Today is National Spaghetti Day, and what better way to celebrate yet another meaningless food holiday than to look back to the Spaghetti Tree Hoax of 1957?Never heard of it? Well, think of the Spaghetti Tree Hoax as the pasta equivalent of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. But, you know, with delightful noodles instead of all that interplanetary conflict.Back in 1957—on April Fools' Day, of course—the BBC broadcasted a segment focusing on a family in southern Switzerland that purportedly grew its own spaghetti—on a spaghetti tree, natch.The story was the brainchild of one Charles de Jaeger, a cameraman who had once had a teacher who used to taunt his students for being so stupid that if someone told them that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it. As fate would have it, a number of BBC viewers were, in fact, that stupid: Several contacted the network to find out how they, too, could grow spaghetti trees. When asked, the BBC reportedly told these suckers to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."No, this was not a Monty Python cross-promotion. The report aired on a show called Panorama, the world's longest-running current affairs show. The three-minute report showed a family in Ticino harvesting their spaghetti from a tree that had produced a miraculous bumper crop, thanks to favorable winter weather and the fortuitous disappearance of the tiresome spaghetti weevil.Viewers were told, "After picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm, Alpine sun. Many people are often puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length, but this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by plant breeders who succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti.""For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti."Amen to that. We're all for home-grown spaghetti and tongue-in-cheek news stories. After all, who the hell needs fake news about pizzeria child-prostitution rings when you can prank the world into believing pasta grows on trees?
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