"miracle" news and stories

When a woman in Marino, a small Italian town south of Rome, turned on her kitchen tap, she got a spurt of wine instead of water. "Miracolo!" she shouted, and ran outside to tell others. Word quickly spread, and soon residents all over town were filling bottles and containers with Frascati, the local white wine made from trebbiano and malvasia grapes.

It turns out the wine wasn't blessed from above after all. Plumbers were supposed to have connected the 3,000 liters of Frascati to the town fountain for the annual harvest festival, but they accidentally hooked it to the water supply instead.

"People were calling it a miracle which it wasn't--it was a mistake," said mayor Adriano Palozzi. Mistake or miracle, I'd be pretty pleased if wine came out of my kitchen tap.

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The proponents of drinking peanut milk, a small buy loyal bunch, credit it with everything from improving general health to curing baldness. Jack Chang, 58, came up with the drink as a way to enjoy his favorite food - peanuts - after his gum disease progressed to the point he was no longer able to chew solid foods at all. There is no proof that his peanut milk, which is non-dairy and made of made from peanuts, grains, herbs and spices, does any of the things he claims, though his customers swear by it. One, Donna Cooke, insists that it keeps her eyes "clear of infection." Others report "it strengthens patients with AIDS and cancer, reverses baldness, heals wounds faster, prevents colds, reduces symptoms of menopause and soothes psoriasis. It's also said to be a hangover cure. Some drink it at bedtime to help them sleep, others as an alternative to caffeine."

The drink now sells 240,000 bottles each year and will soon be on the shelves in Whole Foods markets. Health and nutrition experts are skeptical and believe that the "miracle" product, as it is termed by Chang, does nothing more than take advantage of a rising health anxiety of consumers, a modern snake oil.

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It's that time of year, the time to look back on the stories that made 2005 great. Our countdown begins with God, who appeared several times this year in food.

Grilled cheese, fish sticks and cinnamon buns.

This may sound like the lunch menu at the local high school, but in fact these are all food items on which people claim to have found the likeness of God. Suprisingly, God shows up in mysterious ways on a number of food items.

Early Christmas morning, the Bongo Java coffee shop in Nashville, Tennessee, suffered a break-in. While the shop and register appeared to be undamaged, it's famous NunBun was missing. The cinnamon bun, discovered by the store manager in the 1996, was said to have the likeness of Mother Teresa in its cinnamon-glazed layers of pastry. The bun was preserved in the freezer until a local crew made a short film about it, after which the story was picked up by the city paper and propelled into the national spotlight. After having received so much attention, the bun was coated in shellac and put on display in the shop, where it has enjoyed attention as a local novelty for 9 years.

The shop owner fears that the Immaculate Confection may have been destroyed, since it was so clearly the target of this crime.

[Thanks to Tracy for the tip]

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