Spaghetti tree

The spaghetti tree is a fictional tree invented for the joke of those who do not know how spaghetti is produced.

For the first time, the message that they grow on trees was made as an April Fool’s joke in the BBC television program Panorama in 1957 , which described the unusually rich harvest of spaghetti in Ticino due to the mild winter and “virtually complete extinction of spaghetti weevils ”, Switzerland Additional weight to the message was given by the voiceover of authoritative speaker Richard Dimbleby . In the 1950s pasta was not an everyday dish in the UK , and was mainly known as canned spaghetti in tomato sauce. Part of the plot was filmed at a (now closed) pasta factory on London Road, St. Albans , Hertfordshire , as well as in a hotel in Switzerland.

The program, which was released on April 1 , was watched by an audience of about 8 million people, hundreds of whom called the next day and asked about breeding spaghetti and how they themselves can grow such a tree. They say that at the BBC they were advised to "put the spaghetti shoot in a jar of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

This is the first known example of the Mokumentari genre.

It is also possible that the earlier idea of ​​growing spaghetti (more precisely, pasta) came from the humorous novel Adventures of Captain Vrungel in 1939. After the Italian fascists arrest the crew off the coast of Eritrea , Fuchs manages to trick them by sprouting pasta. At the same time, he states that the pasta held by the Nazis can sprout only when sprinkled with alcohol. The alcohol allocated for these purposes, of course, mainly goes to soldiers for personal use, which leads to a sharp decrease in vigilance and allows the heroes to escape. After questioning, it turns out that Fuchs, along with pasta, sowed oats, the sprouts of which the Italians took for sprouts of a pasta tree.