For more than 4,000 years humans ate purslane across multiple civilizations. People like Thomas Jefferson grew it in his garden at Monticello, even the great King Louis XIV of France served it at his royal table.

In the 20th century, American lawn culture became more common and industrial agriculture told people what should and would be “counted” as food, so things like purslane got reclassified as a weed, something that was to be pulled out and discarded. It grows in every US state without any help from anyone and it has 15 times more omega-3 that iceberg lettuce per gram. And for those that don’t know, omega 3 is a very important and healthy fat that your body cant produce on its own.

The seeds of purslane were found in Ontario lake sediment dated back to 1340-1540 CE, so they reached North America before Christopher Columbus. Before the Mayflower ever set sail, before the first English settlements took root along the Eastern seaboard, purslane was already being tended to and and harvested across the continent. It had names… stories… all of which we may never know or ever hear about.

Much of the world today has a adopted a world view that has divided into what’s “civilized” and what’s “wild”. what’s “cultivated” and what’s “waste”. Plants that didn’t require plowing or tending were seen as unruly.

Us humans, and our constant need for control…

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The chocolate that most of you eat today is probably the best its ever going to taste. Not because chocolate is getting any worse, but because the tree that chocolate comes from has been slowly disappearing from the global chocolate market.

Most of the chocolate around the world comes from only two countries, the Ivory Coast and Ghana, and its been that way for decades. Ghana first became the worlds leading producer by the 1920s and in 1978, Ivory coast surpassed them. And ever since then they’ve been the dominant pair in production.

Although this may sound like not such a big deal, its one of those things that becomes a problem when you only account for short term profits. Volume and production is what makes the world go round, but when you focus more on production rather than expansion, it takes one thing to go wrong for it all to fall apart.

And as time went on the chair began to start losing its legs.

Excessive rain, dry spells, diseases… everything that could go wrong, just did. Something called the cocoa swollen shoot virus touched more than 80% of the crop in Ghana. And the trees that were touched, didn’t just produce less, they would just die. The only trees that survived were older than 25 years old, so they each and every year they were producing less. And on top of all that, the climate all those trees were planted for was shifting. A billion dollar industry, fading away in front of our very eyes…. while most consumers had no idea.

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Most of you have never grown a tomato, and that’s okay. Growing food is becoming a lost practice. But what that means is that most, if not many people have no idea that what a tomato is supposed to be.

Somewhere in the middle of the last century, commercial tomato breeders started harvesting them for something called uniform ripening.

A naturally grown tomato doesn’t turn red all at once. It gets these dark green shoulders that fade unevenly, they’re sometimes deformed and unattractive to the eye of mass consumers. Something like that is horrible for farmers trying to pick thousands of tomatoes efficiently. And as a consumer, I understand. Millions of pounds of food turned down every single day, all due to customers wanting perfect looking fruit.

So farmers started breeding out as much of the imperfections as they could. Selected for a mutation that made the whole fruit turn an even light green before going uniformly red. Its easier that way, easier to harvest, to sort… and it looked better on the store shelf.

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The world of seedless fruit has been a topic of discussion since the day humans first got their hands on it. And the argument of what it is and should be has always been a point of contention.

The seedless fruit sitting in your kitchen today cant reproduce, which means its existence sits in the very hands of those who gave it life.

Every navel orange you’ve ever eaten was a clone, an exact match as the first one ever discovered and eaten on a plantation in Bahia, Brazil in the early 1800s. A single branch, a single mutation, from a single tree. Every single navel orange since that very point has come from a cutting of that tree or from a cutting of a cutting of a cutting going all the back to the original branch. The tree cant produce seeds and has no way of producing seeds, so without being cloned it would’ve inevitably died on that planation 200 years ago, end of story.

That’s the story behind most seedless fruits. Not through breeding or engineering, but through an accident that was intentionally cloned. And cloning isn’t as hard as people think. Cuttings, air layering, grafting, even tissue culture.. all fascinating methods of cloning plants.

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There’s a tree that grows where most other plants cant, and it can feed an entire family from almost every part off it. And what’s interesting is that most people have never seen or heard of it, while some have grew up with it without ever knowing what it was.

Not because its rare or anything like that, but simply because its not here. It grows where food is hard to find and grows in places where you’ll probably never see a grocery store.

