The History of Fresh Produce

Why did the British government convert a captain’s cabin into a floating greenhouse? What was it about a starchy Pacific fruit that so captivated Joseph Banks and the planters of the Caribbean? And who was William Bligh, the ambitious navigator chosen to command one of the strangest expeditions in naval history?

Join John and Patrick as they launch a brand new series on the voyage of HMS Bounty, tracing its origins from the breadfruit groves of Tahiti to the sugar plantations of the West Indies, and introducing the crew who would sail with Bligh, including a yo...

Who were the benandanti, the “good walkers” of sixteenth-century Italy who claimed their spirits left their bodies at night to battle witches, armed with stalks of fennel, in order to save the harvest? Why did the men who believed they were defending Christendom find themselves being interrogated by the Inquisition? And how did a man’s claim to have been sent by an angel become the very thing that condemned him?

Join John and Patrick as they travel to the villages of Friuli to uncover one of the strangest chapters in the history of food — a story of grain...

Where did the world’s most pungent bulb actually come from? What does a 4,000-year-old Babylonian clay tablet reveal about how people cooked with it? And how did a humble kitchen ingredient end up as a weapon against vampires, the subject of an international trade dispute, and a plant carrying hidden viruses from field to field?

Join John and Patrick as they take apart the history of garlic, one clove at a time — from the stews of ancient Mesopotamia and the gardens of Rome, to medieval English recipes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Along...

Who was Edgar J. Watson, the Florida farmer shot dead by his own neighbours in 1910? Was he really the serial killer of Everglades legend, suspected in the murder of the outlaw Belle Starr and accused of murdering his own harvest crews rather than pay them? And how much of his fearsome reputation can actually survive contact with the historical record?

Join John and Patrick as they journey into the Ten Thousand Islands to separate fact from folklore in one of Florida's most notorious murder legends — uncovering, beneath the myth, a genuinely fascinating story of vegetables, sugarcane, and a...

Why did rural labourers burn tax records during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381? How did American wheat farmers try to seize control of the railroads in the 1890s? And why, in 1962, did French growers actually fight each other with artichokes?

Join John and Patrick as they trace six centuries of farmers rising up against landlords, railroads, governments and markets — from medieval England and the Breton "Artichoke War," through the great Indian farm protests of 2020, to the tractors that brought the Netherlands to a standstill and are still rolling through the streets of Europe today. Same grievance, different century: wh...

Who was John Chapman, the barefoot, tin-pot-wearing nurseryman who became one of America's most beloved folk heroes? Why were his millions of apple trees destined not for eating, but for cider and applejack? And how did a man who secretly controlled a small fortune in frontier land come to be remembered as a penniless wandering saint?

Join John and Patrick as they strip away two centuries of Disney-fied legend to uncover the real Johnny Appleseed — a hard-nosed frontier businessman, a devoted follower of a radical Swedish mystic, and the accidental architect of the chaotic genetic lottery that ga...

Why did the Suda insist a Greek comic playwright died after being struck by a pear? How did the Emperor Augustus's own precautions against poison get defeated by figs still hanging on the tree? And why could sixteenth-century chroniclers not agree whether a King of England was killed by apples, pears, plums, peaches, or simply overeating?

Join John and Patrick as they trawl through history's long and stranger-than-it-sounds relationship with fatal fruit and veg — from poets choked on grapes at Greek symposia and a Roman prince's fatal party trick, to a 99-year-old man killed by a falling co...

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 existence by banning it as a religious act? Why did quinoa's spectacular twenty-first century success on global markets cause farming communities who had grown it for seven thousand years to start eating less of it? And, what exactly is the "quinoa paradox"?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of quinoa — from the shores of Lake Titicaca to the UN G...

How did a single night's frost in September 1867 kill nearly one tenth of Finland's population — proportionally worse than the Irish Famine — and why has almost nobody heard of it? Why did a philosopher-turned-finance-minister's obsession with protecting a brand-new currency cost tens of thousands of lives? And, how did the very people who mismanaged the catastrophe end up writing its history?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of the Great Finnish Hunger Years — the Frost Night, the coffins, and the national amnesia that followed...

