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like you sign up for your one dollar a month trial at shopify dot com slash setup it's monday august 22 i'm jackson bird today It's Monday, August 22nd, 2022. I'm Jackson Bird today. A dive into the viscous depths of the unshakable ketchup bottle and its 57 different origin stories. Plus, NASA released the sound of an actual black hole and expected and unexpected chicken wing news.

Here's some cool stuff for your ride home.

Love it or hate it, there is no doubt of ketchup's popularity in North America.

It's frequently touted as one of Canada's favorite

condiments, and here in the U.S., while it's often pitted against mustard as if they were equals,

for the last three years, sales of ketchup in the U.S. have been almost double that of mustard.

The real opponent, if we were to go strictly on sales, would be

Ranch, which ketchup has been neck and neck with on sales numbers for the last three years.

Now, while Ranch and Mustard both have their own fascinating histories, today I want to dive

into the savory history of the nation's most iconic and perhaps most confused condiments,

and how it is that we ended up with pretty much just one dominant version of a once diverse to the point of eluding definition sauce.

The very first evidence we have for the sauce that would become ketchup dates back to 544 C.E.

in China, from the Chi Min Yao Shu, the most completely preserved

of the ancient Chinese agricultural texts. It contains an origin story about the accidental discovery

of the sauce and instructions for recreating it yourself. Back then, however, it was not ketchup,

but rather a kind of fish sauce,

originally made from yellowfish, shark, and mullets. And like with so many things,

British colonizers in about the 1500s were introduced to the fish sauce and brought it back with them to Britain, where over the years they transformed it from its original version. Quoting

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