You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [55]
1. CINDERELLA: MUTILATION, SEX, MORE MUTILATION
The version you know
You all know it: The stepmother and stepsisters hate beautiful Cinderella and make her work all day. One day a fairy godmother shows up and gives Cinderella pretty clothes and a pumpkin coach and sends her to the ball where she falls in love with the prince.
But at the stroke of midnight it all ends, and she runs home, leaving only her glass slipper behind. The prince searches the land, finds Cinderella, the shoe fits, and they live happily ever after.
What got changed
Everyone seemed to have a version of this one. A famous difference in many of the stories is the glass slipper. Authorities on fairy tales (whom you tend not to see at parties) disagree about whether Perrault’s slipper was made of glass or fur, as the words in French (verre and vair) are pronounced almost identically. It’s kind of important, because if the prince was wandering the land looking for a lady with the perfect “fur slipper,” well, it doesn’t take Freud to figure that one out. Suddenly the prince doesn’t look so noble.
One thing Perrault left out that the Grimms delighted in putting back was the violence. The sisters, desperate to fit into the slipper, mutilate their own feet, cutting off their toes and heels in exquisite Germanic detail. When the prince eventually realizes that Cinderella is the one for him, birds peck out the sisters’ and mother’s eyes for their wickedness.
You can probably understand why Disney went with Perrault’s ending for its adaptation.
FIVE HORRIFYING FOOD ADDITIVES YOU’VE PROBABLY EATEN TODAY
DECIPHERING food labels is tricky business. They’re filled with lots of multisyllabic words that border on being impossible to pronounce, chemicals that sound like they could kill you just by touching them, and much, much worse. Read on, unless you’ve eaten recently.
5. SHELLAC
Most everyone is familiar with shellac as a wood-finishing product. It’s often used to give furniture, guitars, and even AK-47’s that special shine. But did you know that it is also commonly used as a food additive? Yep, that’s why those jelly beans you gorge on every Easter are so shiny.
But what exactly is shellac?
Are you sure you want to know?
Shellac is derived from the excretions of an insect, Kerria lacca, most commonly found in the forests of Thailand. Kerria lacca uses the slime as a means to stick to the trees on which it lives. Candy makers then come along and harvest the Kerria lacca excretion by scraping it right off the tree. Unfortunately for you and your future enjoyment of shiny candies, this leaves little room for quality control measures to guarantee that the insects aren’t scooped up as well.
Once that happens, and it almost always does, the insects simply become part of the shellac-making process. And the candy-making process. And the candy-eating process.
Don’t eat candy? That’s OK: You’re probably eating bugs too. During the cleaning process, apples lose their natural shine. Care to guess how it’s restored?
If all of this is making you a bit queasy, we understand. It’s not every day that you find out you’ve been celebrating the resurrection of Jesus by consuming handfuls of insect-infused treats your entire life. But before you head to the medicine cabinet, consider this. That pill you want to take to quell your nausea? It didn’t get shiny on its own.
4. BONE CHAR
The sugar you put on your cereal in the morning didn’t start out white. It’s naturally brown—a color the food industry apparently decided was undesirable. To make their product more acceptable to whitey, sugar companies use a filtering process to strip it of its color. In some cases, the process involves boring sciency words like ions and such. But sugar derived from sugarcane (about a quarter of the sugar in the United States) goes through a . . . different process.
Domino, the largest sugar producer in America, uses something called bone char to filter impurities from its sugar. Bone char is produced using the bones of cows from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan that have