This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Nothing tells the story of human life and culture quite like food.

What we eat is central to ritual, politics, and society in general, no matter how ordinary it may seem in the moment,

which means that throughout the scope of history, food itself has become the source of intense controversy.

The Christian season of Lent, for instance, is supposed to be a time of fasting and self-denial.

Today, you might see someone give up drinking or eating sugar for 40 days, but the older

tradition is to give up meat.

In medieval Christian communities, only fish could be served at meals during Lent. That is, until March 9th of 1522.

On that night, in the Swiss city of Zurich, a printer named Christoph Froshaer gathered his

employees and some local officials into his parlor for a Lenton feast.

However, instead of the customary fish, they served sausages.

One of the men in attendance was Pastor Haldrick Zwingley, who blessed the meal.

Now, at that time, it was forbidden by the church to eat meat during Lent,

so word about the anti-Christian meal spread fast. Frosher and most of

the others who had attended were jailed for breaking canon law. Zwingli, the priest, wasn't arrested,

and might have gotten away free and clear, but he didn't intend to keep his head down for long.

Even though he hadn't eaten any of the sausage himself at the meal, he felt the principle of

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