A few meaty facts to chew on:

• The Roman emperor Elagabalus ordered 600 ostriches killed so his cooks could make ostrich-brain pies.

• A 1655 book by English physician Thomas Muffett advocated torturing animals before slaughter to make them more tender as food. The book said animals should be killed slowly and painfully, with "fear dissolving the hardest parts."

• Jesse James refused to rob a bank in McKinney, Texas, because his favorite chili parlor was in the same building.

• On a 1965 space flight, astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich on board for crewmate "Gus" Grissom.

4 In 1971, when Tokyo got its first McDonald's, the company's Japanese partner, Den Fujita, made this politically incorrect statement: "The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is that they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years. If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for 1,000 years, we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair will become blond."

• Turkeys have been bred to have such large breasts that they can't have sex and must be artificially inseminated.

• Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie gave up meat around age 60, explaining: "My intestines wrote me a letter."

• There's no chicken in chicken fried steak, so why is it called that? Probably because the beefsteak is coated in flour or batter, much as is done with fried chicken. Like many Southerners, Elvis Presley loved chicken fried steak, which he called "ugly steak."

SOURCES: "The Food Chronology" by James Trager, "The Great Food Almanac" by Irena Chalmers, "The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink" by John F. Mariani, "Jazz Cooks" by Bob Young and Al Stankus, People magazine, foodtimeline.com, London Daily Telegraph and Tribune news services.