4 Bizarre food stories to make you hungry (or scared)

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You’re tired. It’s one of those days, isn’t it? So we’ve decided to take a break for our usual depth of storytelling, and keep things extra light today.

Grab a cup of tea, sit back, and enjoy these four very brief (and very bizarre) stories about food.

1. A $1,500 chicken sandwich

In 2015, a YouTuber in Minnesota, USA, made a chicken sandwich from scratch. We know, that doesn’t sound very interesting – but let us define what we mean by ‘from scratch’.

He harvested the wheat and slaughtered the chicken. He collected water from the ocean, and boiled it to get the salt. He grew a garden and extracted plant oil from the seeds. In total, he spent $1,500 sourcing, growing, and harvesting the ingredients for his sandwich – and it took him six months to do it.

Was it worth it? When he finally tasted the sandwich he said, “It’s not bad.”

2. Arrested over his mother’s stew

Also in 2015, at the age of 23, a man in Albuquerque texted his mother to ask if she could have some of her pozole – a traditional Mexican stew. She said no.

He then broke into her house and stole her pozole; and he was arrested on a residential burglary charge.

3. Elvis spent $49.99 on a sandwich*

One night, Elvis Presley had a craving for a particular sandwich called a Fool’s Gold Loaf, which he’d had once before at the Colorado Mine Company in Denver. This sandwich consisted of a hollowed out loaf of Italian bread, with margarine, an entire jar of peanut butter, jelly (or jam, for the UK-English speakers among you), and a pound of fried bacon – all deep-fried.

That single sandwich is estimated to have somewhere between 8,000 and 40,000 calories, and it cost $49.99. The story goes that Elvis and his team took a private jet to Denver just to eat it.

*He spent $49.99 in 1976, which is about $190 in today’s money.

4. A very expensive hot dog cart

In 2013 the New York Times interviewed Mohammad Mastafa, who was running a hot dog cart near the Central Park Zoo in New York City.

And for the right to operate that small cart, Mohammad had to pay the parks department $289,500 per year.

The zoo entrance was the most expensive of the 150 pushcart sites in the city’s public parks; with other operators around Central Park also paying over $200,000 annually.

When the NYT journalist asked Elizabeth W. Smith, the assistant parks commissioner for revenue and marketing, why it was so expensive, she said:

“It’s a lot of peanuts, it’s a lot of hot dogs.”

The article wasn’t able to reveal how much Mohammad and the other pushcart vendors made in annual revenue – but it’s reasonable to assume that they do turn a profit. Which means it is, indeed, a lot of peanuts and hot dogs.

Do you have a story about an unlikely food entrepreneur or an individual going to incredible lengths to get hold of a particular food product? We want to hear it.

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