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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 electrifying their patches with lethal intent, and causing over a hundred and sixty of them to spontaneously explode in rural China? Why did Mark Twain call the watermelon "the king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth"? And, what does a kinkajou locked in a Florida bathroom have to do with any of this?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the 5,000-year hist...

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 a vegetable keep reappearing at every major turning point in human history? What is the true story of the poisoned green pickle, the Heinz pickle pin that required police crowd control at the 1893 World's Fair, and the man who went over Niagara Falls in two welded plastic pickle barrels? And, why does Connecticut law require that a pickle must bounce?

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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? Why does the humble pea, which unlocked the fundamental laws of genetics, turn out to be better frozen than fresh — and what does a machine called the Tenderometer have to do with Mendel's monastery garden? And, how did a crop that fed Neolithic hunter-gatherers quietly become the building block of the plant-based food revolution?

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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? Why does 80 percent of America's winter salad come from a single Arizona county that only exists because of a river it doesn't own? And, what happens when a legal framework built for one climate and one scale of agriculture is asked to hold together under a completely different one?

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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? Why does a parasite that was "fixed" in 1996 keep coming back, outbreak after outbreak, in a different salad drawer each time? And, what does the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak in years, unfolding right now across three dozen American states, tell us about the food system that hasn't changed at all?

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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 leave measurable chemical marks on the genes of people who were in the womb during it? And, what did the bomber crews of Operation Manna find spelled out below them in tulip bulbs as they flew low over the Netherlands dropping food instead of bombs?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of the Netherlands and the Hongerwinter — the st...

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 vegetable become the subject of diplomatic warfare between South Korea, Japan, and China, a million-dollar space programme, and a UN cultural heritage inscription shared by two countries technically still at war? And what does kimjang — the autumn tradition of women gathering to make a year's supply together — reveal about what kimchi actually is, beyond the jar?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story...

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? How did a single crop fund two civil wars simultaneously — with the government and the rebels taxing the same beans to buy weapons to fight each other? And what does the concept of Ivoirité — invented to exclude a presidential rival — have to do with the farms that feed the global chocolate industry?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Côte d'Ivoire and cocoa — the Ivorian Miracle, the blood choc...

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? How does a pre-phylloxera cutting, preserved in Uruguayan soil while the original European stock was wiped out, become a living archive of a grape that no longer exists in its original form in France? And what does it mean that Uruguay didn't pick Tannat — Tannat picked Uruguay?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the stor...

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? Who were the people who lost the right of pannage, turbary, and estovers, and what does it mean that the hedged fields every English person loves as the quintessential English countryside are the direct product of the legislation that destroyed the English peasantry? And how do the Enclosure Acts, Kett's Rebellion, the Swing Riots, and the Premier League turn out to be the same story told two centuries apart?

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How does a fruit with a two-day shelf life become one of Switzerland's great protected exports? Why does the finest kirsch come not from Germany's Black Forest but from a small lake-side canton in Central Switzerland? And why does a splash of cherry brandy hold a bowl of molten cheese together at every Swiss dinner table?

Join John and Patrick as they trace the story of kirsch — from wild cherries in the forests of Central Europe, through the Chriesimärt of Zug and the founding of Etter in 1870, to the almond note hidden in every glass and the...

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? How did the phylloxera catastrophe that destroyed French vineyards quietly turn colonial Algeria into the hidden engine of French wine, with Algerian reds shipped in unmarked barrels to be blended into Bordeaux and Burgundy without anyone asking where they came from? And what does it mean that the appellation system which defines French wine as we know it today was partly invented to keep Algerian wine out?

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Why did the President of the United States personally intervene to improve the yam supply of Caribbean labourers on a jungle construction site — and what does that detail reveal about the vast, brutal, and deeply unequal machine that built the Panama Canal? Who were the Silver Women selling plantains from market stalls in the Canal Zone, and why does the history of one of the greatest engineering projects in human history barely mention the West Indian workers who actually dug it?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Panama and the Canal — the Gold Roll...