The tree that I'm talking about is called the moringa, also known as, the tree of life. Food scientist even call it the miracle tree. Some people may be turned off from it being called such, but I want you to give this tree to a moment to build its case. The leaves alone have seven times more vitamin C than an orange. Ten times more vitamin A than a carrot, seventeen times more calcium than milk. This tree lives up to every name its ever been given, and that’s just the beginning. Even if the tree lost all of its leaves, it still wouldn’t fall short of amazing…

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If you’ve ever grabbed that green shaker of parmesan at your favorite Italian restaurant, you might want to rethink your choice. Surprisingly, it’s likely not real parmesan cheese and may not even be cheese at all.

Back in 2012, a surprise inspection by FDA agents at a Pennsylvania cheese factory named Castle Cheese Inc. uncovered something strange. They heard rumors that the factory’s “100% Real Parmesan Cheese,” wasn’t really “100% Real Parmesan Cheese”.

They somehow figured out that the parmesan didn’t have any parmesan cheese at all. It was a blend of cheeses like Swiss and mozzarella, white cheddar and a filler called cellulose. Which is a plant based additive that comes from wood pulp and is also FDA-approved… but only up to 4% of a total product. People have mixed feelings on this understandably.

“How can a product that’s 100% of something be 4% of something else?”

Many of the top brands of grated parmesan cheese got sent to an independent lab for testing after this whole ordeal. A leading seller of hard Italian cheese in the U.S. estimates that about 20% of the grated parmesan products available on shelves are mislabeled to this day.

While the cellulose issue is concerning, the bigger problem is that many products, even the ones without cellulose, still don’t qualify as real parmesan.

True parmesan is known as Parmigiano Reggiano, created more than 900 years ago by monks in northern Italy’s Parma and Reggio Emilia regions. The monks would have a surplus of milk and needed a cheese that could last through the winter without being refrigerated. So they put together a recipe using raw cow’s milk, salt, and rennet. Nothing more, nothing less.

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The olive oil in your kitchen is probably lying about what it is.

Not all of it. But enough.

Extra virgin is the highest grade of olive oil. To earn it, the oil has to be cold pressed from fresh olives with no heat, no chemicals, and no refining. It has to meet strict chemical standards and pass a sensory test. It has to smell and taste a specific way. It has to be fresh enough that the compounds responsible for its flavor haven’t degraded. That’s what the label says. That’s what you’re paying for.

In 2010, researchers at UC Davis bought 19 brands of imported extra virgin olive oil off supermarket shelves in California and sent them for testing. 69% of the imported brands failed to meet the international standards for extra virgin. Bertolli. Carapelli. Brands you’ve seen a thousand times. Sitting on the shelf labeled extra virgin. Not extra virgin.

The failures happened for three reasons. Some oils were old and had gone rancid. Some were lower quality oils from damaged or overripe olives that should have been labeled virgin, not extra virgin. And some had been cut with cheaper refined oils to stretch the supply.

That’s the polite version of the problem.

The impolite version… involves the Italian mafia.

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The soil that your strawberries grow in is dead before the plant even gets planted in it.

Not dead as in dry or poor in nutrients, but dead as in every living thing in it has been killed. All the fungi, the bacteria, the insects, the worms. All the microorganisms that healthy soil needs to function, before a single strawberry plant actually touches the ground.

This is how almost every single commercial strawberry is grown.

In the 1950s, California strawberry farmers started losing crops to a soil fungus called Verticillium wilt. The disease spread through fields and wiped out plants before they could fruit. The industry needed a fix, and what they found was methyl bromide, a colorless, odorless gas injected directly into the soil before planting. It killed everything, not in the general sense, but literally. The verticillium wilt. Every other fungus. Every pest. Every beneficial organism that happened to be living in the ground. The soil came out the other side chemically clean, and the strawberries grew.

More than 90% of California’s commercial strawberry fields used methyl bromide. The entire production system was built around it.

Then… scientists discovered that it was eating the ozone layer. Methyl bromide turned out to be one of the most destructive ozone-depleting substances known.

The Montreal Protocol listed it in 1993 and started moving to ban it and the US was supposed to phase it out by 2005.

The California strawberry industry lobbied for exemptions and… they got them. In 2006, the year after the ban was supposed to be complete, use actually increased by 5%, applied to an additional 2,200 acres. Full prohibition on strawberry fields didn’t come until 2016.

By then the industry had found a replacement. Two replacements, actually. They get applied together. The first is 1,3-dichloropropene, which the EPA classifies as a probable human carcinogen. The second… chloropicrin.

Chloropicrin was first manufactured for use as a chemical warfare agent in World War I. It causes intense eye irritation and lung damage the second its inhaled. It’s banned for agricultural use in the European Union and Russia has been accused of deploying it against Ukrainian soldiers since 2022.

It’s also what goes into the ground before your strawberries are planted.

