Written by Sam Marks
If you’ve ever traveled to southern Switzerland, you may have been lucky enough to see a Spaghetti tree in real life. While the Po valley of Italy is most notable for its large Spaghetti plantations, Ticino, a southern Swiss province border Italy, has a family-based Spaghetti harvesting festival.
It is around late March when farmers pick the fully grown Spaghetti off the trees and lay them to dry in the Sun. Decades of breeding have produced a perfect-length Spaghetti crop, which explains why all Spaghetti is the same in length. Ticino’s harvest festival concludes with the home-grown Spaghetti being served fresh, hours after being picked. For those who enjoy this delicacy, freshly harvested Spaghetti is generally regarded as the most flavourful way to taste the crop.
That is if you believe what the BBC wants you to believe.
On 1 April, 1957, the BBC’s Panorama programme reported on a Swiss family harvesting Spaghetti. Around this time, Spaghetti was not a common food in the U.K. and many at the time considered this an exotic dish. It was primarily tinned along tomato sauce, with the actual making process of Spaghetti being largely unknown by the public. Sensing an opportunity, the BBC ran what is widely considered the best hoax prank a news source has ever published.
The piece was thought of by Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger. de Jaeger was from Austria, and inspired by when his school teacher teased his classmate for being so dumb he would believe that Spaghetti grew on trees. Michael Peacock, the editor of Panorama, gave de Jaeger a budget of 100 pounds to produce the piece. They filmed around the now closed Pasta Foods factory in St. Albans, Hertfordshire and at a hotel in Castagnola, Switzerland. The broadcast was voiced by Richard Dimbleby, the respect host of Panorama, making the outrageous story seem even more believable.
Around 8 million people watched the broadcast and the BBC was flooded with hundreds of phone calls the following day from viewers. Some questioned the legitimacy of the story while others asked more in-depth questions about how they could growth their own Spaghetti tree. The BBC responded by say “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best”.
Bibliography
“A Nod and a Link: April Fools’ Day Pranks Abound in the News – CNN.Com.” Accessed January 18, 2023. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/01/april.fools.pranks/index.html.
BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU.
“Greatest April Fool Stories – from Spaghetti Trees to Alabama Changing Pi.” Accessed January 18, 2023.
Retrospect Journal 