The Worst Food-Related Catastrophes In History
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- Опубликовано: 22 май 2024
- Weird History Food is going to show some really crazy Food-Related Catastrophes. Food and drink are meant to be enjoyed, right? Not always. Surprisingly, food has been the focal point of several catastrophes throughout history. Shortages, overabundance, and even tainted food preparation have caused calamity in ways we never thought imaginable.
As you look through the list of food-based calamities, vote up the ones that lead you to view your dining experience more cautiously than ever.
#foodfight #foodhistory #weirdhistoryfood 
Развлечения
The saying is: As slow as molasses _in January._ Cold molasses flows very slowly. The tank that burst had received a delivery of molasses from a ship the day before. Those molasses had been heated to facilitate the transfer.
Strange how the Tylenol murders in the states killed less people than the Dow beer murders, but are still more widely known.
The Tylenol murders changed how people got over the counter drugs. Plus we still don't know who did it.
The Dow beer deaths were do to stupidity vy the company. And they happened in Quebec, and no one cares about Quebec outside of Quebec
The Tylenol murders is why there is child resistant packaging for all drugs.
Tylonol was awesome for how they handled that. It was the perfect example of how to handle a situation like that and their example is still taught in business courses.
Missed the Austrian Wine Poisoning which shed a light on Glycol as a Sweetener as well as a Poison in the Wine making Industry. Frederick Knudsen did a pretty good Documentation on it.
That was my first FK video. One of the best out there.
That sort of thing deserves an entire video because there's so much behind it. Even the motivation has more nuance than your standard story of negligence.
This was interesting. I would love to see a video about the history of A&W Restaurants and their root beer.
I second this ^^ they're my favorite root beer :)
I need a recipe for the extruded fries!
Regarding the cases of alcohol poisoning during the liberty fire, I would imagine the whiskey would have been the undiluted type that comes straight from the cask before they bottle and sell it. The victims would have been drinking booze that was far more powerful than they were accustomed to, hence the alcohol poisoning.
Well, that, and with easy access to such vast quantities, they could have easily drank more than usual, too.
@@MatthewTheWanderer yes, of course
Came down here to comment this same thing. You are correct. At least, according to another video I watched, that was solely about the Liberty Fire.
One of those is not like the others.
12 died from drinking too much beer,
few dozen died drinking whisky from the street,
few dozen smothered by molasses,
million died due to potato famine,
300 dead due to bad olive oil,
That first line reminds me of the music video "Me!" by Taylor Swift.
Must be age-related, I thought of Sesame Street. Agree that the potato famine is out of place; while it is arguably the outcome of human negligence, it's a far more complex and complicated event than the others.
@@aliquotidian My comment was more of a jab towards the death toll.
Potato famine is in million plus while rest are under thousand
That potato famine was also a straight up genocide by the British who forcibly exported a whole lot of food and refused to help.
Imagine how much worse the molasses flood would have been in the summer.
Actually, it would have been less because the molasses wouldn’t have slowed down and become like concrete preventing people from being rescued from under collapsed buildings, overturned cars and other debris. The molasses tank was heated making the molasses very thin when the tank ruptured.
@@jpbaley2016 I'm talking about 2.3 million gallons sitting in the summer sun.
I can’t imagine the bugs if it happened in the summer
the olive oil story is unironically still playing out in today, fake "extra virgin olive oil" is a common practice in italy and spain sadly
@@R.P.-hw2rqkey word: probably. 😏
Ayyyy oooooo forget about it ova here
fake extra virgin olive oil? What was it really...olive oil that had been around the block and was the neighbourhood bike or something?😅
@@dancingdingo Extra virgin is a very specific thing, it's well worth looking into
@@kristoffer3000yup + it really helps you poop too!
The ruins of that flour mill in Minneapolis are now part of the Mill City Museum. If you come to my home state, I would definitely recommend checking it out. They even converted one of the massive elevators used for transport into a riding theater which tells the story by moving people to different levels with each level giving a different part of the story.
Another great video! Kudos to the whole team - from writing to narration and editing. Bravo! Love this channel!
Not a fan of this lady's narration. She lask the spark that the other guy has..
The molasses tank was already bulging and then....they added more to the tank, causing the thing to collapse/give way. I also read that the wooden holding tank was poorly built and kids could squeeze through the openings when the tank was empty. Crazy
The story I heard was that the tank were also painted brown so people wouldn't notice the molasses leaking out from them. And now, supposedly on hot summer days people can still smell the molasses.
Companies cutting corners due to greed? Glad we learned are lesson 😂
@@chadbusch8541 more like zero regulations back then
@@cardboardempire They had regulations by 1919. That was well after the Pure Food and Drug Act, for example.
