A list of curious facts

One: Did you know that a small French town named Bessières collects 15,000 eggs on Easter each year—to cook a ridiculously large omelette. A team cracks open the eggs, adds two pounds of salt, a pound of pepper and a bucket of herbs. Then they whip it all up in massive pots—and fry it in a dozen gallons of duck fat in a 13-foot-wide frying pan.

Don’t think that is weird enough. How about this?

The volunteers, dressed in yolk-yellow shirts and bright white pants, are members of the Confrérie Mondiale des Chevaliers de l’Omelette Géante de Bessières — the World Brotherhood of the Knights of the Giant Omelet — one of France’s gastronomic brotherhoods, which promote and protect regional comestibles. 

Get a glimpse of this astonishing culinary spectacle below. FYI: our lead image is from the Bessières Facebook page—featuring parts of the annual fair that are far more colourful. Just in case you’d rather look at a ‘sexy star’ than a giant omelette…kinda like us lol! (National Geographic, paywall)

 Two: We absolutely love this fact from The Atlantic:

Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems.

What’s even more amusing is that the PhD student and his committee had done their best to conduct repeated tests to make the result… well, just go away. In fact, he didn’t even respond to media queries about his research.

FYI: there’s even a Harvard study that proved the same: “men who consumed two or more servings of skim or low-fat milk a day had a 22 percent lower risk of diabetes. But so did men who ate two or more servings of ice cream every week.” We don’t recommend stocking up on Baskin Robbins, but this fascinating piece in The Atlantic tells us a lot about how certain findings get more attention than others.

Three: Scary movies literally curdle your blood… sort of. According to Dutch researchers, being scared silly at the movie hall releases a little bit of Factor VIII—that’s the protein that helps clot your blood. We leave you to draw your own conclusions. (NBC News)