Julia Child’s first recipe was shark repellent? Seriously?

On the Internet, stories never get old, even when the writers do. The latest example? The currently hot topic along the lines of “Julia Child’s first recipe was shark repellent.”

It’s been repeated several times in the last couple of weeks, the original source apparently the CIA itself (in a tweet timed to Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week”).

I know about this story because, as far as I know, I was the first one to write it, almost 15 years ago. Though, of course, with a person as public as Child, it’s entirely possible it may have appeared before that.

It’s part of an ongoing Child theme that insists on trying to turn America’s greatest cookbook writer into something more. It’s the most recent descendant of the “Julia Child was a spy” meme.

Here are the facts:

During World War II, Child was a desk clerk for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the forerunner of today’s CIA. She was stationed in South China, which was a life-changing experience for a girl who had lived a fairly cloistered life, growing up in a moneyed family in Pasadena and then going on to Smith College.

The South China Sea was the site of much fighting during the war, and many sailors met an unhappy end there. One of her office’s projects was to convince the Navy to develop a shark repellent to help sailors lost at sea.

But they could get no support from the Navy, she said, because, well, “SHARKS!”

I’ll let Child tell the rest of the story (if you want to read the full profile from 2002, you’ll find it here).

“We couldn’t get the Navy to admit that sharks ate Navy men. They didn’t like to say, ‘Dear Mrs. So-and-So, your son was eaten by a shark. They’d much rather say: ‘Your gallant son was lost at sea.’

“Then one day, a shark was caught and they opened him up and found he had some undigested parts of people in his stomach. One of them still had fingerprints, and it turned out to be a Navy man. There was such glee in our office that they had finally proven a Navy man could be eaten by a shark.”

I can still hear that sweet wicked laugh when she finished the story.

Are you a food geek? Follow me on Twitter @russ_parsons1