Today is April Fool’s Day.
Perhaps the most famous April Fool’s Day hoax of all time involved trees. Viewers of a BBC Panorama programme in 1957 were told that due to a combination of favourable growing conditions and a fall in the population of the spaghetti weevil, there was a bumper crop of spaghetti produced in Switzerland that year. Pictures of a family in southern Switzerland harvesting trees laden with spaghetti added to the ruse.
At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown, being a ‘luxury’ product to many British people, even though it was mostly consumed as tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce.
Apparently hundreds of people phoned the BBC wanting to find out more, including how they could cultivate their own spaghetti tree. Read more
Gabriel Hemery