Butter Smeared On Giant Bridge To Prevent Suicides, Traffic Jams

Butter. It’s tasty and it just happens to be an ideal lubricant for suicide hotspots like giant steel bridges.

Take this bridge in Guangzhou China for example:

Government officials in Guangzhou in south east China ordered workers to smear butter on all of the climbable surfaces of the 1,000 foot long steel bridge.

Government spokesman Shiu Liang said: “We tried employing guards at both ends but that didn’t work – and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked – and so now we have put butter over the bridge and it has worked very well. Nobody can get up there and anybody who tries either falls”

Apparently, they were fed up with traffic jams caused by motorists slowing down to watch people jump (or threaten to jump) to their deaths. Mmm…suicide butter jam. [Metro]

Taste Test is our week-long tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.