History and produce with John Paap & Patrick Kelly 🍋
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How did a green vegetable reduce the court of Louis XIV to what contemporaries called “a fashion and a madness” — with ladies smuggling peas to their bedrooms and the Sun King himself eating so many that his doctors prescribed billiards as the cure?
How did a treaty signed in the middle of the Second World War end up with farmers seizing a dam at gunpoint, a woman shot dead by her own country’s National Guard, and American lettuce growers in 2026 wondering whether they’ll have a crop at all?
How did five farms in the highlands of Guatemala end up sickening nearly a thousand people across fifteen American states and two countries — and why did California’s strawberry industry lose forty million dollars for something it had nothing to do with?
How did a Nazi food embargo, a frozen canal, and a railway strike combine to starve one of the most developed societies in Europe to below 400 calories a day?
Why did the South Korean government fly in emergency cabbage from China in 2010 — and why was that decision experienced as a national humiliation as much as a practical solution?
Why does the country that grows 45 percent of the world’s cocoa receive between five and seven percent of the value of the chocolate bar it becomes?
Why did a Basque immigrant fleeing the Carlist Wars plant a vine from the Pyrenees on the banks of the Uruguay River in 1870 — and how did that single decision produce what may now be the healthiest red wine grape in the world?
Why did Parliament pass 5,245 individual Acts to enclose 6.8 million acres of English common land — and why does almost nobody in England know it happened?
How does a fruit with a two-day shelf life become one of Switzerland’s great protected exports?
Why was Algeria, a predominantly Muslim country in North Africa, the largest exporter of wine in the world — and why has almost nobody heard of it?
