The History of Quinoa
How did a plant that Victorian botanists dismissed as something you'd find growing on a rubbish heap become the sacred mother grain of the Inca Empire — and how did the Spanish nearly stamp it out of ...
15 Sep 58min
The History of Watermelons
How did a fruit that began as an ancient Egyptian burial canteen — a self-contained water supply buried with pharaohs — end up starting an American military intervention in Panama, getting farmers ele...
1 Sep 35min
In a Pickle
How did a jar of pickles keep Julius Caesar's legions marching, Cleopatra beautiful, Captain Cook's sailors alive, and Napoleon's armies fed — and why does the same basic technology of salt water and ...
25 Aug 57min
The History of Peas
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 t...
18 Aug 49min
The 1944 Water Treaty
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...
11 Aug 31min
The Parasite in the Salad Drawer
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 mi...
4 Aug 28min
Netherlands: Operation Manna
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 does the Dutch Hunger Winter still le...
28 Jul 26min
South Korea: The Cabbage Crisis
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? How did a fermented v...
28 Jul 27min
