11 ms·

Spaghetti-Tree Hoax

174 points by stjo 4y ago

croddin 4y ago
Amazing how modern genetic engineering has let us take the simple spaghetti tree and create other trees such as: rotini, penne, bucatini, ravioli, lasagna noodle, small shell, bow tie, macaroni ;)
- sph 4y ago
  Lasagna usually comes in sheets and is extracted from the bark of the spaghetti tree.
  - billpg 4y ago
    My grandmother had a spaghetti loom to make lasagna sheets.
- technothrasher 4y ago
  Honestly, none that would have been possible without the invention of the turbo encabulator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag).
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
When I first read the title I was parsing it as some sort coding thing. Like a decision tree but with spaghetti code. I was not correct.
- w-j-w 4y ago
  You fell for the spaghetti-tree hoax of your own making.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  I was hoping it would be about the food but fearing it would be about code! Classic HN bait and switch. Happily I was wrong.
brendoelfrendo 4y ago
"Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his classmates for being so stupid that if they were told that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it." Turns out, his teachers might have been on to something.
cynicalsecurity 4y ago
[flagged]
fredsmith219 4y ago
San Giorgio had a commercial with this same gag https://youtu.be/q-ZtGoXkI58 https://youtu.be/q-ZtGoXkI58
082349872349872 4y ago
Something to recall about the UK of the time: it was so parochial that James Bond was having his exotic international adventures all the way on the other side of the Channel, in the Dept. of the Somme (80).
smilliken 4y ago
There used to be a man at a farmers' market in Southern California that played this trick. He decorated a small tree with draped spaghetti and set it on the table. People would ask and he'd explain that it was a spaghetti tree. Every week there'd be a new gullible person that would take the bait. He saw it as community service to get people to think more critically about where their food came from.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sdrothrock 4y ago
My uncle pulled this one on me when I was a kid. There was a willow tree out in the yard and he'd have me go to the "spaghetti tree" and "harvest some spaghetti" for dinner, which I went and did... and lo and behold, we had spaghetti for dinner. It's pretty hard to argue with that kind of delicious cause and effect when you're a little kid!
metadat 4y ago
Does this help analogously explain how crypto has lured in so many people? Edit: rom-antics: Duly noted, thanks for the advice.
- omoikane 4y ago
  Perhaps you were thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- braingenious 4y ago
  No.
- rom-antics 4y ago
  If you can't look at a spaghetti tree without thinking about crypto, you should probably take a break from the internet.
v8xi 4y ago
"place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best" is very funny
Stratoscope 4y ago
I had the privilege of seeing this documentary as a kid, when it first aired in the US on the Jack Paar show around 1960. Of course, growing up in an Italian family in Oregon, I knew perfectly well what spaghetti was made of, which made the documentary even more hilarious. When we visited my grandmother near Portland, there would always be two big platters of spaghetti, one with the usual red sauce, and one with pesto! We called that "spaghetti with green stuff" and always dug into it first. My aunt made her pesto with a mortar and pestle the old fashioned way. One of my projects for this year is to get a marble mortar and olivewood pestle, and make pesto like that. Here's the recipe I'm starting with: https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe
- williamdclt 4y ago
  PSA: pesto is incredibly simple to make at home, and way way way better than store-bought pesto. At minima you need olive oil, garlic, some green leafy things (basil, spinach, parsley... I've done some with only parsly stems), some sort of hard cheese, salt and some sort of mixer. Adding nuts, using good EVOO, multiple cheeses and a pestle&mortar gives even better results, but even without that it'll be delicious!
  - unwind 4y ago
    Just to play unfold-that-acronym, here "EVOO" is simply extra virgin olive oil, i.e. the good stuff. Pretty obvious if you're into cookery I guess, but it did pause me for a few seconds anyway. :)
  - don-code 4y ago
    Home pesto maker here. It's not for the faint of heart. Each year I grow four basil plants - it takes close to an hour to completely de-leaf and de-stem just one plant. I end up with a stock pot full of leaves. Those are then ground with pine nuts (close to $7 for a small jar - I need 4-5 jars), close to a gallon of olive oil (the brand I use comes in gallons, so about $30), and lots of cheese (I honestly don't remember how much I spend on cheese). The result is great, but it's definitely a day's work plus close to $100.
bredren 4y ago
Tom Glazer’s On Top of Spaghetti parody debuted 10 years after this. I wonder if he was influenced by this hoax.
golem14 4y ago
Y’all might be interested in California‘a Velcro production: https://misc.rural.narkive.com/cEsySUGR/california-s-velcro-crop-under-challenge https://misc.rural.narkive.com/cEsySUGR/california-s-velcro-...
- Stratoscope 4y ago
  This is a good reminder to mention the VELCRO® Brand educational video, Don't Say Velcro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY
  - dalmo3 4y ago
    This is the most wholesome thing I've ever seen a company make. I can't tell whether they're bluffing or double bluffing, but I appreciate a good self deprecating joke. The play with other brands also fits in very well.
    - Stratoscope 4y ago
