The History of Fresh Produce

How did twenty-four rabbits released by one man for a "spot of hunting" in 1859 colonise an entire continent within thirty-five years — and why did a three-thousand-kilometre fence, a campaign of poisoning, and even the deliberate introduction of foxes all fail to stop them? Who was Dame Jean Macnamara, the doctor who had already helped defeat polio and then spent twenty years fighting institution...

Why did Cleopatra demand the balsam groves of Jericho as the price of financing Marc Antony's wars — and what does it mean that a plant worth twice its weight in gold was guarded day and night by Roman soldiers after the conquest of Jerusalem? What was the balm of Gilead, the most expensive agricultural commodity in the ancient world, and why did it grow nowhere on Earth except the shores of the D...

Why has the argan tree — which grows nowhere else on Earth — survived for 65 million years in the mountains of Morocco, and why are the women who have tended it for centuries now earning two euros sixty for a litre of oil that sells for a hundred in Paris? Who was Zoubida Charrouf, the chemist who gave scientific language to what Amazigh women had always known, and built a cooperative movement tha...

Why did a Valencia orange, abandoned on a tiny arid Caribbean island, transform into a new species that nobody could eat — and how did that inedible fruit end up in cocktail bars on every continent? What made the harbour of Willemstad one of the most consequential trading posts in the Atlantic world, and what does the story of Sephardic refugees, the slave trade, and a language assembled from seve...

How did a city of 30,000 people survive for 450 years between Venice and the Ottoman Empire — and what does the Republic of Ragusa have to do with the cherry on top of your cocktail? Why does the American maraschino cherry share almost nothing with the Croatian original except a name? And how did one man, escaping a burning city in a rowboat in 1944, carry a single cherry sapling across the Adriat...

Why did France's black truffle — once produced in the thousands of tonnes — collapse to near-extinction in a century, and what does its revival reveal about the country's relationship with luxury, landscape, and desire? Who are the truffle thieves stalking the oak groves of the Périgord with poisoned meatballs and stolen dogs? And why does a near-identical Chinese impostor, worth one-seventieth of...

Why did the cloud forests of Ecuador produce the only cure for a disease that killed popes, hollowed out armies, and blocked European expansion into the tropics — and what did the people whose knowledge made that cure possible pay for sharing it? Who was Manuel Incra Mamani, the man whose botanical expertise created the Dutch quinine monopoly, whose name is on nothing, and who was beaten to death...

Why did a South American legume become the foundation of French imperial power in West Africa — and what did it cost the people who grew it? Who was Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the Sufi mystic the French exiled twice but could never destroy, whose followers built a religious empire on peanut fields? And how did a single crop simultaneously build the city of Dakar, finance two world wars, and trap an inde...

Why did tobacco, and not gold or glory, save the first permanent English colony in America? How did the Founding Fathers' tobacco debts to British merchants help light the fuse of the American Revolution? And who were the Tobacco Lords — the scarlet-cloaked Glasgow merchants who controlled more of the British tobacco trade than London, Bristol, and Liverpool combined? Join John and Patrick in the...

From Indigenous sugar shacks to the Supreme Court of Canada… how did maple syrup become one of the world’s most tightly controlled commodities? Why does Quebec maintain a vast strategic maple syrup reserve? And how did a group of “barrel rollers” steal nearly $19 million worth of syrup in the most Canadian crime of all time? Join Patrick and John as they explore the history of maple syrup, the ris...

Why did the Aztecs drink their currency — and what does it mean that the most global food in the world began as a bitter, frothy, sacred drink consumed by warriors and kings in the rainforests of ancient Mesoamerica? Who was Quetzalcoatl, the god who stole cacao from paradise and gave it to humanity — and why does his promised return from the east make the moment Montezuma handed Hernán Cortés a g...

Who was Dewayne Lee Johnson, the school groundskeeper soaked in Roundup who took on the most legally powerful agricultural company in the world — and what did his trial finally expose about what Monsanto's own scientists had known, and hidden, for forty years? Why did the revolution that promised to feed the world end up increasing herbicide use by twenty percent, turning farmers into perpetual cu...

