The Alien Origins of Bovril

A food like Bovril deserves to have some bizarre origins. And it does.

Straight outta Wikipedia, the world’s biggest game of Chinese whispers:

“In 1870-1871, in the war against the Germans, Napoleon III found that his armies could not ‘march on empty stomachs’. Because of this he ordered one million cans of beef to feed his starving troops. The duty to provide all this beef went to a Scot called John Lawson Johnston. The only trouble was that Britain did not have a large enough quantity of beef to meet the French people’s and Napoleon III’s demand. John Lawson Johnston’s first beef product was known as ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’.”

When it came to branding time, the Bovril name came from the latin for cow, Bos, plus Vril. Vril is the name of a mysterious liquid energy source from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1870 novel The Coming Race. Vril is used by strange, subterranean angel-like beings to do whatever they want. Don’t know about you lot, but we use Bovril in exactly the same way.

Perhaps the strangest thing is that since 2004, Bovril’s actually been yeast-based, like Marmite. Did anyone notice? Naah.

By the way, Unilever’s official site backs all this up. So it’s not just a load of processed cow-guts…

Fact-U-Like of the day 4/7/06

Guess what faggots, that slightly disturbing British breed of meatball, are called in Provence? Gayettes. There’s obviously a conspiracy somewhere.