      It's one of my favorite videos. I watch it whenever I feel like I need to cheer up. Be sure to check out the two followup videos that Semaphor linked in a sibling comment. In an odd coincidence, I had dinner last week with the brand protection attorney for Clorox! From the VELCRO® Brand video: If you need something to clean up your socks, Do it with bleach, and not with [censored] And here's an article with some other clever and compassionate "cease and desist" trademark notices: https://www.cll.com/OnMyMindBlog/creativity-can-make-trademark-demands-more-effective https://www.cll.com/OnMyMindBlog/creativity-can-make-tradema...
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Thank you, this was great. There’s also a feedback response video [0] (of course they are making fun of German, Klettverschluss is so easy to say!), and a behind-the-scene video [1] where they show you their two actual lawyers that somehow were roped into participating ;) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWMQLMiTPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWMQLMiTPk [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP-fZdFfOGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP-fZdFfOGE
bee_rider 4y ago
> Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy. Spaghetti as an exotic delicacy, rare enough that people could believe this story. The past truly is a far off and alien land.
- qqtt 4y ago
  Spaghetti from a can, no less.
  - kitd 4y ago
    Oh, the inhumanity
    - jjgreen 4y ago
      I found some 1950's womens' magazines in the cellar of my rented house a few years ago, one recounted the story by a woman who's husband returned from the Indian subcontinent with a taste for "curry and rice", so she prepared the same by adding curry powder to rice pudding ...
  - noduerme 4y ago
    It's not as if Hawaiians of the same decade believed that Spam grew on bushes, did they?
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  Looks like war time rationing is the reason it took a while to be established in the UK and it sounds like by the end of the 1950s pasta restaurants were a thing in Britain or at least London. https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,371547,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,371547,00.html
- CaptainZapp 4y ago
  > from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce It really seems that English cuisine improved a lot since then. Spaghetti in tins (and I won't even dare to think about the quality of the "tomato sauce") is a crime against nature.
noduerme 4y ago
I heard a variation of this once, but I never knew where it originated. An older fellow in a rural part of Spain made the obligatory pass at my girlfriend while we were standing for drinks and tapas at the village bar. He told her he was a farmer and he'd grown up growing spaghetti. Big, waving fields of spaghetti that reached over your head; they would cut bushels of it with a scythe. A few minutes later, tears welled up in his eyes and he burst into song. I love Andalucía.
- qqtt 4y ago
  I don't think it originated with this broadcast, however, as the individual who did it was inspired by a comment from their own school teacher. It seems people have been making similar jokes about spaghetti for a very long time.
thinking4real 4y ago
"the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled" Wew, that’s a false claim if I’ve ever seen one.
- shultays 4y ago
  Maybe they forgot "back then in 1957", still probably a bold claim
tobinfricke 4y ago
> At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water It seems absolutely wild that as recently as 1957, something as mundane as spaghetti was "relatively unknown in the UK". (Unless we are being meta-pranked...)
- goto11 4y ago
  There is often a meta-hoax which vastly overstates how many people believed a hoax in the first place. For example the myth about the War of the Worlds radio show causing mass panic. The article mention "hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees". Of course it is unclear how many of these "hundreds" called to call bullshit, and how many called to get spaghetti-growing tips. Given Aprils Fools was a well known tradition at the time, it is possible some of the callers was in on the joke. We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax. " This is true, but I regulary read a satire magazin - and the readers letter are quite funny and scary, because I could not believe how many people do take BS seriously. Now of course, they could all be satire, too (but elaborate one, because from seemingly real FB accounts), but maybe keep in mind, how many people did (and still do) believe Covid was a hoax. And that there is an actual flat earth society.
- interfixus 4y ago
  > Unless we are being meta-pranked We are not. I grew up in Denmark in the sixties. We really weren't lacking for anything, but spaghetti strictly came out of a tin together with some strange orange tomatoish sauce. I graduated highschool in 1977. Everybody went to Copenhagen for a night on the town. That's were I saw the first pizza of my life.
  - 4y ago
agarren 4y ago
BBC reporting on the spaghetti harvest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU It’s a family affair in Switzerland, unlike “large spaghetti plantations” in Italy.
gilgoomesh 4y ago
Spaghetti drying racks can sometimes be called spaghetti trees so it's not like there isn't a reasonable way a person reading about pasta production could get confused.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kitd 4y ago
My parents watched this. It was a running joke in our family when I was young, about going out to the woods to get the spaghetti for lunch.
gandalfian 4y ago
See also the day gravity was reduced producing a floating feeling on earth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gravitational_effect#:~:text=The%20Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian%20gravitational%20effect,2%20on%201%20April%201976 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gra....
- CommitSyn 4y ago
  > Soon after 9:47 on that morning, the BBC began to receive hundreds of telephone calls from people reporting they had observed the decrease in gravity.[5] One woman who called in even stated that she and eleven friends had been sitting and had been "wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room".[7] I have to wonder what her mind conjured up once it came out as a hoax, as she'd surely told everyone close to her by then.
