celery. Myrmidons love it.

I think celery is the first food I've encountered in Britannica. Is celery interesting? Actually, practically everything is interesting when you dig a little deeper.

When I started reading about trees that are native to North America, I found it surprising that half the trees in my yard are actually non-native trees. That makes identification harder because all the identification books I have are North America specific. None of them mention Italian Cypress trees or Avocado trees.

The same goes for food I get at the grocery store. Where did these foods first come from? Britannica says celery is "native to the Mediterranean area". Wikipedia says the first references to celery are found in 1323 BC, although there is no evidence that it was cultivated until hundreds of years later.

Homer's Iliad mentions that the horses of the Myrmidons grazed on wild celery in the marshes of Troy. (Apparently Troy was an actual real place which is now northwest Anatolia in modern Turkey.) If I was a vegetable, I'd be super stoked to be mentioned in the Iliad.

Be prepared. The following shocked me to the core:

Celery is NOT a negative calorie food! It does NOT take more calories to digest it than it provides to the body. Seriously, the web is awful at providing information about food and health. It's just absolute garbage at both those things. If you hear a fact about food on the web outside of an encyclopedia, just believe the opposite and you will probably be right. In fact, I'm not even sure that there are any true facts about food. Be skeptical!