench into the proceedings by offering up his own story. Dayton is the great-grandson of George Draper Dayton, who founded the department store in the first place, and worked there in the summer of 1968. He said at an (unrelated) press conference that the store put up a rainforest display and was surprised when the monkeys started eating the birds. In the process of separating the two, he continued, they lost a primate, who escaped into the ceiling.

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Freed—who, as he tells me, has spent "the last three days of my life fielding media inquiries about a monkey"—prefers the first story. He has been paying careful attention to all theories offered, and if you stack Netka, Murphy, and Leboe's tales together, he says, they add up. "They're consistent in almost all ways," says Freed. "The timing, the timeline... it doesn't lead itself to obvious suspicion." If you ask him how the monkey got up into the ceiling, his money is on the pair of preteen boys.

He's now trying to track down more details about the next phase of the story: the discovery. Freed eventually learned who found the monkey, he says, and sent him some questions. "I said to him, 'You're the guy who found it, what was that like? Were you surprised? Did it come at you out of nowhere?'" he says. "He never responded." The person who posted the photo, too, has gone quiet. "It might take another 50 years for these two guys to come and tell their story." But when they do, the Old Minneapolis Facebook group will be waiting.

The Overlooked Wonders of Soviet-Era Industrial Design

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From domestic appliances to clothing to children’s toys, everyday items from Soviet life are the subject of the new book Designed in the USSR: 1950 - 1989. It’s a comprehensive look at a momentous four decades, in which otherwise mundane products often had an additional purpose: to replicate items from the West, or to promote Soviet achievements.

The Saturnas vacuum cleaner did both. Entirely spherical and encircled by a beige-colored ring, it was released in 1962, the year after the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to travel into outer space. This mini-planet cleared dust from the floor, while its form reminded its user of the USSR’s space capabilities. It was also based on an existing American product, Hoover’s Constellation vacuum cleaner, which was released in 1955.

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“There were ‘sample product rooms,' where Western examples of industrial products were displayed, often serving as prototypes for their Soviet equivalents,” writes Alexandra Sankova in the book’s introduction. Sankova is the director of the Moscow Design Museum, which first displayed these items in an exhibition in 2012. For her, the Soviet era from the 1950s onwards was an important period of design history, “when function and utility were the driving forces behind ideas but remarkable examples of innovation and creativity still flourished.”

Yet in the context of the Soviet system, such creativity was not always celebrated. “There existed a veritable army of professional designers who were mentioned only on pay slips and industrial certificates," writes Sankova. “Instead, manufacturers employed so-called ‘artistic engineers’ who were responsible for the visual appearance of their products."

Some of the products featured in the book have since become iconic, such as the Nevalyaskha roly-poly dolls that righted themselves to an upright position. Others remained as prototypes, such as the Belka A50 compact car, which had a stub-nosed front and a bubble-shaped roof. And some have enjoyed a second life in post-USSR Russia: cosplayers have been known to use the top half of a Saturnas vacuum cleaner as medieval helmets. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book.

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Found: A 19th-Century Slaughterhouse Beneath a Former Nightclub

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The underground scene found below the permanently closed Silk Nightclub in Edinburgh was not one CFA Archaeologists were expecting.

BBC Scotland News reports that Bruce Glendinning and his team from CFA, a cultural heritage company, unearthed a well-preserved 19th-century slaughterhouse and well during the club's demolition. The site is located just outside the city’s walls, which makes sense given the Edinburgh Slaughterhouse Act of 1850 prohibited private slaughterhouses for three miles outside the city limits.

The layout and materials of the foundations "tells us how it looked inside with cobbled floors and the different floors and how the drains worked so they could sluice the blood away,” Glendinning told BBC Scotland News.

Construction contractor Bowmer and Kirkland and CFA excavated and took "detailed photographic, survey, and written records" of the slaughterhouse, says Glendinning. The well, however, will remain preserved, backfilled with clean gravel, and "then a concrete cap will be cast over it" before construction starts on a hotel, student housing, and homes.

Why Are Bananas, Nuts, and Crackers the Only Foods That Say 'Crazy'?

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There is an episode from the 1972 first season of the television show M*A*S*H titled “Bananas, Crackers, and Nuts.” In it, Hawkeye decides to secure a rest and recuperation break from the war by faking insanity, which he does by, among other things, pretending to be in love with another man. (It’s not a good episode in terms of social awareness.) The three foodstuffs in the episode’s title are the only three in American English that can also mean “crazy.”

It’s worth noting that in this article—as in the M*A*S*H episode—we will not be very specific in defining the word “crazy,” largely because the terms we’re looking at here are not in themselves specific. Calling someone “nuts” isn’t exactly a diagnosis. We’re also not really examining the history of the way people talk about mental illness. What we’re doing is looking at a linguistic blip: How did three, and only three, food-related terms become shorthand for mental illness?

There are reasons, or at least guesses, for the winding path these three terms took. But their etymologies are not related, and show just how weird and broken and non-systematic language can be. To put it in another, definitely worse way: What if….it’s language itself….that is bananas, crackers, and/or nuts?

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Let’s get started with “banana.” The earliest records of the banana plant come from Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea, but the word probably comes from the West African language Wolof; bananas have been grown in West Africa for thousands of years. The fruit was first brought to the New World in 1516, by Portuguese sailors, where it became widely grown throughout the tropics.

