Welcome back to Yum But Why. I'm Kinar, and with me is her mom, Aparna. And today we are talking about birthdays. Specifically, you can guess it. Birthday food. Because every culture on earth celebrates birthdays, but not everyone does it the same way. And the differences are really surprising. Did you know that in some countries the birthday person doesn't receive cake, they bring one to share with everyone else? Or that in Korea you eat soup for your birthday? We've got the history of birthday cake and candles, which goes back way further than you'd think. A wild story about the happy birthday song with three sisters. Birthday food traditions from around the world, some science that might change how you feel about blowing out candles, jokes, trivia, and more. Let's go. Let's go. Okay, let's start with the most iconic birthday food. Cake. Kinar, where do you think the traditional birthday cake comes from? Probably from America. Yeah, we always assumed it was an American thing, but the story actually starts in ancient Greece. So in ancient Greece, round cakes were made to honor Artemis, the goddess of the moon. They were crafted from dough, honey, and sesame seeds and lit with candles to make them glow like the moon itself. Fun fact, Artemis is also the goddess of the hunt. And the new moon mission is called Artemis.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. So the very first birthday cake was an offering to Artemis?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, some historians believe that their tradition of putting candles on cakes may have roots in these offerings made to Artemis.
SPEAKER_04Oh, interesting. Like a moon cake for a moon goddess. And here's the part that connects directly to us today. After making a wish, people would put out the candles, believing that the smoke carried their prayers up to the heavens. And that's exactly what we do. We make a wish and blow out the candles.
SPEAKER_01Some historians think that the idea of candles and wishes may trace back thousands of years.
SPEAKER_04The Romans adopted the idea and started making cakes to honor the birthdays of important citizens. Birthday celebrations were much more common among wealthy families and important citizens than among ordinary people. So when did it become something for regular folks? Germany! The modern birthday cake can be traced back to 18th century Germany, where children's birthdays were marked with Kinderfest. Festive gatherings that included a sweet cake crowded with candles. Kinderfest literally means children's festival, right?
SPEAKER_01Yep. And their version was a little different from ours. The candles were lit in the morning, left to burn all day, and only blown out in the evening after dinner. So the candles were burning for hours.
SPEAKER_04Each candle represented a year of life, a tradition that still survives today.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna have a lot of candles on my cake, huh? A whole lot. It's the beauty of aging. Technically, you can only have two and do a four and a zero. Kinara just told everybody my age, which I'm very proud of, so it's fine. So German immigrants brought Kinderfest to America in the 1700s and eventually became the birthday party tradition we all know. Add in the Industrial Revolution, making sugar and flour cheap enough for everyone, and suddenly birthday cake wasn't just for the wealthy anymore.
SPEAKER_04Okay. Now can we talk about the happy birthday song? Let's do it. Okay. So the song is written in 1893 by two sisters, Mildred and Patty Hill, who were educators in Louisville, Kentucky. Mildred wrote the tune and Patty wrote the lyrics, and the original song was called Good Morning to All. It was a classroom greeting for teachers to welcome students every morning. What do you think it sounded like? Hmm, something like Good morning to all. Good morning to all. I will see you today.
SPEAKER_01I love it. That's very sounds very accurate. So wait, it was never actually written for birthdays?
SPEAKER_04Not at all. But here's where the secret third sister comes in. Mildred and Patty had a younger sister named Jessica. At some point, Jessica is the one who adapted the melody with the birthday lyrics we know today. Then in 1935, she worked with the music publisher to copyright the new version.
SPEAKER_01So we have Jessica to thank or blame for the song.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. And here's the wild part. A music publisher eventually sold those rights to a company called Warner Chapel Music for $25 million in 1988.
SPEAKER_01That's a lot of money.
SPEAKER_04No. Before 2016, you couldn't use Happy Birthday to you in a movie or a TV show without paying the royalties.
SPEAKER_01And royalties are basically like rent you pay to the company for the rights to use the song.
SPEAKER_04Wait. So every time a restaurant sang happy birthday, they were technically breaking the law. So therefore, every single time you wanted to sing it, you have to pay.
SPEAKER_01Or so you can pay like a blanket fee sometimes to to use the song. Most restaurants actually use different songs specifically to avoid paying this fee. And then in 2016, a court ruled that Warner Chapel's copyright claim was actually invalid. They had never properly owned the lyrics at all. The court put Happy Birthday into the public domain, which means everybody can use it, and Warner Chapel had to pay back $14 million in fees that they had wrongly collected. Alright, let's do a world tour of birthday food traditions. Some of these might surprise you.