It was a steel tank, riveted. The tank was designed by someone who had never designed a tank before; to seal their fates, the tank was only pressure tested to about a foot depth. The tank being painted brown to disguise its chronic leakage is true.
I have always heard that the saying is "as slow as molasses in January" which, I think, makes more sense.
"It will make them pay. It will make them ALL pay." 😂
No greater combination of words has ever been assembled now that I know what a "Kentucky Meat Shower" is.
It's crazy how vastly different the theories for what the Kentucky "sky meat" was!
Re: the potato famine- approx. 1/4th died. And 1/4th emigrated. Ireland's post famine population reached pre famine levels only recently.
25% is 1/4.
The Whiskey fire 🔥 and the beer flood I had never heard of before
It’s apt that Dunkin removed donuts from their name, because they have become flavorless and really unappetizing. It’s a real shame, they used to be fresh tasting and a treat.
Any beer that shares its name with a huge chemical company, well.....there's potential for disaster.
Trying to find out if Dow Chemical Co. was the parent company; do you know?
Thanks for adding actual captions for the Deaf
My family always used the, “It’s colder than molasses in January” iteration of the expression; tacking on the ‘winter’ clause, to emphasize the sluggish and tedious pace of someone or something, by adding on the effect of cold’s even further reduction in molasses’ already inconsiderable velocity.
If you think drinking alcohol from a boot doesn’t sound like a good time, then you don’t know Daniel Ricciardo.
So tonally strange
I’m well aware of how much food kills people, that’s why I kill my food first. Can’t take chances.
Dows's former plant in Montreal is now a building for tech start-ups. There's a room turned into a museum about Dow glory days and downfall.
Thanks for this! 🥔
4:52 _Canadian Tainted Beer Crisis_
Drinking the contents of a bottle labeled *DOW*
That's right up there with bottles labeled *DuPont*
Beer labeled corona
Great soundtrack!
Molasses Flood: I caused a massive catastrophe!
London Beer Flood: Hold myself.
Pacific Molasses had several terminals across the US, two of which were in Albany and Buffalo, NY. It was common to ship from the former, located on the Hudson River, to the latter, by rail, but the product had to be heated before it was loaded into rail tank cars. During the summer, it was not unusual for the already heated molasses to expand even further while sitting in the rail yard awaiting movement west. This doubly heated molasses would then escape via the pressure relief valves, and drip onto the ground in the rail yard. The birds loved it, but the railroad employees who had to walk along the tracks did not.
I have a sneaking suspicion the Boston Molasses Flood is on this list. **Ooh, right at the top no less!
I had to look into the toxic oil poisoning, it was just too interesting. What they mean by "denatured" is that they added aniline dyes to the product so that it would be obvious that what you were buying was not olive oil. What they mean by refined is that they treated the oil enough to change the dyes while also not removing the aniline itself. Whatever mixture of chemicals and/heat they used must have changed the shape of the dye molecules, creating any number of byproducts. It was, in retrospect, a poisoning that was almost intentional, in my opinion.
i remember the dow beer poisoning, i was 13
How big was that molasses tank !!! How could their be so much to destroy a neighborhood
People generally forget about how hot that molasses was. The tank burst bc it was so warped from the heat and some of tbe people who died straight up boiled to death
"Dozens died."
*cue music*
*jaunty waltz music plays*
I wonder if it was intentional to reference Spuds McKenzie directly after referencing Wonka. Now all I can think of is Slurms McKenzie
I thought the Washburn mill was a rollermill? I doubt there were any millstones in it. Millstones had been obsolete tech for a while by then. To put it in perspective, the first "modern" flour mill (i.e., with only rollermills instead of stones) was built in Hastings in 1853. The Washburn mill was built 20+ years later.
The flowing whiskey was full of broken glass pieces btw
I bet some unfortunate people ended up drinking some of those shards!
Missed the Bradford sweets poisoning in 1858, and the Aberdeen Typhoid outbreak in 1964.
The worst thing about the potato famine is that there was plenty of food but the English refused to give it to the Irish, saying it would make them lazy
That molasses tank was cheap built, it was making disturbing groaning noises for months.
The most heinous detail of the Irish Potato Famine was the fact that more than enough food was grown on Ireland to feed everyone but it was all allocated for export to England and harsh draconian laws would fiercely punish (upto and including death) any poor Irish person who had more than a small amount of grain on their person.
The Potatoes in question were the "Lumper" Variety, which was easy to cultivate and the poeple who died were overwhelmingly poor farmers who worked on export dfarms during the day and only grew what they could "back home" to survive.