Why did the Sumerian gods describe a land on the Persian Gulf coast as paradise — and why does the geological reality of that same land, 4,000 years later, still justify the comparison? Who were the Qarmatians, the radical sect who built a proto-communist oasis commune and then stole the Black Stone of Islam from Mecca and kept it hidden in an Eastern Arabian date palm grove for twenty-two years? And how did the water that made Al-Hasa the most fought-over oasis in the ancient world turn out to be sitting directly above the largest conventional oil field on Earth?

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Why did two Syrian merchants opening a shop in Istanbul in 1554 inadvertently invent the public sphere — and how did a small copper pot of coffee produce Lloyd's of London, the French Revolution, and the Royal Society? Why did Sultan Murad IV personally execute coffeehouse owners in the streets, and why did it make absolutely no difference? And how does a drink from the Ethiopian highlands, brewed first by Sufi monks in Yemen, end up creating the conditions for the Enlightenment?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Türkiye and the kahvehane — the Ottoman coffe...

Why did a Māori chief ask a visiting English botanist how it was possible to live without a plant — and what does his bewilderment reveal about a civilisation built entirely around a single organism? How did European demand for rope fibre trigger the Musket Wars that reshaped the political map of Aotearoa before formal colonisation had even begun? And what does the ethics of harvesting — never cut the rito, never remove the heart — tell us about a way of relating to the natural world that almost disappeared and is now being slowly, carefully restored?

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Why did a blacksmith hide six cocoa pods under his tools to smuggle them past Spanish customs — and how did those six pods become the foundation of an industry that today supplies sixty percent of the world's chocolate? Who was Tetteh Quarshie, the man who spent six years watching cocoa grow on a plantation island before bringing the knowledge home to Ghana, and why has the credit for what he did been contested ever since? And what does it mean that the average cocoa farmer in Ghana earns a dollar a day for producing the raw material of a ch...

Why did 27 words buried in a Bavarian price regulation from 1516 become the most famous food law in history — and why did it take 402 years for anyone to give it the name that made it sound ancient and inevitable? What was in German beer before hops arrived, why did the Church control it, and how did switching ingredients become an act of theological protest during the Reformation? And how did Bavaria hold its entry into the German Empire hostage to the extension of its beer law — and win?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Germ...

Why did the man who just conquered India weep over a melon — and what does that tell us about the fruit that travelers from Ibn Battuta to Victorian cavalry officers have been stopping their journeys to describe for seven centuries? How did the river valleys of what is now Uzbekistan become the origin point of every sweet melon on Earth, and the crossroads through which paper-making, Islam, and Buddhism all passed in different directions? And who was Babur, the tiger who lost Samarkand twice, won an empire he couldn't love, and asked to be buried in a garden in Af...

Why does the most extravagant opera house in the history of South America sit in the middle of the Amazon rainforest — and how did a wild tree, a Connecticut hardware merchant's accident, and a debt bondage system built on human misery pay for Italian marble, Murano chandeliers, and a ceiling painted in Paris to look like the underside of the Eiffel Tower? Who was Henry Wickham, the man who took 70,000 rubber tree seeds out of Brazil and ended the boom in a single generation? And what happened to the opera house when the carriages stopped coming?

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Why did the most productive colony in the entire world — generating 40 percent of Europe's sugar from an area the size of Maryland — become the site of the only successful slave revolution in human history? How did a Vodou ceremony in a forest clearing, a Stoic-reading formerly enslaved general, and yellow fever combine to defeat Napoleon's army and reshape the political geography of North America? And why were the people who freed themselves required to compensate the people who enslaved them — and to keep paying, with interest, for 122 years?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Hai...

Why did the potato blight begin in Belgium before it reached Ireland — and why has the Flemish famine of 1845, which killed tens of thousands and stunted a generation, been almost entirely forgotten while the Irish catastrophe became the defining tragedy of a nation? What destroyed the linen industry of Flanders before the blight even arrived, and how did that earlier catastrophe turn a regional food crisis into something far worse? And what does DNA sequencing of museum specimens from 1845 reveal about where the most consequential agricultural disaster in European history actually began?