SPEAKER_04Okay. Starting in Korea, in South Korea, your birthday breakfast is meal cook, seaweed soup.
SPEAKER_01Soup for breakfast on your birthday? Actually, I would love that. I love seaweed and soup. I want tomato soup.
SPEAKER_04The tradition comes from the idea that new mothers would eat seaweed soup for its health and nutritional benefits after giving birth. So on your birthday, you eat it to honor your mother's sacrifice and bringing you into the world. That's actually really beautiful. There's a potential origin story floating around out there that's super interesting. The tradition dates back to around the year 918, and it started because people observed that whales eat seaweed after giving birth to their calves. People saw this and thought if it helps whale mothers recover, it should help me too.
SPEAKER_01Let's go to Ghana next. Your birthday starts with Oto, a dish made from mashed sweet potato or yam mixed with eggs and palm oil eaten for breakfast. It's considered a celebratory food specifically tied to birthdays and other major life milestones.
SPEAKER_04Cool. And in China, people eat longevity noodles. Just like on their new year, on your birthday, you eat long, uncut noodles. The longer the noodle, the longer you live, and you absolutely cannot uncut or break them. So that means if they want like a hundred year life, their noodle has to be like super long.
SPEAKER_01I guess so. If you want to find out more, we talk about that in our New Year's episode a few episodes back. So check it out. In the Netherlands, it's common for the birthday person to bring treats, often cake, pastries, or other sweets, to share with classmates or co-workers. The birthday person is the one doing the giving.
SPEAKER_04Fairy bread is a classic Australian kid's birthday party food. White bread spread with butter and topped with rainbow sprinkles, which are called hundreds and thousands. In Australia, it's served at nearly every kid's birthday party and has become a symbol of nostalgic celebration.
SPEAKER_01I want to try that. I like all those things. White bread, butter, sprinkles.
SPEAKER_04And in Brazil, people eat brigaderos. These are small chocolate budgets truffles rolled in sprinkles. Every Brazilian birthday party has a table full of brigaderos.
SPEAKER_01Remember we tried to make them once? It's like chocolate and condensed milk that's delicious. Yeah, we got a kiwi crate and it had a recipe. And Trader Joe's has them in the frozen section, just FYI. I don't think we did good. We did not make them that well. But they are delicious. Um in India, on your birthday, the birthday person feeds the first bite of cake or sweets to someone else before eating any themselves. It's an act of love, giving before receiving. And growing up, I always thought that everybody did this at birthdays, that you feed each other a birthday cake. You feed it to the birthday person, the birthday person feeds you, and then realize that not everybody does that. But I do love this tradition. She also has a tradition where you put birthday frosting on my nose. Yeah, but that's a good one too. No, what is it? So we actually have a few listeners who have shared some of their birthday food traditions with us. So let's give it a listen.
SPEAKER_03Hello. We love this podcast. We would like to tell you about our family tradition of a birthday cherry cheesecake. The first person to make this delicious dessert was our grandmother. She taught our mum how to make the recipe, and now we're learning too. You first start with a base made of crumbled graham crackers, butter and sugar mixed together, which you put in a tin and in the fridge. On the top, you put some double cream, cream cheese, and more sugar mixed together. And then you put it back in the fridge to cool. Finally, you decorate with black cherries and a thick syrup made from the juice of the cherries. And then you and I am nine years old.
SPEAKER_00My parents wake me up with a TV when my birthday song, and they're always the moves in my room. My parents make me my favorite my favorite food for dinner, and they usually and they always make me bake good for um my birthday. Like um pies and uh cookies, and last year I had a chocolate cream pie.
SPEAKER_01Okay, science time. Kinara, why do we blow out birthday candles? To make a wish. What does that have to do with blowing out candles though?
SPEAKER_04Because the smoke carries the wish to the heavens with the candle smoke, like we talked about with the ancient Greeks. That makes sense.
SPEAKER_01I like that visualization when the smoke you blow out the candle and there's smoke and it carries it up to the heavens. So this 2,000-year-old belief that the smoke carries our wishes upward is still baked into our birthday tradition without us even knowing it.
SPEAKER_04Okay, but here's a science fact about blowing out candles that is either fascinating or disgusting, depending on how you feel about it.
SPEAKER_01Oh no. I don't know if I want to know it.