Predictably, planting a monoculture left these poor farmers' crops vulnerable to be wiped out by a single malady.
When the pathogen rotted the subsistence potato crops of these poor farmers and the English constables harshly prevented them for gaining access to enough grain from the export crop to even survive, they died.
That is why so many Irish (and rightly so) say "Fook the English".
In terms of the meat shower, it is entirely possible that the meat was indeed regurgitaed by vultures, who had over-eaten on carrion and then under the stress of flying found that they could no longer contain all they had consumed. Vultures vomiting meat has been documented.
Exactly, it was far more genocide than it was famine.
Also known as what seed oil…
colza oil isnt toxic in itself, it a common cooking oil, it must have been contaminated by something else
Industrial grade oil often has other products added for various reasons and are usually toxic.
@@kevinconrad6156I believe she said it was actually “denatured” oil, meaning that there was an adulterant added that would have mad it toxic. They do the same thing to ethanol (drinking alcohol) when they sell it as fuel. It’s also called “denatured”, as they add methanol to it (wood alcohol), which makes it extremely poisonous.
While it's impossible to know for sure what caused the dancing plague/mania. Experts regarding the matter have rules out ergotism or food poisoning as a cause. There were simply too many different cases of dancing mania to logically conclude they were all caused by bad food.
What's interesting to me, is that where once ergot fungus was thought to be bad for us (and still can be, in some circumstances), we now synthesize a medicine from it, Ergotamine, which is used to treat migraines. And it works for a lot of people. My husband, though, is not one of them. He's a chronic migraine sufferer, was put on it many years ago. But he only took it for a short time. He had a _terrible_ reaction to it. It made him hallucinate; he said the whole world looked like a "cartoon". Was rather scary to see him that way, tbh. So, while there may be a synthetic version today (or maybe not, never researched it), we're never going back there again. And while I agree with you, there are too many cases of dancing mania to blame them ALL on food, I find it very easy to believe that some of them, or if they've disproved the dancing thing, at least some other cases of mass hysteria back in the day, were possibly caused by ergot. Because I've seen the effects it can have on a person, even in modern times. And yes, it could've been something else in the medicine that my husband reacted to (it definitely wasn't the migraine itself, because he's _never_ had migraine symptoms like _that_ before or since) but it seems too coincidental for me to completely dismiss it. Perhaps it only affects certain people. Maybe, back in the day, a few were affected, they started hallucinating and went nuts, and the mass hysteria took care of the rest (like I said, maybe not in the dancing cases, but in other cases). Who knows, really? Either way, it's interesting to me how something can be bad, and good, at the same time.
When foods get deadly
I'd like to add a story from the time of my Grandfather. It was lost to time and I can not find out where the accident happened. I do remember grandma had a newspaper clipping about it. I was too small to read most of it so...
Anyways here is how the story was told to me. Grandpa worked at a rendering plant where they manufactured a Crisco alternative called SPRY. One day grandpa was on a catwalk just as some government inspectors arrived. He looked over to see a massive boiler structurally failing. Before he could even use a breath to shout a warning to the men on the floor the tank burst. Anybody on the ground, including the inspectors were doomed. To add insult to injury there were no real 'emergency services' like we have today. The body removal was handled entirely by the survivors. To his dying day Grandpa would not be around anything fried in oil.
3:30 I have a friend that lives in Salem, Massachusetts, that image is the type of display that is used for their long Halloween season every year!
A+ video!
LOVE IT! So unique and memorable!
Bad weed or wheat😂
The script in this is also a catastrophic event
I would like to hear about mustard.
why isnt the great leap forward famine in china on this list?
Fun fact about the potato blight: colonizers only brought a couple types of potato back with them from South America, so they became less resistant to disease over time. It's the same principle behind the precarious nature of the world's current main banana variety, the Cavendish
Arguably bananas are even more precarious as they’re all clones with no genetic variety at all. Only geographic and physical control measures are maintaining banana crops.
The jokes tho....
I thought that mysterious meat rain was found out to be from vultures who vomit their meal mid-flight?
Where’s the weird guy?
Ask your mom.
WN😅
@@misterhat5823WN😢
The almost...jovial tone of this video is pretty unsettling honestly.
6:21 There is a section in the basement of Frees Hall dormitory at Doane University that is called The Horseshoe, every once in a while there would be a party there.
good video
Love when companies look in to them slefs.... we look in to it and found we did nothing , always blames some one eles, sabatoage ,or nothing at all or plant manger, insted of the company for not training them correctly noo not there fault ,never..always some one eles,sick of this crap,
Alcohol doesn’t exactly qualify as food
11:16 Reminds me of the song "Hot Air Balloon Song" from Community with Sara Bareilles! ("Felt Surrogacy" episode)!