Both chemicals get injected into the soil together and sealed under plastic tarps. Almost 30 million pounds of these fumigants get applied to California farm fields every year, a huge portion of all pesticides used in the state. The soil underneath the tarp doesn’t just lose its pests… It loses everything. The microbial communities that take years to develop. The fungal networks that help plants absorb nutrients. The biological complexity that makes soil soil rather than just… dirt.

When that tarp comes off, the field is clean. The strawberries go in. They grow in something closer to a sterile growing medium than earth.

The variety that dominates commercial production today, the giant red berry that ships well and looks perfect on a store shelf, was specifically bred during the fumigation era for yield and appearance rather than disease resistance. It doesn’t do well in non-fumigated soil. The fruit and the chemical process that precedes it were developed together, each one needing the other to work.

California grows about 90% of the strawberries sold in the United States. The red berry in your kitchen right now almost certainly came from a field that was chemically sterilized before planting, using compounds that began their lives as weapons of war.

Which is pretty insane.

Sources

1. UC Davis SAREP. “Alternatives to Methyl Bromide.” https://sarep.ucdavis.edu/are/ecosystem/methyl-bromide

2. PubMed / Phytopathology. “Strawberries at the Crossroads: Management of Soilborne Diseases in California Without Methyl Bromide.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32075499/

3. EPA. “Methyl Bromide.” https://www.epa.gov/ods-phaseout/methyl-bromide

4. Grist. “An EPA-approved pesticide is worse than the one it’s replacing.” https://grist.org/article/sterile-soil-dirty-hands/

5. Grist. “How strawberry farmers got themselves and the ozone layer out of a jam.” https://grist.org/article/how-strawberry-farmers-got-themselves-and-the-ozone-layer-out-of-a-jam/

6. Center for Food Safety. “Toxic Chemicals in Our Soil: Time to Pull the Plug on Methyl Bromide.” https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/blog/4076/toxic-chemicals-in-our-soil-time-to-pull-the-plug-on-methyl-bromide

7. The Inflamed Generation / Substack. “Your Strawberries Are Wrapped in a Chemical Weapon.”

The Inflamed Generation

Your Strawberries Are Wrapped in a Chemical Weapon

Last weekend, I was in Los Alamos with my family…

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5 months ago · 57 likes · 4 comments · Elroy Vojdani, MD

1. ScienceDirect. “Chloropicrin.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology-and-pharmaceutical-science/chloropicrin

2. Britannica. “Chloropicrin.” https://www.britannica.com/science/chloropicrin

3. Cloud SDS. “Chloropicrin: Hazards, Uses, Safety, and Regulations Explained.” https://cloudsds.com/chemical-hazard-and-safety/chloropicrin-hazards-uses-safety-and-regulations-explained/

4. PMC / Frontiers in Microbiology. “Long-term effects of chloropicrin fumigation on soil microbe recovery.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10375714/

5. Newsweek. “Russia Accused of Using WWI-Era Chemical Weapon in Ukraine.” https://www.newsweek.com/russia-accused-first-world-war-chemical-weapon-ukraine-chloropicrin-1865516

6. California Department of Pesticide Regulation. “Options to Methyl Bromide for the Control of Soil-Borne Pests.” https://www.cdpr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/sept2000.pdf

When a coconut forms on a palm, the liquid that fills it up isn’t juice or something that’s made for its harvester. It’s the food supply that the embryo inside the seed uses to grow into a coconut palm. Every vitamin, mineral, and electrolyte inside the coconut exists because a tiny embryo needs them to survive. So the coconut isn’t producing a drink… It’s building a fuel tank for its own baby.

At about seven months, that tank is full. The liquid is sweet and packed with everything that the embryo needs. If the coconut stays on the tree, the embryo starts drinking it, literally. The liquid gets absorbed slowly into the developing meat and by the time the coconut is fully mature at eleven or twelve months, most of that water is soaked up into the white flesh that would have fed the seedling through its first weeks of growth.

The coconut water industry only exists because someone figured out that if you pick the coconut early enough, before the embryo starts drinking, you can drain it and sell it.

That’s the entire thing… The entire billion dollar coconut water market is built on harvesting a seed’s food before the seed can eat it.

Vita Coco, the company that controls almost half the US coconut water market, started in 2003 when two guys in a New York bar met two Brazilian women who said the thing they missed most about home was coconut water. The two guys would end up flying to Brazil, sourcing the water from small farms, put it in a carton, and started selling it to yoga studios and small grocery stores in Manhattan.

