 No, no, actually, we live in Swanton, West Swanton. Oh my gosh. Oh my God, Swanton. No kidding. Is the Swanton still on Swanton? As of last year, they were. They aren't out yet this year. So we are assuming they made it through the winter. There was a big push at one of the last select board meetings and, you know, the swans, that's a small pond for swans. The swans are really unhappy there. And why don't we put the swans someplace else and put goldfish in the park. And so the goldfish-swan controversy has been kind of a thing. Seriously, what's the one? We don't know yet. Is it going to be a town meeting? Not that I know of. I think it's kind of, you know, behind the scenes discussions. But there's one real goldfish proponent. So we'll see what happens. What's that? Where are you from originally? Swanton. Girl. Yeah. So you grew up with the swans? Not all the way. You know, we moved around quite a bit. But my family's, I've still got tons of cousins and whatnot in Swanton. It's still home center. And you went to George Washington? You? For my PhD. How about earlier? Where undergraduate degrees were? Mount Holyoke. Yeah, I loved it. And you presently are writing professionally? I do. Go. 200 articles? Lots of magazine stuff. Wow. And 20 books? Yeah, actually, I didn't really start writing as a writer-writer until after Randy and I had a bunch of little boys and I was staying home with these kids. And, you know, up until I started writing anything that anybody other than a biochemist would want to read, I'd only published in things like the Journal of Biological Chemistry, you know, hot stuff. So I was really nervy when I first started writing and I wrote only nonfiction. But I wrote a whole bunch of stuff, like the natural history of squirrels, the science of ice cream, the history of rocking horses, the archeology of privies. That was a really fun one. Okay, there's a whole subset of archeologists who do nothing but dig through privies. Apparently a lot of stuff got interestingly pitched down. Treasure trove. Yeah. And, you know, really set to nonfiction for quite a long time. I wrote my first fiction book for kids, which was called The Dragon of Lonely Island. And it was kind of a revelation because I'd always been kind of nonfiction. We're the guys that do the research. You know, we have to put it all together. This is work. You fiction people, you just sit on your rear ends and make it up out of your head. And then you start doing fiction and you realize, oh my God, this is really hard. I mean, I like to have a couple of projects going at once. But with fiction, I mean, if I can crank out three pages a day, that's a lot. With nonfiction, I can just keep cranking and cranking because it's more like doing a jigsaw puzzle. But you... You've got pieces. Yeah. Do your research. You find the neat bits. You find a cool way of putting it all together. And I love doing that. But you can... You don't get... I don't get so worn down doing that that I do with fiction. It's like, boy, I've had enough of that dragon for... Tell us a little bit about your family. You mentioned boys. Three sons. Three sons. Three sons. Did they have any area? One of them does. One of them is pretty much between us and Bennington, where his fiance is. And we've got one who's got a little baby boy who lives in New York City. Congratulations. Yeah, I know. Grandma. We have been... I know. I know. And it's been a big question as to what are you called as a grandmother? And I looked this up and, you know, I never thought much about this. I call my grandmother grandma. But there's lists of things. Oh, yes. Sometimes the children decide. Yeah. Yeah. Well... I'll just wait. We'll see what happens. Dr. Roup. We'll see how much we like this kid as he gets older. He's really cute. What's his name? Finnegan. Finnegan. He's only eight months old, so... Everybody likes the name. Yeah, really. Finnegan the Roup. Interesting. Yeah. Finnegan. Well, it's... God. Finnegan Harrison Roup. Finnegan Harrison Roup. Magnus. Finnegan Magnus Sherwood Harrison Roup. I said, God, guys, you know, you might have a second child. You know, maybe he's a baby. I think so. I thought he said Magnus. Magnus. Magnus. Got it. I got a better name. Yeah. Magnus. The man. What they said, you know... It's a greater name. Yeah, it's like being royalty. You know, if you've got enough names, you can choose one. Interesting. I mean, when I went to college, I had a whole bunch of friends that had suddenly decided to go by their middle names. You know, let's try on a new one for size. I thought about it for a while. And I didn't know it's your middle name. Natalie. There's just a million Catlins. I love that name, though. Me, too. I've never been fond of Rebecca. Really? What's your middle name? Well, I mean, what do you do with that? I've always been called by my middle name, but my official name is Francis, which nobody knows. I didn't know that. But I have to sing with that. It's confusing, actually, to have to use two different names for different purposes. I've always been one of them. I've never been called my first name. Is it a secret what your first name is? No, Mary, Virginia. I've learned so much today. Why don't we get in a big circle? I actually got interested in this, listening to the Eugene Carroll report. Why is she known as Eugene? Is the E something terrible? Is it like, you know, Ethel Wieda, I'm the Irmengard. I looked it up and it's Elizabeth. Elizabeth Jean, that's pretty. Yeah, that's nice. No. I did, too, immediately. Okay, should we? We've got to find the working person when we actually want to start. He can film. We're going to start. Oh, you're going to film me in the dark? Okay, well... First of all, let me introduce you. Okay, you do that. This is Rebecca. She's going to talk to us on a very interesting topic we all know about. Many of us are gardeners, very much into veggies. And I need to say, the other thing is that this is underwritten activity by the Vermont Humanities Council. We've utilized over the years very effectively and have always been appreciative of their support and they've always given us quality speakers, including Moa for me. Almost. I have to say, yes, that's right. They have a great organization. Yes. And also you have an opportunity to give me a kind of report card thing after the talk. I think you have to go online for that? Yeah. I'll share that with everybody who wants it. Yeah, and then you get to fill out a little thing. A scale of one to five. Yeah, it's done. Intelligent, charming. I understood what she said. Didn't read her