It's her (and my) birthday today, we share a birthdate (both born on December 7, 1979)!
The only major film to hit theaters today is Waitress: The Musical, which she headlines!
This narrator doesn't understand timing and emphasis. She reads it like someone else wrote it, whilst the man reads it like its true to him.
Agreed.
3:30 The film "The Witch" (2015) is a totally masterpiece, would love to have more historically based folk horror films like that!
Was the molasses also really hot?? Did it burn people?
Interesting video - I knew about some of those but others were new to me, thanks. I'd add the methanol wine scandal (Italy, 1986) and of course pineapple on pizza 🥶😅
The tragedies were compounded by the epidemic multiplication of personal Injury attorneys.
I want to know the weird history of Toilet Paper
I'm from Quebec, and I never knew about the Dow Beer crisis, although i've seen old ads for Dow beer if you know where to look, never knew the story behind it, or why Dow doesn't exist anymore
The former Dow Brewery building still stands at the southwestern corner of Peel St. and Notre-Dame St. in Montreal. Only the beer brewed in Quebec City was affected. There were no reported cases in Montreal. It was later determined that the culprit was a chemical foam stabilizer. Apparently the brewery in Quebec City used 10x the recommended amount.
With the falling meat incident, perhaps there was a tornado nearby?
Molasses has killed before and it will kill again. LOL
You left out the Franklin Expedition which all died from food born illness causing madness.
Yeah no, I don't think it's funny to joke about people dying
3:50 How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?
None.
So, what i got from this one is that food only gets to catastrophic potential when it can cause some kind of a flood or enough of it catches fire. Other than that, a pretty safe product. Lol
The last one is SO Irish.... !
nobody died in the fire - but a dozen died from drinking the whiskey !
Ate a Weird History meal before watching this video!
Ate Full English Breakfast* and drank Earl Grey tea* (with a splash of milk)!
* From the Weird History video "The Creepiest Nursery Rhymes from History"
* From the Weird History Food video "10 Misconceptions Around Popular Foods"
Why u talk utter pish mate
I know who Popeye is, but how many do not?
I know ( childhood memories ~ 1st like to your comment ) . ♑️✍️🇳🇴🇦🇺
No dis-respect but we need Tom Blank back as narrator... the humor sort of falls flat without his narration.
Wrong narrator voice....
Fr though lol I literally hoped for otherwise
She's not as bad as the other not-da-narrator
Give his wife a chance....
Then go away. Seriously sick of these comments on literally every video. You’ve been heard I promise.
Not wrong just different and I'm sure we were aware of that.
$17 million in damages in todays money is hilarious. You couldn’t even build that tank for that much now. An accident like that would cost hundreds of millions in payouts.
Bring back the other narrator...
No.
@@DarkZerol Her narration is terrible and lacks the spark that the guy has..
Meat Rain...
Gives a new reason to "Run For the Border." 🔔
I'd rather Think Outside the Pun.
" Sky-meat" should also include Chik fil a as it was surplus airline chicken breasts that Truitt Cathy made a good deal on, seriously.
Dow ales and Jones soda.
I hear on very hot days you could still smell the odor of molasses wafting through the streets of boston😂
The Potato Famine is also a contributing factor to the rise of the IRA.
Well, considering it was actually a genocide, yeah understandable.
You forgot the Geat Fire Of London that started in a bakery!
Cardiomyopathy from a beer in 1966, OH NO!. Cardiomyopathy in 2023 from a shot, YAY!
i miss the old narrator.
Best narrator, don't care what others say
WN🤪
here before the incels show up
Nope
It's ok buddy, they'll always be in that cavern skull of yours
Incels living rent free in this guys head
Quite a few over here.
WN😂
Uggg cant handle the voice
WN😂
Uggg, you're so intolerant!
I love your voice😊
WN😂
A list of what average Americans put in their bodies on any given weekend is catastrophic enough.
Such a low hanging fruit comment
no offense to this woman narrator, she’s just doing her job, but man the jokes just do not hit with her delivery…the videos are just not the same without the guy
WN😅
So you're more into style than substance. I see.
Of course they're not the same. They're all three good in their own right.
@@pretendtobenormal8064 WN😁
@@jenniferlonnes7420 WN😜
Other narrator please
WN😂
Dry your eyes.
@@pretendtobenormal8064 WN😳
Better attitude, please.
@@jenniferlonnes7420 WN😩
I’m getting the impression that the Weird History people don’t like Irish folk, this video has several off colored jokes directed at them. Generally the jokes are light hearted but these seem spiteful