There are a few ideas about how the word banana, and the phrase “go bananas,” became a way to indicate craziness. More specifically, though, to go bananas means to lose control; it is a temporary insanity, one that usually has a known cause. You are not born having gone bananas.

The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English traces the idea of bananas relating to craziness only back to the late 1910s; The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English roughly agrees, with its own etymology going back to 1924. These sources claim that the crazy banana meaning comes from the phrase “banana oil,” which, in flapper slang, meant “nonsense.”

Typically, the substance referred to as banana oil is amyl acetate, which is, insanely, used as both a paint solvent and as a flavoring. (It smells strongly, but not precisely, of bananas, which is partly why banana-flavored candies are distinct but not really banana-flavored.) Why did flappers like to use the phrase “banana oil” to mean “nonsense”? Possibly it’s related to “snake oil,” but I suspect it’s also because the word “banana,” coming from a language that has not given English very many words, sounds unusual to the ears of English speakers.

In any case, use of the phrase “banana oil” died out for a few decades. But by the early 1960s, using the word “bananas” for something crazy had come back. A 1957 Li’l Abner cartoon used the phrase in roughly the modern way, and it soon caught on in counterculture language. (Tom Wolfe used it a few times.)

An oft-cited alternate explanation is that, when monkeys are presented with a bunch of bananas, they will go crazy in anticipation. Studies indicate that captive primates do like bananas, but not notably more than other fruits; a 1936 study found that the tested monkeys preferred grapes. In the U.S. and Western Europe, both bananas and monkeys are associated with the tropics, and thus with each other; it’s likely that the tighter association came from the initial publishing of the Curious George books in the 1940s. In any case I don’t really buy it; monkeys are associated with bananas, sure, but in sort of a cute, fun way, not in a way that lends itself to the word “bananas” meaning a lack of self-control. Going bananas is neither cute nor fun.

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The word “nut” is a complete mess; there are several times more definitions of the word than there are letters in it. Here’s just a short list of those. A nut can be:

  1. A crazy person.
  2. A hard-shelled fruit-and-seed combo.
  3. A category of various seeds and drupes which are not technically nuts as seen in Definition Number 2.
  4. A testicle.
  5. A piece of metal with a hole in it which is screwed onto a bolt.
  6. Semen (as a noun) or to ejaculate (as a verb).
  7. An enthusiast of something.
  8. A person’s physical head.
  9. A person’s metaphorical head, or mental state.
  10. A sum of money required to set up a business.
  11. An exclamation roughly equivalent to “darn it!” (Plural only, for this one.)

There are even more than that! (Apparently there’s something called a “nut flush” in poker.) In any case, the word “nut” has to be in the running for most possible definitions of a single word in the entire English language.

Several of these definitions come back to the physical description of the botanical nut: a hard, vaguely roundish outer shell with something valuable and/or delicious inside. In this way it’s pretty obvious how the word “nut” could be applied to the human skull. To be “nuts about” someone, or something, means that thoughts about that person are thoroughly embedded in your head. That definition dates back, according to some sources, as early as 1785.

Coming later is the idea of nuts as crazy; that use was first seen in 1908, in a newspaper comic strip called Mutt and Jeff. To be “off one’s nut” meant to be separated from your head, and thus your senses. That eventually was shortened to the current use, in which someone can simply be “nuts.”

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The word “cracker,” or “crackers,” has significantly different definitions depending on which national form of English you speak. For North Americans, as a food, it is a hard, flat, savory baked good. In the U.S., it’s also a derogatory word for poor white people, albeit sort of outdated. In the U.K., a cracker is a noisemaking paper cylinder most often seen at Christmas—Americans do not really have this—or a good example of something, as in “that’s a cracker of a pudding.” And of course no matter where you are, something can be cracked, meaning slightly but not completely broken.

The U.K. also has the option to “drive someone crackers,” which is pretty similar in meaning to going bananas, or driving him nuts. It was first seen in soldier reports from World War I, but it’s sort of hard to figure out whether these early uses were using the word to mean “crazy.” The word is sometimes used to describe things that are loud; think of firecrackers. It’s also used to mean “break into,” coming from that idea of something that is slightly broken—just broken enough to grant access. You’ll see that usage in the word “safecracker.”

In any case, it’s most likely that the word derived from a peculiar mutation within British English which is commonly associated with public schools. In some instances, nouns and adjectives can be made informal with the addition of the ending -er or -ers. Rugby, or a person who plays rugby, can be altered to “rugger.” Instead of being pregnant, you can be “preggers,” and instead of eating breakfast, you can eat “brekkers.”

I think it’s most likely that “crackers” came from this change; the word “cracked,” before that point, had been used to indicate craziness. Cracked, in most senses, means appearing almost whole, but in fact being broken. Until very recently—and, in many cases, still today—this was a pretty common understanding of mental illness, if a wildly incorrect and insensitive one. “Unbalanced,” “troubled,” “disturbed,” these are all essentially ways of saying that something is wrong. Cracked, too. It’s not a tremendously helpful way of understanding mental illness, as a society, but it is pervasive.

That means, funnily enough, that “driving someone crackers” does not actually have anything to do with the food known as a cracker. Which makes sense! In the U.K., after all, it’s called a biscuit.

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