PowerPoint. Oh, God. I don't think they asked about that. Let's hope not. Where was I starting from here? Oh, okay. So most of the info for this talk was out of this book. How carrots won the Trojan War. What a great title. Which is, it's on stories of ordinary garden vegetables. Which was a blast to write. This is your book. This is my book. One of my books. Yes, I got that. My book by me. And you have copies for sale? They're on Amazon. They're in bookstores. I have maybe two. Is this fiction or nonfiction? This is nonfiction. This is nonfiction and it's stated very clearly when one of the stories about vegetables is possibly really apocryphal and off the wall. Because there's some weird stuff popping up in the history of vegetables. Quickly, if we were to order it from Bear Pond would you get a bigger share of it from Amazon? Same thing. The only way I get more is if I actually sell them. But that means I have to carry them around. I also had a gig for about three years writing on food history and science for National Geographic. Which was really fun. Though they wanted like four researched articles a week. They were short. It was a blog. So they were short little things. But the amount of research was incredible. So I ended up at the end of National Geographic with just tons of stuff on food. So I've got a book in the works called Sources. Which I keep hoping to get published somewhere. Which is the history of food through the 12 courses of a Victorian meal. So it goes like from soup to nuts with, you know, at each course it's the history of whatever you're eating. So, you know, I never dreamed I'd get so fascinated with food. When I, there were four of us bloggers who blogged for the plate National Geographic. The plate. And actually at the end of this I got like five minutes of fame on television. They did a TV special. I think it was just called Eat. And I got to go to New York. I was made up. It was incredible. And they interviewed me for like three and a half hours. This boiled down to five minutes on Nutmeg. But I was still there, you know? It was very exciting. Anyway, one of the first things they asked all of us was would you please write a short piece on why is food important to you? And I thought, oh for God's sakes, why is food important to you? Because you will die without it. I mean, look at the Donner party. Look at all the pirates that ended up chewing on their boots. And, you know, then after my initial, I realized that food is great because it connects to everything. To culture, to sociology, to geography, to, you know, world migrations. So, so much of history is all involved in finding new foods, spreading old foods around the globe. In search of food, battling for food, running out of food. So there's a lot to connect there, which was always fun. And now my first slide. Well, so one of the first things I came up with in researching this book on veggies was what's a vegetable. Which is not as clear cut as you might think. First, most of the things that certainly I, all my life, have referred to as vegetables, botanically are fruits. So tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, pumpkins, squash. They're all fruits. They come from the fertilized ovary of a flower. If it's got seeds in it, it's a fruit. So what's a vegetable to a botanist is any part of the plant you eat. That's not a fruit. So leaves like lettuce and spinach, roots, beets and carrots. Petioles, like celery. Celery is an enlarged leaf petiole. You know, that skinny little stalk that connects a leaf to a plant. And celery. So all of these are veggies. So it seems really clear cut botanically. Fruit with seeds in it, vegetables not. However, there's also a political vegetable. In the 1880s, I think this all started off with a guy named John Nix who wanted to import tomatoes from the West Indies into the port of New York. At the time, there was a 10% tariff on foreign vegetables being imported into the country. Nix, who happened to know his botany, said, not paying. Tomatoes are a fruit. It doesn't come under this law. And this thing went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, there was a justice named Horace Gray who ruled on this and said that he was declaring for purposes of the tariff that the tomato was indeed a vegetable. Because you ate it with the main dish. You ate it along with the meat and potatoes. You didn't eat it with the chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert. So it's a vegetable. Well, it didn't stop there. Then they went through truffles, onions, water chestnuts, and rhubarb. The first three were all declared vegetables. Rhubarb, which is an enlarged petiole just like celery, rhubarb was declared by the Supreme Court of the United States a fruit. Presumably because of strawberry rhubarb pie. Then the European Union got in on this even more recently. They declared carrots, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes all fruits, regardless of botany, because they could be used for making jam. Seriously. And then we got into state symbols. State symbols, interestingly enough, all came out of the the Colombian exposition of 1893, the Chicago World's Fair. And the Chicago World's Fair, we would all have loved this. It was like the Disney World of 1893. It had 27 million visitors, 65,000 exhibits. It had a Venus de Milo in chocolate. It had a map of the U.S. in dill pickles. It had a herd of ostriches. Canada sent a gigantic 20,000 pound cheese. I forget how much this thing weighed. It was huge. It had to be transported by a special train car. And when they got it to the Canadian building, it crashed through the floor. And had to be moved over to the agricultural building and put on a cement slab. I mean, we all would have loved this. But where the vegetables came in was that there was a gardening club that thought it would be a great idea to have a national garland of flowers where each state would choose its own representative flower. It sounds simple, but it's not simple. Minnesota just squeezed right in there and picked Lady Slipper with no problem. Everybody else argued back and forth endlessly. Apparently, in New Hampshire, they had lawyers before the state legislature. One was for apple blossoms and one was for lilacs. A lot of states went to votes by schoolchildren because the adults couldn't agree. So anyway, you know, the national garland wasn't complete until months after the World's Fair was long gone. But once we had the flowers in place, this seemed so cool that states went on to come up with state birds, state trees. You name it. And now we have endless