Who was Bob Shapiro, the guitar-playing Vietnam protester turned Monsanto CEO who genuinely believed genetically modified seeds could save the planet — and how did the same man who preached environmental salvation simultaneously bury a billion dollars of toxic human suffering in a corporate spinoff so that Wall Street would never have to look at it? Why did the most consequential revolution in the...

What was Roundup, the herbicide born from a soap crisis in a radioactive Idaho slag heap, that became the most widely used weed-killer in human history — and how did the shy, introverted chemist who discovered it almost by accident set in motion a transformation of global agriculture more radical than anything since the plough? Why did a company drowning in Agent Orange lawsuits and Superfund site...

What was Agent Orange, the herbicide that fell like mist on the jungles of Vietnam — and how did a chemical born in a West Virginia factory end up destroying the food systems, forests, and bodies of an entire nation? Why did the company that knew its own product contained one of the most toxic substances ever identified keep that knowledge from governments, soldiers, and the Vietnamese farmers wat...

Who was Edgar Queeny, the cold-eyed social Darwinist who inherited a chemical company from his father and turned it into one of the most powerful industrial forces in American history? Why did the man who helped trigger the atomic bomb, kept the Arsenal of Democracy running, and photographed brown bears in Alaska with Walt Disney also preside over a factory in West Virginia where workers were quie...

Who was John Francis Queeny, the broke Irish-American salesman who founded one of the most powerful and controversial companies in the history of modern agriculture - without knowing the first thing about chemistry? Why did a secret deal with Coca-Cola, a presidential letter, and a warehouse full of matches save his fledgling empire from collapse? And how does the unlikely story of a fake sweetene...

Who is Bill Gates, the college dropout from Seattle who built the operating system of global capitalism - and then turned his restless, problem-solving mind to the oldest human activity of all: growing food? Why did his six-billion-dollar mission to end hunger in Africa leave more people hungry than before? And how does the story of one man's extraordinary ambition over the world's food supply ech...

What is huitlacoche, the fungus that Indigenous farmers in Mexico gave thanks for at harvest - and that American agronomists spent a century trying to burn, quarantine, and breed out of existence? Why did two civilizations look at the same diseased corn cob and see, one, a seasonal gift, and the other, an agricultural catastrophe? And how does this strange, blackened organism open a window onto th...

What is plastic, and how did a shortage of billiard balls accidentally give birth to the material that would feed the modern world? Why did a Belgian chemist rummaging through coal tar waste end up transforming the way humanity eats? And how does the unlikely journey from Victorian ivory substitutes to the clamshell of strawberries on your kitchen counter open a window onto the great forces of ind...

How did the humble date palm become entangled in the great age of empire? Why did steamships, railways, and the opening of the Suez Canal transform an ancient oasis crop into a global commodity? And how did a handful of date palms - smuggled across deserts, nearly lost to a curious dog, and later replanted in California - come to shape the modern global date industry? Join John and Patrick for the...

How did a humble desert fruit help build some of the world’s earliest civilizations? Why did ancient farmers in Mesopotamia become master matchmakers for palm trees? And how did the date palm come to symbolize life, victory, and divine blessing across the ancient world? Join John and Patrick as they explore the astonishing origins of the date - from prehistoric hunter-gatherers and the orchards of...

What does a Roman emperor’s craving for cucumbers have to do with feeding eight billion people? How did a 15th-century Korean cookbook quietly invent heated agriculture centuries before Europe’s glass palaces? And how did Victorian spectacle, world wars, hydroponic ambition, and Dutch engineering transform the greenhouse from aristocratic indulgence into global infrastructure? Join John and Patric...

What was the United States government’s first move, when it decided that what Americans ate was a matter of national concern? Why, from the depths of the Civil War to the height of the culture wars, has Washington repeatedly redrawn the nation’s plate - sometimes to fight hunger, sometimes to win wars, sometimes to battle heart disease and obesity? And how did fruits and vegetables move from quiet...

What kind of fruit was designed to be swallowed whole by giant sloths? How did a sacred Mesoamerican tree become the green badge of millennial brunch culture? And how did a humble postman’s backyard seedling end up conquering global agriculture? Join John and Patrick as they trace the astonishing history of the avocado - from the forests of ancient Mexico and the courts of the Maya and Aztec, to t...