You’ll go bananas for these ‘grape’ fruit facts. No, really, they’re very a-peeling. How’d’ya like them apples?
It’s okay, I’ve stopped now. You can start reading again.
We’re bringing Thursday fun ‘n’ facts right back to where it belongs (you know, Thursdays), and so this week I’ve carefully researched some gently amusing facts about fruit, because why not.
And by carefully researched, I absolutely mean saw it on the internet and then wrote it down.
1) Apricots are Evil
Now me, I like apricots. I think they’re one of our more underrated fruit. But that was before I know that they were stone-cold killers out to destroy the human race. You know what apricot kernels contain?
Cyanide.
Those malevolent little orange villains! Apparently there’s enough cyanide in 15 apricot kernels to kill a child. Thankfully, it’s been a while since I’ve had the urge to eat 15 apricot kernels all at once, but when that day comes, it’s going to be an extremely sad day (at least for me).
Thankfully, those nice bags of dried apricots in your supermarket already have the kernels taken out, so you don’t need to worry about your apricots springing out to attack you with a kalashnikov. Once the kernel’s out, they’re lovely really. AND, if you stick them on a kebab skewer with some chunks of lamb, and cook ‘em under the grill for a few minutes, they taste absolutely amazing. Bonus recipe advice! Don’t ever say the CF blog doesn’t treat you good.
2) Monkey Business
It’s said that if you give an infinite amount of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters – or just one monkey on a typewriter an infinite amount of time, if you’re budgeting – the law of averages dictates that they will eventually produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. So if they can (hypothetically) type out the soliloquys of Hamlet, surely they could pick fruit without screwing it up?
Nope.
The reason being, monkeys really like fruit.
This was proved by a ‘clever’ (not actually clever) plum grower in California in the early 20th Century, who decided that with labour costs rising, he would import five hundred monkeys in from Panama, and arrange them into teams of 50 under ten different foremen to go and pick that year’s plum harvest. Apparently it didn’t occur to him, or to any of the ten foremen, that this was the worst idea since King Harald decided not to wear his Kevlar spectacles at the Battle of Hastings.
Because what do monkeys do when you let them loose in an orchard full of plums? They scamper straight up the trees and eat the lot. And that is exactly what these monkeys did.
Nom, nom, nom.