lists of state, whatever. Vermont has three different state rocks because apparently we could not make up our minds. We've got a state cold water fish and a state warm water fish. We have a state fossil. We have a state drink. Milk. Milk is our state drink. And our flower is the red clover. And the bird is the earth brush. And the tree is the maple. The veggie. The veggie is. We'll get to that. I can hardly wait. I can hardly wait. This state had a big problem with veggies. So for example, Tennessee and Ohio both declared the tomato their state fruit. Alabama, totally on the fence, declared the tomato their state vegetable and their state fruit. Louisiana already had a state vegetable. It was the sweet potato, which actually is a vegetable. So they declared the tomato their state vegetable plant. And I quote. The best one actually has nothing to do with tomatoes. Oklahoma, their state fruit is the strawberry. And their state vegetable is the watermelon. What? I know. It was. What state was that? Oklahoma. I keep looking. They don't like vegetables. Apparently the watermelon was promoted by a state representative who came from a watermelon growing area. As a teenager, he had won a seed spitting contest. And he argued that since the watermelon was vaguely related to cucumbers and gourds that it was pretty much vegetable like no matter when you ate it with your meal. So in Oklahoma, the watermelon is a vegetable. In Vermont, you will see a picture of John Gilfeather who looks great. He's in overalls. He's described as a lanky bachelor from Wordsborough. We may have power. The exit signs have gone off. Try the switch. That's all right. By the time you watch and set up my computer, you'd be very unhappy. I mean, we're doing okay. Will you send us your slideshow? Sure. I'd love to see it. Seriously? Yeah. What? It's got some pictures of tomatoes. And a nice picture of John Gilfeather, slightly out of focus. John Gilfeather was the either discoverer or breeder of the Gilfeather turnip, which is our state vegetable. It was a close race between kale and the Gilfeather turnip. But my understanding is that we actually got the turnip because there was a passionate letter writing campaign from Wordsborough, Vermont, home of John Gilfeather and the turnip. Safe to assume that didn't happen recently. I think it would have gone the other way. I didn't know. It was really recent. I think it was like 2016 that they finally decided on it. 2016 kale lost. Yeah. My goodness. Well, I think they came down on the fact that they could argue that the Gilfeather turnip was a native Vermont vegetable where it's kale. So you can kind of see, but we did get a turnip. Has anybody ever been to the annual Wordsborough Turnip Festival? No. October. Every October, and apparently it's advertised as the world's largest turnip culinary event. They're our next field trip. Which I'm sure it is. There are a lot. There's a whole bunch of contests, you know, biggest turnip, best looking turnip. There's a turnip song. Yes, and I will not, I will spare you. Historically, the origin of the turnip is a bit of a mystery. It looks like it originated in Asia and that the first turnips were grown primarily for their oil bearing seeds, for their oily seeds. It was known as rape, Asian rape, rapeseed oil. Rapeseed oil was pretty much the oil of choice right through the 19th century where it was used for everything from White House lamps to locomotives. Is it fair to assume that it was then superseded by whale oil? I think that no, it would have been neck and neck. Yeah, maybe they're different. Now, linguistically it was followed up by canola oil because rape oil just didn't appeal to a lot of people. So canola, canola, it's rapeseed. The fields of it growing are bright yellow. Nice, I'm looking at where was I here? Yeah, it was grown in ancient times. The Romans grew it. Apparently turnip, the root vegetable though, really came into its own in the Middle Ages. Where of course it was recommended for livestock and peasants. So turnip was not an elite meal. And in fact they find like three turnips on medieval heraldic shields. Turnips show that you were a philanthropist. If you gave a lot to the poor, presumably turnips. Despite the fact that everybody kind of looked down on the turnip, there were a lot of turnip stories. A lot about particularly about particularly gigantic turnips. You know, folk tales about turnips so big that a cow could eat its way into it and you'd see nothing but its little tail sticking at the end. There's even a Grim Brothers tale called the turnip, which is one of those comeuppance stories. It's not one of the really gruesome Grim stories. It's about a poor farmer who grows a particularly good looking turnip and brings it to the king and in exchange gets a bag of gold. So depending on what version of the story either his evil brother-in-law or step-brother or a nasty neighbor decides to bring a horse to the king in hopes of getting a bag of gold for a turnip. But instead in return for the horse he got the turnip. So turnips have always been a staple in time of war. They're tough. They're fairly easy to grow and harvest. They're protected from rampaging armies. So even during World Wars I and II there were both periods of time that were known as turnip winters, which was people didn't have much to eat and pretty much you were thrown back on turnips. And I've got a recipe for a wulton pie. During World War II Lord Wulton was the minister of food and rationing was very, very strict in Britain. People were pretty miserable. No sugar, no flour. There were lots of campaigns telling you to enjoy your turnips and carrots because this is pretty much all you've got. And there was one meal called wulton pie that was primarily a pie made out of turnip. And we've got an account of one woman who kept a very detailed diary on the home front during the war who said that her six-year-old son would burst into tears at the phrase wulton pie. Our turnip, Mr. Gilfeather's turnip, is probably a rutabaga. Scientifically a rutabaga is a cross between a cabbage and a turnip. So cabbages have 18 chromosomes and turnips have 20, rutabagas have 38, and our Gilfeather turnip has 38. So it looks like ours is a rutabaga. Turnips, turnips aren't generally the most hated vegetable. They're usually pretty much ignored. I mean, if you read seed catalogs, there are a lot of seed catalogs that go from tomato to watermelon and don't even bother with turnip. But most hated, anybody got a particularly hated vegetable? Beets. Yes, lots of people don't like beets. And if you