PROFESSOR THRUPIECE
the thrupiece diet
PLEASE NOTE: Visitors to this site are kindly asked to understand that this site is concerned only with the academic background and intellectual foundations of Professor Thrupiece's pioneering work on the thrupiecediet™. Those interested in purchasing thrupiecediet™ products are directed either to the website of Threadbone Laboratories, the current patent world wide licensee, or to the thrupiecediet™ products website
Background
Widely regarded as the world's leading weight-loss product, the thrupiecediet(TM) was developed in Cambridge in the early 1960s and arose from Professor Thrupiece's pioneering PhD research into the nutritional value of Household Fluff (0.003thru).
Professor Thrupiece had been no more than 11 years old when he first discovered blue jumper fluff in his navel and he quickly became intrigued by the potential value of fluff to the human diet. Aware that large quantities of the material accumulated almost everywhere and that these were regarded as "a nuisance to be disposed of rather than a resource to be harnessed", he quickly began to investigate ways in which they might be genetically modified "to ensure better absorption". Matters of texture and taste would be investigated much later and some claim the Professor's refusal to consider these at the outset hampered the project with downstream consequences felt even to this day.
Working in primitive conditions and in great secrecy, the Professor's early experiments were conducted chiefly on himself - with mixed results.
Belly-button fluff of the kind first used by Professor Thrupiece together with two extraction devices he purchased c 1951
An Early Breakthrough
The Professor's early researches attracted little attention, though at some point in late 1951 both the United States and the Soviet military authorities, keen to find ways of boosting astronaut nutrition whilst holding space payloads to a minimum began to take a keen interest. (See Professor Thrupiece and the Space Race) The veil of absolute secrecy was probably punctured in late 1951 when Professor Thrupiece was obliged to seek import licenses for specialist “fluff and household dust handling technologies” (UK Customs and Excise Certificate B649c October 1951) when equipping his private state-of-the-art laboratory (or shed) in his Batcombe back garden. Given the now almost universal availability of thrupiecediet™ products it is hard to imagine the extraordinary sensitivities attaching to this early work or its strategic value to governments of all descriptions in the early-mid 1950s. Without question it was subject from 1953 onwards to what MI5 Historian Ivor Notion has termed “observation, oversight and espionage” and there is reason to believe that interest intensified once the idea of manned space operations began to crystallise. Tellingly, it was at about this time, according to Sissy Oats (the Thrupiece household’s cleaner and grandmother-in-law of the 2007 thrupiecediet™ Slimmer of the Year Brenda Oats) that the thirteen year old “Professor” bought a new high-capacity vacuum cleaner from Harrods and asked her to estimate the likely weekly yield of “fluff, dust and other particles” from behind the extensive venetian blinds in the Batcombe Cricket Pavilion which she also serviced on Tuesdays. In that same year, he would also contact his second cousin Sheldon Treadbone (an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge) to see if he could source high quality undergraduate fluff on the industrial scale he would require if he was to satisfy his ever more demanding paymasters
By the mid 1950s Professor Thrupiece was sourcing fluff from mutliple locations.
[TOP] The Batcombe garden shed: an unlikely place from which to start a dietary revolution [ABOVE] The derelict Batcome Cricket Pavilion whose venetian blinds were an early source of significant quantities of research-grade fluff.
the thrupiecediet
It was only on going up to Cambridge and receiving a more thorough grounding in both Culinary Bio-ethics and Fluff Molecular Path Transformational Science that Professor Thrupiece could properly refine his ideas and bring the appropriate rigour to his instinctive experiments. Setbacks (including an unpleasant laboratory incident with an unstable (and probably contaminated) batch of Magdalene College undergraduate bed-lint which saw him suspended from all practical work for three months) were common and it would require all the professor's legendary determination to see the work through. The opportunity to pursue PhD research under the expert supervision of Dr Kenwood Cheffe (backed, significantly, by a Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food grant) proved the catalyst for "the final solution" (not to be confused with THE Final Solution (see Adolf Hitler: The War and My Tenuous Connection With It (Threadbone Press 2002)) and the rest is - quite literally - History.
Originally marketed as the Cambridge Diet™ it was rebranded following a copyright ruling in the High Court.
Commercialised fully in the late 1960s The thrupiecediet™ rapidly supplanted all other airborne substance-based supplement plans after official adoption by the UK Government for use in times of conflict (British overseas territories only).
The thrupiecediet™is now manufactured and licensed exclusively by Threadbone Laboratories plc.
An early initiative to promote home-manufacture of the thrupiecediet™ in the USA was hampered by inadequate technology though a more recent re-introduction using threadbonenanocooking™ is gaining considerable traction in the digital marketplace.
The Cambridge Laboratory in which Professor Thrupiece (far left) originally worked. His mentor Dr Kenwood Cheffe can be seen (centre wearing gown). Voted by his fellow students "Least Likely to Succeed", Professor Thrupiece would prove them all wrong when his breakthrough PhD research established the basis for turning household fluff into a dietary staple. His work later extended to dust, lint and other airborne raw materials.
