In 1702, Willem III of the Netherlands celebrated his 30th year as King, and was hated by his people for being very distant on common issues. At the time, the Netherlands was suffering from a particularly bad famine, which affected everything except for its lemons, whose plant was particularly resistant to the pathogens infecting the roots of other plants. Carrots were hit particularly badly that year, but that’s a story for another issue.
Because of the famine, the primary source of food for peasants ended up being lemons, which frankly was simply not optimal. Interestingly, unlike what most people think, lemons weren’t always naturally yellow, but used to be dyed yellow from their green colour during farming. However by the 1900’s farmers eventually just resorted to selectively breeding for yellow lemons as that was what the population was used to. Why yellow? Well, that’s what this story’s about. Anyways, many of the peasants developed severe tooth decay, ulcers and internal bleeding, and severe esophageal irritation to the point where it became increasingly hard to swallow anything due to the constant citric acid intake.
One of the peasants, sick of this problem and the King not taking action and sitting down all day collecting taxes and importing fine food from France, decided to go to the palace and speak with the King. He had accused the King of being so distant to his country’s problems that he didn’t even know what the colour of a lemon was. The King of course responded that he did know, despite having absolutely no clue, after which the peasant asked him to bet on the issue. If the King got the colour correct, he would be able to continue to rule. If he did not, the peasant would be able to rule the country. The King, wanting to keep his pride, agreed to the bet and guessed that lemons were yellow. The king being incorrect, the peasant brought in a large pile of green lemons from his village to show that the King was wrong and proceeded to physically remove him from his throne. The peasant was promptly executed. The King, once again wanting to keep his pride, then enacted a law forcing all farmers to dye their lemons yellow. He died under mysterious circumstances later that year and was replaced by the creatively named Willem IV.
So remember: when life gives you lemons, sell them for a profit so that you can buy more lemons, which you can then sell for a profit to buy even more and so on until you develop an entire food corporation based on selling lemons after which you can branch into selling other products until you have a significant share of the food market after which you can slowly inject drugs into your products that will make the population less and less likely to take action against an attempt towards world domination!
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