imagine behind you, you will see a chemical formula that looks like this sort of. And that's why people don't like beets. It's a chemical that's called geosman. And it's actually, it smells lovely. It's made by soil bacteria. And this is the stuff that after a rain makes your garden smell so good. But it also tastes like dirt. The sort of earthy taste of beets is due to its uptake of geosman from the surrounding soil. And we are really, really sensitive to this. Like to 10 parts per trillion. We can really pick up on this. And in this way, we're a lot like camels. Camels are very sensitive to geosman. And it's believed that this is the way that they can zero in on oases from a great distance because of the smell of the soil bacteria producing geosman under damp conditions. So us and camels. Really, it's not a taste for a lot of foods. You know, if your wine has a tad of geosman, a little bit of dirt, this isn't great for a vintage. And often like catfish, bottom-dwelling fish will have a little too much geosman and they taste kind of muddy. So it smells good, but it's not necessarily super in food. But that's often why people don't like beets. Are they good beets? Because I like the geosman. I like the earthy beets. A lot of people who didn't like beets could tolerate low geosman beets. Oh, God, I would look this up. That is so good. Do you remember, did they have a cult of our name? There were several cult of ours, but if you look up Irwin Goldman, low geosman beets, you'll find out. Okay, you'll find out. So we may have solved the beet problem, right? Internationally, you know, poles are kind of all over the place with hated vegetables. Generally Brussels routes are on a lot of most hated lists. But it varies from culture to culture. The Japanese supposedly don't like bell peppers much. The British don't like celery. But it depends who and what you eat. What? Okra. Okra Vermonters don't like them. No, I've been born in my garden. I certainly do. When I wrote this book, the publisher said, it's too long, you've got to cut a couple of chapters. They cut artichokes in okra. Maybe you can send David a bunch of chapters. I'm not a huge fan of Southern fried okra. My family makes it from Louisiana. But I really like Indy Masala, which is Indian okra curry. I think that's fantastic. My family likes pickled okra. But we have not grown okra. You have to take special care of it. No, my hated one is lima beans. We'll get to lima beans. There's a whole bunch of studies by flavor and taste chemists and researchers as to why you don't like certain things. Why don't we like beans? Why don't we like Brussels sprouts? They don't really know. One of the major guesses is unfamiliarity. You tend to avoid things you're not used to. And they actually come up with something that they call the nine times rule that says if you try something nine times, you will overcome your unfamiliarity prejudice and you will start to like it. So everybody think of something that you can't live or try nine times. The other major argument is that there's a certain genetic component to it which may be why some people really can't stand still on trial. And the people who hate cilantro say it tastes like soap and crush bugs. Julia Child was a cilantro hater. She said at one point the only thing to do with it was to throw it on the floor and stamp on it. Well, French cooking, you know, it's not big and cilantro. But they've actually identified a gene called TAS2R38. Do you have to look at that? Do. Which affects your ability to taste bitter substances. So apparently if you've got a very active gene or possibly multiple copies of this gene, you're super sensitive to tastes that might have a tinge of bitter. So this may actually put you off things like cilantro, some of the cabbages I could see that affecting it. I used to hate cilantro and I decided I really wanted to like it and I kept trying it. Nine times. And now I love it. I was really surprised by that but that confirms for me that that really happened, right? So that's an unfamiliarity thing. But if you're stuck with TAS2R38, you may not be able to overcome it. So there may be some genetic components to all kinds of, you know, off-putting foods. Mine is lima beans, which brings us to Fanny Trollup. I've got a lovely picture of Fanny Trollup. She looks this sweet little face and a little bonnet. Fanny Trollup was the mother of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollup who wrote those gigantic books all about vickers and small town life in 19th century England. In the early 1800s, the Trollup family was roaring bloke. Fanny's husband, who she refers to as Mr. T, had fled to the continent so he wouldn't get clapped into debtor's prison. Leaving Fanny with six children and huge debts. So she decided to go to America and open a bazaar. And what she meant by bazaar was what we would call a mini-mall. She was going to go to Cincinnati and open this place that sold embroidered handkerchiefs and doilies and served tea and crumpets and, you know, it was just a lovely little tiny shopping plaza. She got to Cincinnati. It was a frontier town. Pigs are running in the streets. Nobody wants doilies, tea or crumpets. So at this point, she's even more broke than she has been to begin with. So she decided that she would do a whirlwind tour of the country and write a travel book, which she did. And it's called The Domestic Manners of the Americans. And it's a hoot because she hated everything. The kids were rude. The trees grew too close together. The Mississippi River was a murky stream. Tobacco was repulsive. Oaks were intolerable. Watermelon was vile. Thomas Jefferson's writings were a mighty mass of mischief. Niagara Falls. Niagara Falls was much better looking from the British side than from the American side where it was really noticeably less sublime. And this book sold like hotcakes. All the Americans bought it because they wanted to see what she said about us and all the Brits bought it because they wanted to see all the awful things she said about the Americans. And this is a great story. You know, she eventually retired to a villa in Italy and lived happily ever after. But one thing that she liked about America was lima beans. I'm like, no. She said they were delicate and delicious and probably weren't appreciated by the Americans and should be really picked up by the British. Lima beans. So lima beans I have always said are, have basically been trying to kill us. The raw lima bean contains cyanogenic glycosides which is cyanide bound to a sugar. And the reason that they're full of this is they