jaclaz 4y ago
The idea by Douglas Adams in Hitchikers guide to the galaxy that in an infinitely large universe most things are grown might well have been inspired by this. The description of the life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruits remains a masterpiece.
scioto 4y ago
The closest thing I can think of is spaghetti squash (do a web search and look at photos), which when you cut it in half, you create "spaghetti" by scraping out the insides with a fork. A viable pasta alternative if you're trying to reduce carbs.
ggerganov 4y ago
In 1991, the Bulgarian national television aired a prank that the nuclear plant in the country has exploded [0]. Initially, a lot of people were very scared and believed that it really happened. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/nuclear-prank-in-bulgaria.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/nuclear-prank-in-bu...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- noduerme 4y ago
  Jesus, that is really not funny. 45 years of communism can seriously fuck up your sense of humor.
  - cess11 4y ago
    It was a student prank and not people that had lived for 45 years or more, and national chauvinism was arguably a much stronger factor in the bulgarian sense of humour at the time. So how did you come to your conclusion?
    - noduerme 4y ago
      "War of the Worlds" aired on radio in America in 1938 and caused mass panic. Now, many years later, a place which had experienced free media and stuff like, oh, open reporting of the Chernobyl disaster for the intervening 4 decades would be more prepared to deal with absurdist jokes on national broadcast, but would have a broader immunity to bullshit by that point. Even so we are extremely susceptible to disbelieving journalism. My view is that it's just cruel to do that, to create mass panic as a joke, especially the moment that state media is finally being liberated to report actual facts for the first time - it simply undermines truth with nihilism. So if you find it funny I would say it's a very warped sense of humor. Probably one that stems from the sense of helplessness and nihilism created by living under a communist dictatorship. That's where I got my opinion.
      - 4y ago
fanf2 4y ago
There are Italian restaurants in the UK called “spaghetti tree” https://www.spaghettitree.co.uk/ https://www.spaghettitree.co.uk/ https://www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk/ https://www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk/ Apparently in Oz too https://spaghettitree.com.au/ https://spaghettitree.com.au/
Jedd 4y ago
The disconnect is fascinating, but it truly was a different era -- though the Brits had a long & glorious history of taking a while to get familiar with new foods (insert the story, which may be apocryphal, regarding the arrival of potatoes - lacking an instruction manual, people were eating the leafy bit, feeling very sick indeed, and then swearing off the awful plant). Twenty years after the Spaghetti Tree broadcast, a vox pop of some gorgeous Brits painfully misunderstanding how, well, everything works, is my favourite 'I can't believe people thought that...' historical video. https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1092120538259038209 https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1092120538259038209 I wonder if there's any contemporary examples of otherwise seemingly modern societies resisting something like metrication due to a basic comprehension failure.
- xnorswap 4y ago
  That guy ~40 seconds in is such a stereotypical boomer. "We ruled the world once didn't we?" is a depressing attitude and an attitude that has only got more entrenched as they've aged leading to brexit and the awful consequences.
Eleison23 4y ago
[dead]
jgrahamc 4y ago
I don't remember which channel did it in the UK but there was a deadly serious report about a place that was suspected of breeding dinosaurs including attempting to get into the site and interviewing a local butcher about the huge orders of meat being made by the scientists. Ah, found it: https://reprobatepress.com/2022/04/01/jurassic-mansion-the-bbcs-maddest-april-fool-spoof/ https://reprobatepress.com/2022/04/01/jurassic-mansion-the-b...
tomcam 4y ago
Actual vid at https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU. Come for the legendary and perfectly executed hoax. Stay for the plummy accent. Then watch for bad news on the North Carolina marshmallow harvest, probably inspired by it: https://youtu.be/yflTu150QZw https://youtu.be/yflTu150QZw
- dmix 4y ago
  He used the phrase "Bumper year" and I was curious where that came from: > A bumper crop is a very large amount. Most often, the term bumper crop is used to describe a high yield of harvest in an agricultural endeavor, but it may be used figuratively to mean a large amount of something. The expression bumper crop came into common use around 1830, but the word bumper dates back farther. In the 1600s, a bumper was an extra large wine cup that when filled to the brim, held a great amount of wine. By the 1700s, the word bumper was used in conversation to mean a large amount of something. By 1830, this definition of the word bumper came to be used mostly in the expressions bumper crop and bumper year. > Dickens wrote in 1839, “This charming actress will be greeted with a bumper,” meaning a crowded house at the theater.
ortusdux 4y ago
Reminds me of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
blooalien 4y ago
Just about all the best and most amusing April Fool's pranks I've genuinely enjoyed over the years have nearly all been BBC "hoaxes". A while back they did an absolutely convincing little documentary short about the discovery of a little gang of flying penguins that you can probably still find floating around YouTube and other video sites to this day. Truly hilarious stuff.

