Chef Boyardee was a real person
Continuing on with a series about food-related people, like how Betty Crocker isn’t a real person, we move on to Chef Boyardee, whose real name was Ettore Boiardi.
Ettore was born on Oct 22, 1897, in Piacenza, Italy, with a passion for food since the start. Family stories say he used a wire whisk as a rattle. This passion landed him a job as an apprentice chef at a hotel at the very young age of 11, which mainly included tasks like peeling potatoes and taking out the garbage. By 16, he had left Italy and arrived at Ellis Island a few months before WWI began.