really don't want you biting them. The original lima beans, of course, are much more loaded with this stuff than the modern cultivars, which are really quite low. And it goes away with cooking. So unless we eat tons of raw lima beans, we're probably safe. But it shows you what kind of vegetable this is. One positive thing about lima beans is they contain a substance called prunitin. And this is, I think, fairly recent research. Prunitin enhances longevity, at least in fruit flies. Fruit flies that are fed on prunitin live 10% longer than non-prunitin-fed fruit flies. That is a hard phrase to say. And prunitin-fed fruit flies climb up the sides of test tubes 50% faster than their non-prunitin-fed neighbors and it only works in males. So husband, son, father, all of you, lima beans, the rest of us are completely off the hook. Well, I hate to mention what I just had for dinner. Lima beans? Me too. Me too, lima beans. My family likes lima beans, it's just me. So maybe I haven't tried them nine times. Great idea. So tomatoes. Tomatoes are probably the diametric opposite of the prunitin. They're the most popular garden vegetable. If you grow nothing else, you probably grow tomatoes. And unfortunately they have a long history of being poisonous and undesirable. This story is a little shaky. But it's interesting. Historians think that the reason for this is that it was bad timing. Whoa! Tomatoes were introduced into Europe in the early 1500s from the Americas. And unfortunately they landed at a time when the witch craze was still roaring in Europe. And this lasted from about 1300 to about 1650. They don't have really good records on how many women and men were executed during this period, but it was at least upwards of half a million, is the guess. And the problem with the tomato is that it looked like a lot of really wretched relatives. Right about that time a pope's physician had come up with a recipe for what witches presumably used for putting on broomsticks so that they could fly. And it contained a whole bunch of solinaceous plants from the nightshade family, which also includes the tomato, the potato, eggplants, peppers, lots of good stuff, but also mandrake, deadly nightshade, belladonna, and the pope's recipe for flying wingman contained hen-bay, mandrake, nightshade, hemlock. Well, these things really look, the mandrake and deadly nightshade really look kind of like cherry tomatoes. They're fruits. And the guess is that no woman in her right mind wanted to be caught in Europe growing this in her garden during a witchcraft craze. It obtained the nickname wolf peach because it looked luscious like a peach, but it could be used to turn yourself into a werewolf, me be. So tomatoes, bad timing and some nasty relatives seems to have put them off for a while. On the other hand, they tasted good. So you could get around this depending on where you were. And it looks to me to a certain extent this was the effect of climbing. The original tomatoes came from Central and South America. They were warm weather vegetable, fruits, vegetables. So the cultivars that we have now, we can grow them here. There's a Siberian tomato that has like a 15-minute growing season. Tomatoes can really be grown ubiquitously nowadays. But they were probably mainly warm weather plants at the time. They were picked up in Europe much more readily like in Spain and Italy than they were in Northern Europe. And here, they were grown much more popularly in the Southern colonies. And we have recipes from the early 1700s from America with people cooking with tomatoes, canning tomatoes, preserving tomatoes. So maybe it was just sour grapes. We can't grow them, so they're poisonous. But Mary Randolph's cookbooks, which her recipes are thought to come largely from the Jefferson family, contain recipes for tomato-based gazpachos, gumbo's, scallop tomatoes. And we know that Jefferson grew tomatoes. So the poison thing is a little iffy, probably defended on where you were. Tomatoes are used often to make ketchup, tomato ketchup is very popular here. The earlier ketchups were based on fish, they were walnut ketchups, they were all kinds of ketchups. Nowadays, it's kind of boiled down to tomato ketchup. But tomato ketchup has had its place in the vegetable sun under Ronald Reagan. Any of you remember this? When a ketchup was declared a vegetable for purposes of children's school lunches. And anybody who heard about this went, oh, dear God, this is just disgraceful. It's actually kind of interesting and counterintuitive because it turns out that the raw tomato is less nutritious for us than the cooked tomato, especially the cooked tomato when you add a little bit of olive oil to it. I know, doesn't that seem wrong? Well, the reason is, tomatoes contain an antioxidant, it's a pigment called lycopene. It's the stuff that in red tomatoes makes them really, really red. And it's one of the major nutrients in tomatoes. In the raw tomato, this thing is in a chemical configuration called the trans configuration where the molecule is spread out flat. It's like a little needle. And it's not absorbed very well by our digestive tracts. If you cook the tomato and mush it up in olive oil, the lycopene grows up into a kind of a snail shell shape called a cis configuration that's absorbed much more readily by our digestive systems. In fact, we get like 50% more nutrition from a cooked tomato than from a raw tomato. That is so wrong. But that is what science says. On the other hand, ketchup is loaded with sugar. So, you know, just forget it as a vegetable. So, tomatoes have some bad press. So does spinach. I love spinach. Spinach is good. There's this famous Carl Lowe's cartoon from the New Yorker which shows, you know, a very upscale mother at a table with this child with little rimlets and the kid is glaring at her plate of whatever and the mother is saying, it's broccoli, dear. And the kid is saying, I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it. Spinach is originally from Iran. Our name Spinach comes from the Persian for green hand. I read somewhere that a totally unconfirmed story that the Persians were fond of growing it to feed to Persian cats. I doubt it. I haven't been able to confirm that story any place else and I tried it on our cats who will not touch spinach. Though we don't have Persian cats so maybe that's me. Spinach seems to have, originating in the Middle East it seems to have gone east before it went west because the Chinese picked it up very, very early. It came into Europe with the Moors who around the 7th or 8th century came across Northern