174 points by stjo 4y ago

Amazing how modern genetic engineering has let us take the simple spaghetti tree and create other trees such as: rotini, penne, bucatini, ravioli, lasagna noodle, small shell, bow tie, macaroni ;)

sph 4y ago
Lasagna usually comes in sheets and is extracted from the bark of the spaghetti tree.
- billpg 4y ago
  My grandmother had a spaghetti loom to make lasagna sheets.
technothrasher 4y ago
Honestly, none that would have been possible without the invention of the turbo encabulator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag).

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

When I first read the title I was parsing it as some sort coding thing. Like a decision tree but with spaghetti code. I was not correct.

w-j-w 4y ago
You fell for the spaghetti-tree hoax of your own making.
doctor_eval 4y ago
I was hoping it would be about the food but fearing it would be about code! Classic HN bait and switch. Happily I was wrong.

brendoelfrendo 4y ago

"Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his classmates for being so stupid that if they were told that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it." Turns out, his teachers might have been on to something.

cynicalsecurity 4y ago

[flagged]

fredsmith219 4y ago

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

082349872349872 4y ago

Something to recall about the UK of the time: it was so parochial that James Bond was having his exotic international adventures all the way on the other side of the Channel, in the Dept. of the Somme (80).

smilliken 4y ago

There used to be a man at a farmers' market in Southern California that played this trick. He decorated a small tree with draped spaghetti and set it on the table. People would ask and he'd explain that it was a spaghetti tree. Every week there'd be a new gullible person that would take the bait. He saw it as community service to get people to think more critically about where their food came from.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sdrothrock 4y ago

My uncle pulled this one on me when I was a kid. There was a willow tree out in the yard and he'd have me go to the "spaghetti tree" and "harvest some spaghetti" for dinner, which I went and did... and lo and behold, we had spaghetti for dinner. It's pretty hard to argue with that kind of delicious cause and effect when you're a little kid!

metadat 4y ago

Does this help analogously explain how crypto has lured in so many people? Edit: rom-antics: Duly noted, thanks for the advice.