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Why did a Greek historian standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid in 450 BC record that its builders were fed on onions, garlic, and radishes — and what does the archaeology say about whether he was right? Who were the people who actually built the pyramids, and what does a daily logbook written by a middle-ranking official called Merer, found in a Red Sea harbour in 2013, tell us about the greatest construction project in human history? And why does the onion, cut open to reveal its concentric rings, turn out to be both the fuel of the pyramid builders an...

Why did a Portuguese colonial sugar ban inadvertently create Cape Verde's national spirit — and what does it reveal about how cultures find ways through every door that's closed to them? How did ten uninhabited volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic become the birthplace of a creole language, a music of longing, and a sugarcane brandy whose flavour is specific to each valley's microbes? And what happens when the law designed to protect a traditional product becomes the mechanism that pushes out the people who made it traditional?

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Why do Bosnian Muslims make and celebrate a plum brandy that Islamic law technically forbids — and what does their answer to that question reveal about four centuries of Ottoman rule, Balkan identity, and the extraordinary weight of contingency behind things that seem simple? How did the Ottomans simultaneously bring distillation to the Balkans, prohibit alcohol, and shape the culture that would eventually inscribe plum brandy on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list? And what is in a glass of šljivovica that a supermarket bottle of slivovitz will never contain?

Join John as he tells the story of Bosnia and...

Why did a restless boy from a rural Swedish parsonage end up giving a name to every living thing on Earth — and how did he build a system so durable that it still runs as the operating system of modern biology, long after the theology behind it was overturned? How did the invention of the index card, a near-fatal journey through Lapland, and three years in the Dutch botanical gardens produce twelve thousand species names and a framework that has since scaled to potentially a trillion? And what do we do with the fact that the same man who pl...

Why does the Emperor of Japan — head of state of one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth — wade into a rice paddy every year to plant seedlings by hand, and harvest them in autumn by torchlight? How did a grain that arrived from the Korean peninsula three thousand years ago become not just the foundation of Japanese civilisation, but the source of imperial legitimacy, the unit of feudal taxation, and the subject of the world's first commodity futures market? And what does it mean that turtle shell divination was used in 2019 to select the rice fields for a ne...

Why did the civilisation that invented writing, cities, and law destroy the very soil that made it possible — and why are sixty to seventy percent of those same fields still poisoned by salt today? How did two scholars at the University of Chicago, reading cuneiform grain records from 2400 BC, discover that the fall of Sumer was not caused by war or plague but by a slow, invisible chemical process that no amount of ingenuity could stop? And what does it mean that the Sumerians could see it happening, recorded it meticulously on clay tablets, and kept irrigating anyway?

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Why did a Jesuit republic of 140,000 people in the subtropical forests of South America — with its own armed militia, its own printing presses, its own Baroque composers, and the only successful mate plantation in colonial history — get destroyed by a riot about hats? How did the Guaraní and the Society of Jesus together solve a domestication mystery that no one else could crack, and why did that knowledge vanish the moment the priests were expelled?

Join John as he tells the story of Paraguay and yerba mate — the Jesuit utopia, the bandeirante raiders, the angel faces carved in subt...

How did a shipping clerk in Antwerp discover one of the greatest crimes of the nineteenth century simply by paying attention to which ships were carrying what — and why did it take a decade of missionary photographs, a British consul's report, and Mark Twain's pen to force the world to look? Why did the invention of the pneumatic tyre turn a wild Congo rubber vine into the engine of an atrocity that halved the population of an entire country? And what made Leopold II's Congo Free State different from every other colonial horror?

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Why does it take between 150,000 and 200,000 flowers — and up to 470 hours of human labour — to produce a single kilogram of saffron, and why has the plateau of La Mancha been the place where that labour happens for over a thousand years? What did the Moors actually bring to Spain, and why does every Spanish cook who reaches for the azafrán, the arroz, or the aceite speak a culinary history that maps directly onto what happened in those Andalusian fields between 711 and 1492? And what is the specific, irreversible tragedy of expelling the people who know how to maintain an irrig...