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We were shocked when we read these four facts about ketchup. It's a shame to use it only on french fries when it has such a fascinating history!

Ketchup please, hold the tomatoes
Back in the day before ketchup went west, it was never seen in the company of tomatoes. The stuff preferred anchovies, walnuts, mushrooms, and kidney beans, among other things. In fact, it sometimes played the part of the starting point for a quick and easy recipe, a role filled more often by cream of mushroom soup today. “Ke-Tsiap,” as it was first known, went through a lot of partners on its way to the US. But it wasn't until the year 1812 in Pennsylvania where the first tomato ketchup recipe was written down by James Mease, and thus was born the condiment that chefs love to hate.

Feed the world
Ask anyone to name a brand of ketchup, and nine times out of ten (maybe more) the name they say is Heinz—and that's because Heinz makes a lot of ketchup. Heinz makes so much ketchup in fact that—just counting single serve packets—they make almost enough each year to give everyone on earth two servings. Indeed, 11 billion packets of ketchup is a hell of a lot of ketchup. Throw in the bottles (glass and squeezy), and those big jugs with the pump on top at the hot dog stand, and you could probably float an aircraft carrier—which would make for a pretty creepy photo.

Three percent unpopular
So we've established that Heinz makes a lot of ketchup, and since they're not the only producer in the United States by a long way, you're probably asking “who is eating all that ketchup?” And 97 percent of the time the answer would be…you. That's because the slow red stuff can be found in 97 percent of homes in the US: but the impressiveness of that number is slightly overshadowed by the very nearly literal mountain of french fries that must exist to explain how Americans consume 78 million gallons of ketchup every year.

Ketchup, catsup, and President Reagan
Ketchup and catsup are pretty much the same thing, except that ketchup might be a vegetable—well, in the 1980s at least. As a result of government budget cuts, schools were having trouble meeting the nutritional requirements for the food they were giving the kids. And so the USDA under President Ronald Reagan created regulations that basically said that anything that had the nutritional content of a vegetable could be considered one for the purposes of school lunches, and that included ketchup. There was an uproar: not least among the producers of catsup, which while virtually identical to the big K, nevertheless wasn't blessed with the new status. Fearful of missing out on a piece of the morally questionable action, manufacturers of catsup quickly renamed their products ketchup, leaving “catsup” forever in its wake.

Well, this certainly opens our eyes about ketchup! We were especially surprised to learn that tomato ketchup as we know it was invented a little over 200 years ago!

Article Source: Grunge