APRIL 26 - Today in Food History
- National Pretzel Day
1785 John James Audubon was born. Ornithologist, naturalist and artist, known mainly for his paintings and sketches of North American birds.
1856 Eben Horsford patents a process to manufacture calcium acid phosphate, a key ingredient in his 'Horsford's Bread Preparation' later renamed 'Rumford Baking Powder'
1877 Minnesota held a state day of prayer to plead for an end to a 4 year plague of Rocky Mountain locusts. In southwestern Minnesota, locusts had been eating crops, trees, tobacco, fence posts, leather, dead animals, sheep's wool - everything but the mortgage. Two days later a snowstorm moved through and the locusts were never seen again. No one knows what caused the locust plague, nor why the Rocky Mountain locust became extinct after the plague.
1947 Pete Ham of the music group 'Badfinger' was born
1962 'Mashed Potato Time' by Dee Dee Sharp is #1 on the charts.
1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine explodes. The worst nuclear disaster in history. In addition to the human toll, agriculture and livestock was contaminated by radiation in large areas of Europe for years to come.
1989 Lucille Ball died. Two of the funniest food related comedy routines ever done were the chocolate factory and the grape stomping episodes from her TV show, 'I Love Lucy.'
2005 A herd of buffalo escaped from a farm and wandered around a Baltimore, Maryland suburb disrupting traffic, and shutting down several major highways. Police eventually herded them onto a nearby tennis court.
2006 Chicago banned the sale of foie gras.
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