The History of Fresh Produce

By The Produce Industry NetworkSociety & Culture Arts History Food

The History of Fresh Produce episodes

October 13The Farmer Everyone Wanted Dead
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 fragile agricultural frontier where reputation could be as valuable as land.
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In Sponsorship with Cornell University: Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
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1 hr 3 min
October 06Six Hundred Years of Farmer Revolt
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: who controls the food system — and who pays when the rules change?
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In Sponsorship with J&K Fresh.
The customs broker who is your fruit and veggies’ personal bodyguard. Learn more here!
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1 hr 19 min
September 29Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth
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 gave America the Golden Delicious, the McIntosh, and the modern apple itself.
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In Sponsorship with J&K Fresh.
The customs broker who is your fruit and veggies’ personal bodyguard. Learn more here!
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Join the History of Fresh Produce Club for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, book discounts and access to an exclusive chatroom community.
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49 min
September 22Death by Produce
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 coconut, a watermelon-eating contest that ended in tragedy in Brazil last December, and a devastating public health mystery in India that took decades to unravel.
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In Sponsorship with Cornell University: Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
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40 min
September 15The 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 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 General Assembly, via a golden digging stick, four centuries of colonial suppression, and a UN resolution...
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In Sponsorship with J&K Fresh.
The customs broker who is your fruit and veggies’ personal bodyguard. Learn more here!
-----------
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59 min
September 08Finland's Great Hunger: The Last Famine of Western Europe
How did a single night's frost in September 1867 kill nearly one tenth of Finland's 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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This episode was inspired and sourced primarily from the impressive work of Andrew G. Newby and his publication “Finland’s Great Famine, 1856-68”
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In Sponsorship with Cornell University: Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
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45 min
September 01The 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 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 history of the watermelon — from Tutankhamun's tomb to the Watermelon War of 1856, via a prison ship, a poisoned patch, and one very angry nocturnal mammal...
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In Sponsorship with J&K Fresh.
The customs broker who is your fruit and veggies’ personal bodyguard. Learn more here!
-----------
Join the History of Fresh Produce Club for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, book discounts and access to an exclusive chatroom community.
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36 min
August 25In 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 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?
Join John and Patrick as they tell the global history of the pickle — ten thousand years of brine, from Mesopotamia to the Lower East Side deli...
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58 min
August 18The 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 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?
Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of the pea — ten thousand years of the most underestimated vegetable in history...
----------
In Sponsorship with J&K Fresh.
The customs broker who is your fruit and veggies’ personal bodyguard. Learn more here!
-----------
Join the History of Fresh Produce Club for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, book discounts and access to an exclusive chatroom community.
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50 min
August 11The 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 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?
Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of the 1944 Water Treaty — the dam standoff, the shrinking rivers, and the piece of paper that two nations and their farmers are still fighting over...
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In Sponsorship with Cornell University: Dyson Cornell SC Johnson College of Business
-----------
Join the History of Fresh Produce Club for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, book discounts and access to an exclusive chatroom community.
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32 min