SPEAKER_04Well, it's actually kind of interesting. Researchers at Clemson University ran a study where participants ate pizza first, just like at a birthday party, and then blew out candles on a test cake made of styrofoam covered in vanilla icing. Yum. They found out that blowing candles increased the bacteria on the frosting by 1,400% compared to frosting that wasn't blown on. Why are you telling me this? Because it's science. But, and this is important, the lead researcher says this doesn't mean people who ate the cake are likely to get sick. He said, and I quote, in reality, if you did this w 100,000 times, then the chance of getting sick would still be very minimal. So, relax, enjoy the party, and maybe skip the slice. If the birthday person is obviously sick.
SPEAKER_01So we're not gonna stop blowing out candles, but I do think during COVID, people came up with more creative solutions. Like they had a little mini cupcake on the side that had a candle, so the birthday kid would blow out that instead of blowing out candles on the whole cake.
SPEAKER_04I remember they used to like the kids used to get really sad about not blowing out the candles. So one year there was just like a mom who brought a whole bunch of cupcakes, and all the kids got to blow out their own little candle.
SPEAKER_01That's very sweet. Okay, so I guess we're still gonna blow out candles, right?
SPEAKER_04We are. We are just going to keep making wishes just like people have for two thousand years. We're just going to know about the bacteria now. But that's okay, because doesn't everything have bacteria?
SPEAKER_01That's true. That's a very good point.
SPEAKER_04And on that note, let's start the birthday journey.
SPEAKER_01Let's hear him. I don't know if I'm ready. You never are. Yeah, let's get into it.
SPEAKER_04Why did the birthday cake cross the road? Why? Because he saw a fork in the road.
SPEAKER_01So he's like walking up to his own demise. That's sad.
SPEAKER_04What did the pirate say on his 80th birthday?
SPEAKER_01What?
SPEAKER_04I matey. Why can't kids remember past birthdays? Why? Because they are too focused on the present.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a good one.
SPEAKER_04I know that's true. What kind of birthday cake does Elsa like?
SPEAKER_01Ice cream cake. I'm really proud of myself for this answer, so I hope it's right.
SPEAKER_04It's wrong. The kind with lost of frosting and icing.
SPEAKER_02What do you think to a cow on its birthday? What? Happy birthday to Moon.
SPEAKER_01Amazing.
SPEAKER_02What kind of cake does it ghost like? Uh I scream cake. What do superheroes say when they put on their party hat? I'm a hat man. Knock knock. Who there? Olive.
SPEAKER_04Olive who? Olive who? Olive the presents are mine. Get it? Yes.
SPEAKER_01Okay, let's see if I do better at trivia. A rapid fire birthday food facts.
SPEAKER_04In Denmark, your birthday isn't just a cake and candle situation. Friends and family decorate the house with the Danish flag, the Danabrok, and place flags on the cake, around the house, and even outside windows to signal to the neighbors that someone inside is celebrating.
SPEAKER_01It's very patriotic. In Sweden, there's a special birthday cake called Princess Cake, a sponge cake filled with marzipan, layers of cream, and a bright green fondant dome on top. It was invented in the 1920s by a home economics teacher and named because three Swedish princesses loved it so much. There's actually a whole week in Sweden dedicated to this cake every September. It's delicious. Have you had it before? No. We'll get a slice someday.
SPEAKER_04Okay. And one more, in Jamaica. It's a tradition for friends and family to rub flour on the birthday person's face for good luck. See?
SPEAKER_01Flour, frosting, it's all for good luck. Just keep that in mind. I don't want flour on my face. Would you rather have frosting? I guess yeah, maybe. So what have we learned today?
SPEAKER_04That birthday cake has been around in some form since ancient Greece, and blowing out candles to send wishes to the heavens is over 2,000 years old.
SPEAKER_01We learned that the happy birthday song was written by two sisters as a morning classroom greeting, adapted into a birthday song by their sister Jessica, copyrighted by a corporation, and only put back in the public domain in 2016, after the court made them pay back $14 million. Every culture celebrates birthdays, but they do it in different ways. And that underneath all of it, whether it's candles or soup or fairy bread, birthdays are about the same thing everywhere. Pausing to say, I'm glad you're here.
SPEAKER_04Here's your challenge, listeners. Next birthday in your family, yours or someone else's. Try one tradition from another culture. And tell us what you choose. We want to hear about it. Keep exploring, keep tasting, and keep asking. Yum. But why?