I just read a page on the uses of Cocos nucifera that this was indeed true:
This is from Perdue’s page on the coconut: http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Cocos_nucifera.html
Note, it says it was used as a substitute for sterile glucose, not blood plasma, and was used in emergencies.
Somehow, “Let them eat Pez” just isn’t as evocative. 
The OED confirms that this is true: from the French aiguillette, “little needle”.
Let’s say that one olive costs them 5 cents. That means they would have had to have served 800,000 first-class salads in the course of a year—more than 2,000 salads a day—in order to make a $40,000 saving. This seemed unlikely to me, so I had a look at the AA website. I wasn’t able to determine how many flights they operate every day, but I was able to find out from their annual report that they currently employ around 20,000 flight attendants. This means that, in order to make the $40,000 saving, each flight attendant would have to serve 40 first-class salads in the course of a year. When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so unlikely.
TomH said:
I did a web search on this yesterday, and couldn’t find any reports of this from any reputable (nay, any) sources. I did find this “factoid” repeated over and over on hundreds of pages, usually titled something like “A guy sent this to me by email, but I know it’s true.” The strange thing is that the details of the rumor were always the same: It was always AA, always in 1987, they always saved $40,000 and it was always an olive on a first-class salad. How often are ULs so consistent throughout time? I found web referenced to this as far back as 1994. I would expect some slight detail to change in the time. But no one ever cited a source, so I was again fraught with doubt. I’m eager to see if anyone can come up with the truth about this. If course, I could just call AA…
The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets, but only in “odd word” lists. I would bet the word never existed outside of one shoelace factory, where it was considered a joke word, and everywhere else only as trivia.
The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer.
–The Marlboro Company? If you want to pick nits there never was a Marlboro Company.
The company that manufactures a cigarette under that brand name can trace its roots to a London tobacconist named Phillip Morris who died in 1873, but lung cancer was not listed as the cause.
This sounds like a legend that uses the top brand name of cigarette to try to make a case.
You could make a better case if you looked at the deaths of the first 3 C.E.O.'s of the R.J. Reynolds company.
"Betsy Ross is the only real person to ever have been the head on a Pez dispenser. "
From the official pez website, http://www.pez.com, htere are only two pez dispensers listed that were real people. Betsy Ross and Daniel Boone. The categorical list of dispensers is found at http://www.pez.com/HTML/collectorsdispensers.html
We just did this one over in GQ in the thread When did bar codes become widely used?.