Africa and into Spain and brought with them a number of foodstuffs that hadn't been popular in Europe until the Moors introduced them. Asparagus and spinach were two of them. Spinach seems to have really taken off in Europe with Catherine de Medici who in the 16th century came from Italy to marry the future Henry II of France. As a teenager, she was 14 at the time and there are tons of stories about Catherine. The list of things that she is supposed to have introduced the French to include none of this is proven, forks, sorbet, olive oil, macaroons, the ballet, beans, pantalette style underwear. Well, we can't really really pin any of this down but it does look like she was very fond of spinach to the point where to this day any dish that has spinach in it is often known as a Florentine. Like eggs Florentine is eggs with spinach Catherine came from Florence. So any time you get a spinach omelet you're harking back to Catherine de Medici in the 16th century. Or to Popeye in the 1935. Spinach got a real uptake in the United States in the 1930s with the introduction of the Popeye cartoon. The sailor man who would throw down a can of spinach, develop bulgy biceps and go beat up his enemies. Not a perfect role model but it was good for spinach. And the spinach... Oh, canned spinach, that's right. And the myth about spinach supposedly centers around a German chemist named Emil Wolf who in the 1870s made an error in a decimal point and ended up saying that spinach had ten times more iron than it actually has. That is much iron as beef steak. Well, this isn't true. This chemist was completely maligned. There is a lot of iron in spinach. In fact, there is about as much as there is in beef steak. The problem is we can't digest it. The iron in spinach is just iron iron. The iron in meat is heme iron which means the iron is bound to a protein so we can absorb it. The iron in spinach goes right through us. However, spinach is loaded with vitamin A so it is really good for us. Baby spinach. I felt so deceived by baby spinach. I had believed in my pre-research days that baby spinach actually was baby spinach. It was spinach that was plucked in its tiny infancy before it grew up to be gigantic adult spinach. Well, this is not true. Baby spinach is the toy poodle of the spinach world. It's a cultivar that doesn't get much bigger than yet. So then I got interested in other baby vegetables. I mean, how baby is a baby? Well, baby beets, there is a cultivar of beets that don't get much bigger than ping-pong balls. So it's a small adult beet. Baby avocados are interesting. They're called avocaditos. They are about the size of dill pickles and it's like an avocado. It's got the avocado flesh but without that big seed that you find in the middle of avocaditos. Avocaditos. They don't carry any shells. They can hit the co-op. Or hannifers. Some baby vegetables actually aren't babies. They're just adults who had miserable childhoods. Like baby artichokes are the ones that grow way down at the bottom of the artichoke stem. So, you know, they just don't get the attention and the nutrients that the big artichokes up on top have gotten. Yeah. Baby onions. Baby onions are like batten feet. They're grown really, really close together so they can't get very big. I know. Baby zucchini is a baby. And wait, if you do not pick your zucchini as a baby you will have a thing the size of the Hindu bird within 24 hours. Yeah. Baby corn is really baby corn. You know those little corns that you get in Chinese food? It's sometimes called cornlets. Isn't that cute? Cornlets. And they're just tiny immature corn on the cob. Baby carrots are all of the above. Baby carrots. Imagine deformed carrots. All right, arthritic, awful looking carrots. This is where baby carrots, some baby carrots come from. And they started out in the 1990s with a carrot farmer in California who found that he could only sell these polkratudanist, you know, so straight carrots to supermarkets. So he was discarding up to 40, 50% of his crop each year. He felt that this was appalling, which it is. So to solve the problem, he decided to carve the deformed carrots into spears and markets in his bunny balls. Well, bunny balls didn't totally go over. So... You all have evil minds. I think it's so funny. So some time later, somebody else picked up on the same idea, but instead carved the deformed carrots into tiny carrot-shaped carrots, which became wildly popular. This was a great thing because up until the advent of the baby carrot, the most popular vegetable among small children, like if you polled first graders, first graders, their favorite vegetable was the french fry. And now it's really been replaced by baby carrots. So I would say that's a nutritional... But you can also get baby carrots that are cultivars of tiny carrots. They don't grow very big, or you can pull them up really. They're never just big carrots that have been chopped into little shapes of baby carrots. Yeah, that's what they are. Most of them, that's what they are. They come from these lopsided deformed-looking carrots. I see. It's a young carrot that would be more pointy at the end. There are also the carrot cultivars. I used to work with the carrot reader. And they're like, get to like this one, that are really long and skinny. And then you can get like seven baby carrots out of one carrot. And then they like shape like a tumble on the base. And the carrots are really cool because according to food historians, the original carrots were purple. The orange and yellow carrots only came in quite a bit later. Like in the 15th and 16th centuries. So nowadays you can buy mixed carrot packages, which I think is really cool. Where do carrots start? Oh God, I can't remember. That's okay. Most things are sort of Middle Eastern. I don't know what carrots are. Like Turkey, Jordan, Pakistan, a lot of the stands in South Asia is like the center of origin for carrots. Okay. What she said. Next year you'll be our speaker. Simply for carrots. Okay, asparagus. So we've done both teaches. Now we're going to do underwear. Asparagus is native to the Mediterranean. The original asparagus was kind of a crawling maritime plant. So all of the wild asparagus that we see around here was originally some kind of garden escapee. And nothing is native to America in terms of asparagus. And it's interesting because it's a dioecious plant you have to have males and females. Most of the asparagus that we, asparagus roots that we get to plant in the garden are males because they make bigger, fatter asparagus because they're not responsible for putting energy