I was hunting for background info on how AI is (or may soon be) taking over food advertising – with the inherent danger that its users will get into the habit of slamming product claims totally out of the reality ballpark. What I found was Weird History Food!
Even dear old Clara Peller, who became inseparable from her social revolutionary
customer character in Wendy’s iconic ‘Where’s the beef?” burger
commercials, is not spared the WHF treatment…
I love a good joke as much as the next person. And I really love good food-commercial and -documentary parodies. So I was delighted to come across Weird History Food.
The website’s creative types write and produce realistic-looking and -sounding faux documentaries about all kinds of foods and food styles. And, if your latest expedition into the kitchen jungle comes a cropper, just roll on over to the official WHF site and see what its loony contibutors have come up with now. Their unabashed nuttiness – always delivered with the straightest of faces in most sincere and reverent tones – will cheer you up no matter what kind of culinary disaster you’ve just suffered.
No food tradition or ingredient spared
No food tradition, ingredient or culinary creator is sacred. Check out some of the recent WHF releases and you’ll see what we mean…
- A Map claiming to show every U.S. state’s favourite fast food chain is creating controversy all over the Internet. [They] have [their] own version of each state’s favourite fast food. What’s the right answer?
- Real Origins – National foods we got wrong
- Mac n’ Facts – How Mac and Cheese became an all-American dish
- Gooey Gold – The Gooey history of Velveeta
- White Wonder – The Dark and Seedy Origins of Wonder Bread
- Crazy Chicken Man – Who was the real Colonel Sanders?
- Lost Chips! – Discontinued chips we want back!
- TV Time – The delicious history of TV Dinners
- The REAL Chef Boyardee
- Dave Thomas: The man behind Wendy’s
…And that’s just a tiny sample of the stuff they have on tap at Weird History Food.
I did some fact checking…
And I can vouch that, where WHF asserts some less than plausible ‘fact’, it’s usually a legit ‘fact’. They’ve done their homework, too. And where there’s any doubt about a so-called fact, WHF finds a way to make light of the uncertainties, absurdities and sometimes nonsensical turns of fate that led to… Say, the multiple pronunciations and spellings of Bologna, Baloney, Balonna… Whatever.
A safety valve of sorts
We’ve all had days when nothing seems to go right. Next time you face once of those, just remember, you can pull up almost any WHF featurette and turn that frown upside down. Just beware… Unless you consciously limit yourself to a maximum of two videos at a sitting, you may find you sit down in front of the computer for a half-hour break and discover, when you look up again, that you’ve been there all afternoon. Bet you can’t view just one!
~ Maggie J.