Spaghetti tree
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The Spaghetti tree is a fictitious tree; a joke designed to fool those who do not know how spaghetti is produced.
The report that it is a product grown on trees was first produced as an April Fool's Day joke by the BBC TV programme Panorama in 1957, reporting on the bumper spaghetti harvest in Ticino, Switzerland due to the mild winter and "virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil". The report was given additional gravitas by the voiceover by respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. It was partly filmed at the (now closed) Pasta Foods factory on London Road, St Albans in Hertfordshire, and also at a hotel in Switzerland.
An audience of approximately 8 million watched the program, broadcast on April 1, and hundreds phoned in the following day to ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. The BBC reportedly told them to "place a string of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best".
The Spaghetti Tree myth was also used in a popular 1970s TV commercial for Delmonico spaghetti.
See also
External links
- http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/spaghetti.html
- [Still a good joke - 47 years on] (BBC News, 1 April 2004)
- [The original broadcast] (BBC, RealVideo)
- [1957: BBC fools the nation] (BBC, On this day)
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