into making seeds like the female asparagus. But asparagus has been grown since ancient times. The Romans grew it. There's a Latin phrase quicker than it takes to grow asparagus. So they like the asparagus al dente. And we've got some mosaics that actually show how asparagus was cooked in tall, skinny pots. And it was bundled, tied in little bundles, dumped in the pot, and very rapidly boiled. Pliny, Pliny the Elder who wrote a 37 volume encyclopedia in the first century AD, which is absolutely riotous in many, many parts. His aim was to record all known human knowledge. But he never vetted anything. So anything he found out went into the encyclopedia no matter how outlandish. If he heard about giant ants that mined gold and Libya into the encyclopedia, it won't. Kind of like the internet. Yeah, for me. Basically, yes. So he had a lot to say about the various uses of various plants. According to Pliny, asparagus could be used to treat elephantiasis, serpent stings, all forms of intestinal disorders. And if you mushed it up in olive oil and smeared it all over your body, you will never be stung by bees. I just toss it out. Asparagus pretty much died out in Europe with the fall of Rome, because it was a very attention-intensive crop. You had to pay a lot of attention to it. You had to go out and harvest it every day. It wasn't like field peas or turnips, something that could just sit there and was good for the peasants. However, it was reintroduced to Europe with the Moors, who, when they entered Spain, brought asparagus and asparagus cuisine with them. And it was really popularized by one particular guy named Zurab, which means the Blackbird. And he was prominent in the Moorish city of Córdoba, in Spain, in the 9th century, where he was basically Martha Stewart. He came up with all kinds of fashion innovations. You know, the idea of the color of your clothes should change with the season. So, you know, if you were ever subject to no white shoes before Memorial Day, that's kind of a Zurab thing. He invented an early form of toothpaste. He popularized tablecloths. He liked the idea of wearing her hair in bangs. He came up with the widespread idea of drinking out of crystal glass glasses rather than metal glasses, because he pointed out that metal glasses made so many drinks taste peculiar. You know, anything that's the least acidic, you'll get a metallic taste from a metal glass. And he popularized asparagus. And he was paid a huge salary for all of this. Very wealthy. From Zurab's Spain, the asparagus moved north into France, where it was picked up by Madame Pompadour of the underbearing thing. Madame Pompadour in the, oh, 18th century was the mistress of Louis XV. There's a hairdo to this day still named after her, the Pompadour. There's a shade of pink that was named as Pompadour, rose Pompadour. I looked it up, it's kind of a bubblegum shade. It's a really bright pink. Supposedly the champagne glass was based on the shape of her breast. Though I wouldn't bet on it, this is of course the coupe, the cut shape. Not the flute, don't imagine anything. But the coupe is also said to be modeled on the breast of Marie-Antoinette. Madame du Barry, which was another of Louis XV's mistresses. Dianne de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II. The Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon. And this one is a real long shot. Helen of Troy. You tell me how they knew. But Madame Pompadour was a fan of asparagus because like so much else in the garden that's even vaguely cylindrical. It was touted as an aphrodisiac. And the asparagus that she was most prone to using was actually a lovely picture of it by Manet. It was a blanched asparagus, it was white. So dirt was heaped up around it so it never developed green chlorophyll. She had a white asparagus with purple tips that she was most known for. And you can still find the recipe. It's known as asparagus Pompadour. It's asparagus in Hollandaise sauce basically. Which is where we get to her underwear with this purple tip asparagus. At the time, she was madly popular. There was a British regimen known as the Pompadours from the purple facings of their uniforms. Each British army regimen was differentiated from the others at this time by the color of their facings. So their facings was a big deal. People were blue or white or red, purple. Well, the Pompadours claimed that they were known as the Pompadours because their purple facings were the same color as that of Pompadour's underwear. Which was also the color of her asparagus. Peas. Yeah. She may not have worn much underwear. I did an article on underwear at one point. The evolution of underwear was a little slow. Peas. Peas are such an old vegetable that botanists really aren't sure exactly where they came from. Usually what you find out is they'll give you an origin someplace between the Middle East and the Himalayas. They may be working on this. I haven't kept up with this. Anything on peas? Because I know that DNA... Peas and carrots. Peas and carrots. Using DNA analysis nowadays, they can track the origin of vegetables sometimes down to a very narrow geographic area. Peas, not so much. They've been eaten since at least the Stone Age and before the oldest known discovery of peas comes from Thailand actually from a date called the Spirit Cave where they dated these charred remnants of peas to 12,000 years ago. Old, old peas. Of course, they were very popular in the Middle Ages because they were fed to peasants in livestock right along with the turnips. And these were terrible peas. They were very, very high starch peas. And one theory is that they were originally... When people started eating them, they originally were roasted and peeled like we eat in Bethna. Maybe. If you weren't eating peas, in turnips you were eating these starchy peas in peas porridge, which you would add anything you could possibly think of it to because it's very starchy. You could probably taste it like wallpaper paste. Actually, this is why it was originally very popular to serve peas with mint because the peas were kind of pithy and tasteless. You added mint in that really perked up your peas. Perky peas. Then in the 1700s, a guy named Thomas Andrew Knight discovered a new and really scrumptious pea. Thomas Knight is interesting because he was a major name in horticulture in the 1700s. He became so because his older brother died, at which point he came in for a title, a castle, 10,000 acres of land and a massive balance in the bank of England. He was able to indulge his interest in horticulture from then on, which according