No Such Thing As Sunscreen for Flies
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Nyt Elisa myymälöissä ja elisa.fi.
I'm going to take a bath. The bath is...
Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one. And that is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that in 1965, you could try to quit smoking by swapping normal cigarettes for ones made of lettuce. Did you look as cool? You're not smoking a whole lettuce, I'm guessing.
That would look cool.
I think they looked more or less like cigarettes. So this is a fact I read on the blog Boing Boing. It's a lovely blog which sort of collects fun things off the internet. They found it from Atlas Obscura. And it is all about a guy called Puzant Torrigian, who's from Hackensack, New Jersey, and he created a brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contain nothing but lettuce, which was dried and cured and made to look like tobacco. And they were marketed as tasting, well, pretty close, like a cigarette. But they didn't have any of the nicotine or tobacco tar in. And this guy, Turidjian, he thought that they were going to be the next big thing. And for a couple of years in the 60s, and then again later, which we might come to, they became very slightly popular again.
i wonder how many lives this guy saved cumulatively yeah like how many packets were sold how many people smoked them how many people didn't get addicted because they were really quite not that cigarettes taste nice but you know what i mean these tasted even i think people who smoke cigarettes quite like the taste of it sometimes really yeah but like um in this particular case i don't think they ever really caught on they never caught fire
Put it that way. His idea was that you would get the physical and the psychological satisfactions that you would get from smoking. So you open the packet, you take off the little bit of plastic, you take the cigarette out, you light it, you put it in your mouth. And then that kind of is quite a lot of the stuff that people like. It's the habit. yeah definitely but they were not very popular one researcher said that they were like smoking a potato and another said if i had a choice of a punch in the head or one of these cigarettes i would take a punch in the head wow what a weird thing to say about cabbage it's like smoking a potato it's like no you've literally got the thing you can compare it to there it's like smoking a cabbage actually well lettuce yeah well i suppose lettuce is more like cabbage than it is like potato i think they probably resent being confused with it constantly i would if i were lettuce
Did you see why he chose lettuce? No. So this guy was working for a cigarette company and someone said, why don't you come up with a new kind of cigarette that people won't get addicted to? And he said that he chose lettuce because it was the first thing he found in his fridge when he opened it.
That's quite impulsive because the name Bravo, that came up immediately as well because he told his wife, who was Italian, about the idea. And she said, oh, Poussaint, Bravo, Bravo. And he went, yes, and that's what we'll call it. That could have all happened in one trip to the fridge, I'm guessing.
He could have invented a type of cigarettes that had eggs in them and they were called, what a fucking stupid idea.
LAUGHTER
He did try a load of different things, though. He filed a patent to turn any leafy green into a cigarette. And it's mostly to do with drying the leaves and all of that.
There is a leafy green that people do like to turn into cigarettes, isn't there?
No, Andy? Not familiar with it. But he tried so many. He tried carrot tops.
the leaves at the top of a carrot tomato tops can't get much out of that I guess he tried cabbage he tried grape leaves rhododendrons apparently most were awful and made him feel quite sick rhododendrons would make you feel really sick they're poisonous aren't they oh yeah they could make you Romans or the Greeks made rhododendron honey which would make you go crazy yes of course mad honey yeah maybe it's a different bit or maybe no one ever tried enough of these to make it at all dangerous I think so one of those lasted until 2010 stunning
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–5:51
2
How did lettuce cigarettes aim to help people quit smoking in the 1960s?
5:51–33:59
3
What unexpected inventions and campaigns were used to discourage smoking?
33:59–56:20
4
How did the Suez Canal closure create the longest ‘traffic jam’ in history?
56:20–1:01:07