April Fool's Day is nearly upon us but there are very few really good - and harmless - pranks these days. So, I reached back into the history books to find this very clever hoax to share with you.
In 1957 spaghetti was not the well known food staple that it is today particularly in the United Kingdom. It was considered a foreign delicacy and many did not know where it came from. That set the stage for the perfect April Fool's joke. On April 1, 1957 a BBC news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed both to an unusually mild winter and to the "virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil." The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched video footage of a Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets. The segment concluded with the assurance that, "For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti."
Happy April Fools Day - a few days early!
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