to him, he had since he was a little sprout and had seen the family gardener planting what looked like little pebbles and sticks and being told that these are going to turn into beans and peas. Thomas, a little child, planted his pocket knife. Thinking that it would grow a pocket knife tree and when it didn't, he started a lifelong interesting horticulture. He was really into apples. He did a lot with apple breeding. His peas were probably a serendipitous discovery. He found what he called a wrinkle seeded pea and these peas were sweet. They were really delicious. We know now that it's because they're mutants. They're missing a starch-branching enzyme that converts useful sugar into adult starch. If you don't have it, you stay sugary and sweet. It's the same thing that goes on in sweet corn. They're missing starch-branching enzymes. In super sweet corn, they're missing two starch-branching enzymes. So sweet, sweet or sweetest. Well, as a scientist, I find Thomas Knight absolutely heartbreaking because he did every experiment under the sun with his wrinkle seeded peas. He crossed them with smooth seeded starchy peas. He crossed the short ones with the tall ones and the pink-flowered ones with the white-flowered ones. He did tons of experiments and went nowhere. Then 50 years later, Gregor Mendel comes along, a monk in Austria with an interest in science and peas. He crossed wrinkle seeded peas with smooth-sided peas, short peas and tall peas and pink peas and white-flowered peas. But he took the next step and came up with the theory of Mendelian inheritance, which of course led to our science nowadays of genetics. And I read that he ended up working with 29,000 pea plants so you can guess that his monastery got mighty sick of peas' porridge at some point. But it's basically due to Thomas Knight that peas are now delicious and we don't have to cook them with mint. Poisoned peas. Peas are not ordinarily poisonous. They're not like those lime of beans. And behind you, in imagination, you can see a picture of the Francis Tavern in New York City, which is still there and is still serving meals. And around the time of the Revolutionary War, it was the site of a plot to poison George Washington with a plate of peas. Because peas, now that they're sweet and yummy, were very popular. Everybody wanted peas. Well, the story goes that Phoebe Francis, the daughter of Sam Francis, the Tavern owner, had heard of this plot in advance and nabbed the poison peas before they made it to Washington's table. Flung them out in the yard where they were packed up by chickens. Chickens fell over dead. The plot was discovered. They tracked down the loyalist who had instigated the whole thing and he was hanged. And George Washington survived and went on to win the Revolutionary War. So I've been telling this story of these talks for some time until one of my sons pointed out what if Washington had been poisoned by the peas? Well, he said, we probably would have lost the Revolution because it would have been such a moral blow to the morale of the colonies. A number of people would have been hanged. Thomas Jefferson would have been in trouble. But, you know, it probably would have been terrible. But he said, in the 1830s, when the slaves were liberated throughout the British Empire, American slaves would have been emancipated. We would not have fought the Civil War. And we would not have the breach between North and South that still continues to this day politically. So the poison peas might not have been a bad idea. Okay, everybody think about it. It's one of those, you know, those points in history where things could have gone one way or another. But at this point, I usually end with a quote from Winston Churchill who said that the four best things in life are hot baths, cold champagne, old brandy, and new peas. New peas! Wow. How cute is that? Other vegetable, I can go on on this forever. I did have a question. You mentioned two chemicals with lime and peas. One of them goes away, the dangerous one, goes away with cooking. Does the one that was beneficial? The pruneton? The wealth of food flies, yeah. Yeah, I would imagine that it might. Yeah. Probably because it's a protein. Most things are, yeah. I was wondering how a cyanide goes away in cooking. I don't think there's enough in there, though. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I mean, the modern lima bean is really a very tame creature compared to its ancestor. Unfortunately, even though it makes a great title... You'll have to read the book. No, I will tell you. It's not one of the best stories, in my opinion, but the story is that, well, the Greek soldiers were pinned up inside the Trojan horse waiting to be dragged into the city of Troy where they were going to slaughter everybody inside. They ate carrots because, reportedly, the carrots would bind their bowels. Oh, dear. And the idea was the Trojan horse was a terrible place for bathroom breaks. There's absolutely no evidence that carrots have this effect. And the other story that we have from Greek vegetable history is that the Greeks often used cooked carrots, fed them to their female captives in hopes of breaking down their inhibitions. So, you know, cooked carrots were a real turn-on. Not asparagus. Not asparagus. Not asparagus. That was more a Roman thing. Every culture has their carrot. Every culture has their carrot. It's time for your next book. Well, you know, I'm sure there are books out there that are just on aphrodisiacs, but that's quite a topic all by itself. It's some really terrible things that we work in that way. Thank you very much, Rebecca. Coming over the back roads to get here, and I think you're going to have a straight shot back. Where do we go? You go straight 12 to my feet. Oh, for heaven's sakes. For my favor. I lost all feet. I don't mind a few wiggles, but, you know, it's about the last stop in the interstate before Canada. It's right up in the northwestern corner. So did you plan to come back ways, or did you get diverted because of the tree? Oh, I don't know. We got to Montilier. Sam killed me on that. There was a tree down. We got to Montilier. So you were actually coming from the swamp. There is a way. I moved from St. Alvin's to Worcester, and so I moved back home. Well, GPS suddenly took a sharp turn when we were close to here. So I'll bet it was the tree. And all of a sudden said, oh, you know, these people know nothing. We could send them anywhere we want. We did. We did. We did. Oh, no, I snapped. We'll take it. We'll take it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.