A shocking 95% of people don’t know where pasta originates from – do you?
A survey from Glorious! Foods questioned over 1,000 people on their food knowledge, with 70% confident that they were cuisine savvy. However the polled participants failed to identify the origination of food favourites such as pasta, chili con carne and French fries!
The foodstuff most incorrectly identified was Worcestershire sauce, which respondents assumed originated in the UK (after all Worcester is a city in both England and Massachusetts). A staggering 96.3% of people failed to spot that it actually hails from Bengal in India. The dark brown fermented liquid was brought back to the UK by an ex-governor of Bengal. The recipe was recreated and commercialised in 1837 for the UK market. Viewers of Rick Stein’s ‘Best Curry’ series on the BBC may have already spotted this.
The second item up on the menu is pasta, which respondents assumed (as you would) that it originated in Italy. Wrong! Pasta actually hails from China – which if you think about the similarity noodles, kind of makes sense. 95.1% of people were tripped up.
And how about the ubiquitous French fries? Again, thanks to the name, you’d assume they hail from France (as 9 out of 10 survey respondents thought), but no, they actually originated in Belgium! And within the west European country, they are actually referred to as Flemish fries! Where would we be without curly fries and tornado fries hey?
What do you think? Has correctly identified food ever caught you out?