omoikane 4y ago
Perhaps you were thinking of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
braingenious 4y ago
No.
rom-antics 4y ago
If you can't look at a spaghetti tree without thinking about crypto, you should probably take a break from the internet.

v8xi 4y ago

"place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best" is very funny

Stratoscope 4y ago

I had the privilege of seeing this documentary as a kid, when it first aired in the US on the Jack Paar show around 1960. Of course, growing up in an Italian family in Oregon, I knew perfectly well what spaghetti was made of, which made the documentary even more hilarious. When we visited my grandmother near Portland, there would always be two big platters of spaghetti, one with the usual red sauce, and one with pesto! We called that "spaghetti with green stuff" and always dug into it first. My aunt made her pesto with a mortar and pestle the old fashioned way. One of my projects for this year is to get a marble mortar and olivewood pestle, and make pesto like that. Here's the recipe I'm starting with: https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe https://www.seriouseats.com/best-pesto-recipe

williamdclt 4y ago
PSA: pesto is incredibly simple to make at home, and way way way better than store-bought pesto. At minima you need olive oil, garlic, some green leafy things (basil, spinach, parsley... I've done some with only parsly stems), some sort of hard cheese, salt and some sort of mixer. Adding nuts, using good EVOO, multiple cheeses and a pestle&mortar gives even better results, but even without that it'll be delicious!
- unwind 4y ago
  Just to play unfold-that-acronym, here "EVOO" is simply extra virgin olive oil, i.e. the good stuff. Pretty obvious if you're into cookery I guess, but it did pause me for a few seconds anyway. :)
- don-code 4y ago
  Home pesto maker here. It's not for the faint of heart. Each year I grow four basil plants - it takes close to an hour to completely de-leaf and de-stem just one plant. I end up with a stock pot full of leaves. Those are then ground with pine nuts (close to $7 for a small jar - I need 4-5 jars), close to a gallon of olive oil (the brand I use comes in gallons, so about $30), and lots of cheese (I honestly don't remember how much I spend on cheese). The result is great, but it's definitely a day's work plus close to $100.

bredren 4y ago

Tom Glazer’s On Top of Spaghetti parody debuted 10 years after this. I wonder if he was influenced by this hoax.

golem14 4y ago

Y’all might be interested in California‘a Velcro production: https://misc.rural.narkive.com/cEsySUGR/california-s-velcro-crop-under-challenge https://misc.rural.narkive.com/cEsySUGR/california-s-velcro-...

Stratoscope 4y ago
This is a good reminder to mention the VELCRO® Brand educational video, Don't Say Velcro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRi8LptvFZY
- dalmo3 4y ago
  This is the most wholesome thing I've ever seen a company make. I can't tell whether they're bluffing or double bluffing, but I appreciate a good self deprecating joke. The play with other brands also fits in very well.
  - Stratoscope 4y ago
    It's one of my favorite videos. I watch it whenever I feel like I need to cheer up. Be sure to check out the two followup videos that Semaphor linked in a sibling comment. In an odd coincidence, I had dinner last week with the brand protection attorney for Clorox! From the VELCRO® Brand video: If you need something to clean up your socks, Do it with bleach, and not with [censored] And here's an article with some other clever and compassionate "cease and desist" trademark notices: https://www.cll.com/OnMyMindBlog/creativity-can-make-trademark-demands-more-effective https://www.cll.com/OnMyMindBlog/creativity-can-make-tradema...
- Semaphor 4y ago
  Thank you, this was great. There’s also a feedback response video [0] (of course they are making fun of German, Klettverschluss is so easy to say!), and a behind-the-scene video [1] where they show you their two actual lawyers that somehow were roped into participating ;) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWMQLMiTPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLWMQLMiTPk [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP-fZdFfOGE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP-fZdFfOGE

bee_rider 4y ago

> Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy. Spaghetti as an exotic delicacy, rare enough that people could believe this story. The past truly is a far off and alien land.

