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or both of these purposes. I always associated green with the color of the pistachio nutmeat, although the truth is that the term “yellow-green” is a more apt description. Perhaps the early ice cream makers made a subjective decision that green was more appropriate than yellow.
     
    Donald Buckley, executive director of the National Ice Cream Retailers Association, echoed Marks’s sentiments and added that the color green had relatively little competition in early ice cream fountains. Yellow was already “taken” by vanilla. The average person probably associates the color green most closely with mint, not then popular as an ice cream flavor. (Now, green is a popular color in mint chocolate chip ice cream.)
    Kathie Bellamy, of Baskin-Robbins, indicated that consumers are very conscious of whether the color of an ice cream simulates the “public perception of pistachio.” Note that most commercial pistachio ice creams, including Baskin-Robbins’, are invariably a pale green, and that considerable research is conducted on “color appeal.” After all, with inexpensive food colorings, pistachio could just as easily be colored chartreuse, if the public would buy it.
     
    Submitted by Lynda Frank of Omaha, Nebraska. Thanks also to Morgan Little of Austin, Texas; Bob Muenchow of Meriden, Connecticut; and many others .
     

 
    Why Are Graves Six Feet Deep and Who Determined They Should Be That Deep?
     
    Graves haven’t always been that deep. Richard Santore, executive director of the Associated Funeral Directors International, told Imponderables that during the time of the Black Plague in Europe, bodies were not buried properly or as deep as they are today. These slovenly practices resulted in rather unpleasant side effects. As soil around the bodies eroded, body parts became exposed, which explains the origins of the slang term “bone yard” for a cemetery. Beside the grossness content, decomposing flesh on the surface of the earth did nothing to help the continent’s health problems.
    England, according to Santore, was the first to mandate the six-foot-under rule, with the idea that husband and wife could be buried atop each other, leaving a safe cushion of two feet of soil above the buried body, “the assumption being that if each casket was two feet high, you would allow two feet for the husband, two feet for the wife, and two feet of soil above the last burial.” At last, there were no bones in the bone yard to be found.
    The six-foot rule also puts coffins out of reach of most predators and the frost line. Of course, caskets could be buried even deeper, but that would be unlikely to be popular with gravediggers, as Dan Flory, president of the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science, explains:
     
         Six feet is a reasonable distance for the gravedigger [to shovel] and is usually not deep enough to get into serious water or rock trouble.
     
     
     
Submitted by Patricia Arnold of Sun Lakes, Arizona. Thanks also to Deone Pearcy of Tehachapi, California .
     
     
    Why Doesn’t Ham Change Color When Cooked, Like Other Meats?
     
    Let’s answer your Imponderable with a question. Why isn’t ham the same color as a pork chop, a rather pallid gray?
    The answer, of course, is that ham is cured and sometimes smoked. The curing (and the smoking, when used) changes the color of the meat. You don’t cook a ham; you reheat it. According to Anne Tantum, of the American Association of Meat Processors, without curing, ham would look much like a pork chop, with perhaps a slightly pinker hue.
    Curing was used originally to preserve meat before the days of refrigerators and freezers. The earliest curing was probably done with only salt. But salt-curing alone yields a dry, hard product, with an excessively salty taste.
    Today, several other ingredients are added in the curing process, with two being significant. Sugar or other sweeteners are added primarily for flavor but also to retain some of the moisture of the