A Few Interesting Facts About Celery

I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here, but that’s because I’m both busy and lazy.

In honor of the upcoming 62nd celebration of Indian Independence Day, here is a list of facts I found about our friend, the salubrious, salacious, and occasionally sang-froidesque celery:

The celery is the world’s second-largest fruit (behind the watermelon).

As early as 1998, celery seeds were used in some western cultures as aphrodisiacs.

The band Celery & Me, founded by Marc Stevens, featured a reference to celery in every song, often as a good, the best, or the only friend of the singer. At concerts, Stevens was known to have his bass player dress up in a celery suit.

The Celery Suit is a nickname for the 1978 case of Fredericks v. Fischer Agroproducts Ltd, in which a Mrs. William P. Fredericks claimed that the massive amounts of celery being grown on the farm adjacent to her house were causing her dog to exhibit antisocial behaviour. The case was the first in a line of findings for “Big Celery” that opened up the industry after the restrictions placed on it in the 60s because of fears that celery would be the means a conservative government would try to make inroads with its campaign of reasserting control on American society.

In 1988, the Jamaican bobsled team, famous for qualifying for the Olympic Games, briefly considered using celery sticks as runners on their sled. This claim has alternately been used to underscore the dire financial straits of the team, the team’s ingenuity and enterprising spirit, and stereotyping claims that its members were high on dope.*

*They were.

Celery is known as a negative-calorie food, as more calories are burned chewing and digesting it than are provided from its digestion – it is, however, widely considered to “weigh down the soul.”

“There ain’t no thing that celery sticks won’t fix” was the motto of an ad campaign financed by the Greater Canadian Association of Celery Growers. Its claims that “Celery can cure arteriosclerosis,” “Celery can ease a broken heart,” and “Celery can be used as a weight-bearing architectural structure in many older homes,” encountered strong opposition and were eventually shelved pending “further peer-reviewed studies.” These studies never occurred.

Celery green is considered a less satisfying green than clover green, though often preferred to the latter by sufferers of moderate-to-severe depression.

The Cincinnati Celery Stalkers (later the Cincinnati Celeries) were a baseball team that played in the Northern Baseballing League from 1898-1917. They are most well known as the team for which Joey Cantigliere played before establishing his famous chain of Cantigliere’s Restaurlours (a portmanteau of “restaurant” and “(ice cream) parlour”), which featured the concept of “dinnert,” Cantigliere's novel idea of combining dinner and dessert into one meal. Examples include “Joey’s famous spaghetti ‘n’ walnut balls,” “Cantigliere’s linguini in cookies ‘n’ crème sauce,” and “The Old Sicilian – cannelloni and cannoli.”(The team is also remembered for the celery “laminae” its fans would wear as headdresses in support, made from various types of leafy houseplant.)

A small but growing contingent of evolutionary biologists believe celery to be descended from an aquatic bivalve found off the Pacific shelf during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs.

Pound for pound, celery is weaker than steel but stronger than Styrofoam.

In 2003, an Austrian study concluded that consuming four cups of celery a day decreased a person’s will to live by nearly ¼ (22%). It has yet to be replicated.

“Celery-muncher” is the taunt preferred by many underweight health-food enthusiasts who are allergic to granola but are nonetheless often miscategorised in aspersions as “granola-eater.”

During the Great Copenhagen Bread Shortage of 1417, when the majority of Denmark’s domestic bread rations went to supply the country’s army in its fight against illiteracy, hot dogs were commonly eaten on buns of celery.

Through the centuries, celery has been worshipped as a false god, scorned as a seductive vamp, and upheld as the pinnacle of a law-based society. (Source needed)

The notion that Genghis Khan considered celery one of the seven incarnations of God has lost favour in the general historical and historio-religious communities, only retaining favour in some small religious groups such as “The Church of Kublai Khan” and a small sect of Jews living on the leeward side of various mountains in the Caucuses. However, it is thought that G. Khan was an admirer of its virility and made it a staple of his army’s rations whenever feasible.

Celery is a medium-efficiency conductor of electrical current, but only in the northern hemisphere.

The first “person” to eat celery was not a person at all – it was a wild boar named Snoot who lived near the Nile Delta with his family, though, unbeknownst to them, he had a second family up the river.

The word “celery” comes from “celerity,” meaning “quickness,” due to early cultivators’ observations that its crops could be harvested earlier than those of other plants. (Some etymologists disagree, claiming instead that it was the enhanced intestinal regularity the consumption of celery gave that explains its etymology.)

Celery was first cultivated in the Nile Delta region of Egypt around 4,700 BCE. It was used mainly as a between-meals snack for the Pharaoh.