qqtt 4y ago
Spaghetti from a can, no less.
- kitd 4y ago
  Oh, the inhumanity
  - jjgreen 4y ago
    I found some 1950's womens' magazines in the cellar of my rented house a few years ago, one recounted the story by a woman who's husband returned from the Indian subcontinent with a taste for "curry and rice", so she prepared the same by adding curry powder to rice pudding ...
- noduerme 4y ago
  It's not as if Hawaiians of the same decade believed that Spam grew on bushes, did they?
teruakohatu 4y ago
Looks like war time rationing is the reason it took a while to be established in the UK and it sounds like by the end of the 1950s pasta restaurants were a thing in Britain or at least London. https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,371547,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,371547,00.html
CaptainZapp 4y ago
> from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce It really seems that English cuisine improved a lot since then. Spaghetti in tins (and I won't even dare to think about the quality of the "tomato sauce") is a crime against nature.

noduerme 4y ago

I heard a variation of this once, but I never knew where it originated. An older fellow in a rural part of Spain made the obligatory pass at my girlfriend while we were standing for drinks and tapas at the village bar. He told her he was a farmer and he'd grown up growing spaghetti. Big, waving fields of spaghetti that reached over your head; they would cut bushels of it with a scythe. A few minutes later, tears welled up in his eyes and he burst into song. I love Andalucía.

qqtt 4y ago
I don't think it originated with this broadcast, however, as the individual who did it was inspired by a comment from their own school teacher. It seems people have been making similar jokes about spaghetti for a very long time.

thinking4real 4y ago

"the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled" Wew, that’s a false claim if I’ve ever seen one.

shultays 4y ago
Maybe they forgot "back then in 1957", still probably a bold claim

tobinfricke 4y ago

> At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water It seems absolutely wild that as recently as 1957, something as mundane as spaghetti was "relatively unknown in the UK". (Unless we are being meta-pranked...)

goto11 4y ago
There is often a meta-hoax which vastly overstates how many people believed a hoax in the first place. For example the myth about the War of the Worlds radio show causing mass panic. The article mention "hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees". Of course it is unclear how many of these "hundreds" called to call bullshit, and how many called to get spaghetti-growing tips. Given Aprils Fools was a well known tradition at the time, it is possible some of the callers was in on the joke. We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "We have no idea how many people actually believed the hoax. " This is true, but I regulary read a satire magazin - and the readers letter are quite funny and scary, because I could not believe how many people do take BS seriously. Now of course, they could all be satire, too (but elaborate one, because from seemingly real FB accounts), but maybe keep in mind, how many people did (and still do) believe Covid was a hoax. And that there is an actual flat earth society.
interfixus 4y ago
> Unless we are being meta-pranked We are not. I grew up in Denmark in the sixties. We really weren't lacking for anything, but spaghetti strictly came out of a tin together with some strange orange tomatoish sauce. I graduated highschool in 1977. Everybody went to Copenhagen for a night on the town. That's were I saw the first pizza of my life.
- 4y ago

agarren 4y ago

BBC reporting on the spaghetti harvest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU It’s a family affair in Switzerland, unlike “large spaghetti plantations” in Italy.

gilgoomesh 4y ago

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

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kitd 4y ago

My parents watched this. It was a running joke in our family when I was young, about going out to the woods to get the spaghetti for lunch.

gandalfian 4y ago

See also the day gravity was reduced producing a floating feeling on earth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gravitational_effect#:~:text=The%20Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian%20gravitational%20effect,2%20on%201%20April%201976 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jovian%E2%80%93Plutonian_gra....

CommitSyn 4y ago
> Soon after 9:47 on that morning, the BBC began to receive hundreds of telephone calls from people reporting they had observed the decrease in gravity.[5] One woman who called in even stated that she and eleven friends had been sitting and had been "wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room".[7] I have to wonder what her mind conjured up once it came out as a hoax, as she'd surely told everyone close to her by then.

jaclaz 4y ago

The idea by Douglas Adams in Hitchikers guide to the galaxy that in an infinitely large universe most things are grown might well have been inspired by this. The description of the life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruits remains a masterpiece.

scioto 4y ago

The closest thing I can think of is spaghetti squash (do a web search and look at photos), which when you cut it in half, you create "spaghetti" by scraping out the insides with a fork. A viable pasta alternative if you're trying to reduce carbs.

ggerganov 4y ago

In 1991, the Bulgarian national television aired a prank that the nuclear plant in the country has exploded [0]. Initially, a lot of people were very scared and believed that it really happened. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/nuclear-prank-in-bulgaria.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/nuclear-prank-in-bu...

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noduerme 4y ago
Jesus, that is really not funny. 45 years of communism can seriously fuck up your sense of humor.
- cess11 4y ago
  It was a student prank and not people that had lived for 45 years or more, and national chauvinism was arguably a much stronger factor in the bulgarian sense of humour at the time. So how did you come to your conclusion?
  - noduerme 4y ago
    "War of the Worlds" aired on radio in America in 1938 and caused mass panic. Now, many years later, a place which had experienced free media and stuff like, oh, open reporting of the Chernobyl disaster for the intervening 4 decades would be more prepared to deal with absurdist jokes on national broadcast, but would have a broader immunity to bullshit by that point. Even so we are extremely susceptible to disbelieving journalism. My view is that it's just cruel to do that, to create mass panic as a joke, especially the moment that state media is finally being liberated to report actual facts for the first time - it simply undermines truth with nihilism. So if you find it funny I would say it's a very warped sense of humor. Probably one that stems from the sense of helplessness and nihilism created by living under a communist dictatorship. That's where I got my opinion.
    - 4y ago

fanf2 4y ago

There are Italian restaurants in the UK called “spaghetti tree” https://www.spaghettitree.co.uk/ https://www.spaghettitree.co.uk/ https://www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk/ https://www.spaghettitreesutton.co.uk/ Apparently in Oz too https://spaghettitree.com.au/ https://spaghettitree.com.au/

Jedd 4y ago

The disconnect is fascinating, but it truly was a different era -- though the Brits had a long & glorious history of taking a while to get familiar with new foods (insert the story, which may be apocryphal, regarding the arrival of potatoes - lacking an instruction manual, people were eating the leafy bit, feeling very sick indeed, and then swearing off the awful plant). Twenty years after the Spaghetti Tree broadcast, a vox pop of some gorgeous Brits painfully misunderstanding how, well, everything works, is my favourite 'I can't believe people thought that...' historical video. https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1092120538259038209 https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1092120538259038209 I wonder if there's any contemporary examples of otherwise seemingly modern societies resisting something like metrication due to a basic comprehension failure.

xnorswap 4y ago
That guy ~40 seconds in is such a stereotypical boomer. "We ruled the world once didn't we?" is a depressing attitude and an attitude that has only got more entrenched as they've aged leading to brexit and the awful consequences.

Eleison23 4y ago

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jgrahamc 4y ago

I don't remember which channel did it in the UK but there was a deadly serious report about a place that was suspected of breeding dinosaurs including attempting to get into the site and interviewing a local butcher about the huge orders of meat being made by the scientists. Ah, found it: https://reprobatepress.com/2022/04/01/jurassic-mansion-the-bbcs-maddest-april-fool-spoof/ https://reprobatepress.com/2022/04/01/jurassic-mansion-the-b...

tomcam 4y ago

Actual vid at https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU. Come for the legendary and perfectly executed hoax. Stay for the plummy accent. Then watch for bad news on the North Carolina marshmallow harvest, probably inspired by it: https://youtu.be/yflTu150QZw https://youtu.be/yflTu150QZw

dmix 4y ago
He used the phrase "Bumper year" and I was curious where that came from: > A bumper crop is a very large amount. Most often, the term bumper crop is used to describe a high yield of harvest in an agricultural endeavor, but it may be used figuratively to mean a large amount of something. The expression bumper crop came into common use around 1830, but the word bumper dates back farther. In the 1600s, a bumper was an extra large wine cup that when filled to the brim, held a great amount of wine. By the 1700s, the word bumper was used in conversation to mean a large amount of something. By 1830, this definition of the word bumper came to be used mostly in the expressions bumper crop and bumper year. > Dickens wrote in 1839, “This charming actress will be greeted with a bumper,” meaning a crowded house at the theater.

ortusdux 4y ago

Reminds me of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

blooalien 4y ago

Just about all the best and most amusing April Fool's pranks I've genuinely enjoyed over the years have nearly all been BBC "hoaxes". A while back they did an absolutely convincing little documentary short about the discovery of a little gang of flying penguins that you can probably still find floating around YouTube and other video sites to this day. Truly hilarious stuff.