From nothing in 2004 to $600 million in US sales by 2013. Coca-Cola bought into Zico. PepsiCo took a stake in a third brand. Madonna, Demi Moore, and Rihanna all invested. Last year Vita Coco cracked over a billion coconuts to make its product. About 3 million a day.

Three million coconut embryos a day, drained before they can use what was made for them, put in a carton, and sold as a wellness drink.

The marketing called it nature’s sports drink. And it is, technically. The electrolytes are real. The potassium is real. The hydration is real. It’s genuinely good for you. None of that is wrong.

It’s just that none of it was made for you.

The coconut made it for a tree that never got to grow.

Which is pretty insane.

Sources

1. MaxAPress / BPR. “Exploring the potential application of coconut water in healthcare and biotechnology.” https://www.maxapress.com/article/doi/10.48130/bpr-0024-0009

2. Today You Should Know. “Why do coconuts have water?” https://www.todayyoushouldknow.com/articles/why-do-coconuts-have-water

3. ScienceDirect. “Biochemical and nutritional characterization of coconut haustorium.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814616318064

4. Specialty Produce. “Young Coconut Information and Facts.” https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/Young_Coconut_1233.php

5. Agriculture Institute. “Techniques and Tools for Effective Coconut Harvesting.” https://agriculture.institute/post-harvest-mgt-value-addition/effective-coconut-harvesting-techniques-tools/

6. Coconut Handbook / Tetra Pak. “Harvesting and Post-harvest Management.” https://coconuthandbook.tetrapak.com/chapter/harvesting-and-post-harvest-management

7. Coconut Stock. “Where Do Coconuts Grow?” https://coconutstock.com/where-do-coconuts-grow/

8. CNBC. “Vita Coco: From maxed-out credit cards to billion-dollar company.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/06/vita-coco-from-maxed-out-credit-cards-to-billion-dollar-company.html

9. LinkedIn / Business of Business. “Why coconut water is now a $1 billion industry.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-coconut-water-now-1-billion-industry-fernando-martinez

10. Business of Business. “Why Vita Coco and Zico founders are betting on coconut water’s comeback.” https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/vita-coco-and-zico-founders-betting-on-coconut-waters-comeback/

Not to eat, not hold, but to carry to a party and walk around with so everyone could see it. Then… you’d return it the next day. That same pineapple would get rented out again and again and again, until it finally rotted.

In 18th century England, a single pineapple could cost the equivalent of about $8,000. And no, that’s not a typo. Eight.. thousand.. dollars. For a fruit. People who could afford to buy one didn’t eat it either. They put it in the middle of the dinner table as a centerpiece, let their guests stare at it all night, and then… had it taken away. The pineapple wasn’t food, it was a flex.

King Charles II was so into pineapples that he commissioned a portrait of himself being handed one. Not eating it. Being handed it. That very painting hangs in a museum. A king, in full royal attire, receiving a pineapple like it was a crown. And in a way… it was.

Pineapples got carved into furniture. Sculpted onto buildings. Painted onto carriages.

There are stone pineapples sitting on top of garden gates across England right now that have been there for three hundred years, put there specifically so visitors would understand that the person who lived inside was very, very wealthy.

The reason for all of this was actually very simple.

Pineapples came from South America, so getting one to Europe meant putting it on a ship and hoping the ship was fast enough so the fruit didn’t rot before it arrived.

The ones that made it were worth a fortune because they were basically a miracle of logistics. You couldn’t grow them in England either because the climate there was always wrong. So for almost two hundred years people tried and failed and the ones who actually figured it out, built special heated rooms called hothouses… just to keep a pineapple plant alive through winter. The cost of building and running a hothouse to grow one pineapple was more than most people made in a year. Then… a 22 year old from Massachusetts moved to Hawaii and ruined all of it.

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That number isn’t really an estimate, it’s from genomic analysis published in Nature Communications, comparing the histories of fig trees and fig wasps across every major branch of both species. 75 million years of the same relationship, unbroken. To put that into perspective, that’s about 10 million years before the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

A fig isn’t a fruit in the way most people think about fruit. It’s a hollow chamber called a syconium. Its lined on the inside with a bunch of tiny flowers that can never really be reached from outside. There’s also no opening wide enough for a bee. No surface exposed to the wind.

So the fig solved the problem of how to get pollinated in one of the strangest ways in the plant kingdom… it grew a door just small enough for one specific animal.

And that animal… is the fig wasp.

A female fig wasp, carrying pollen from the fig she was born in, finds a new fig by following a chemical signal the tree releases when its flowers are ready. She can detect that signal from literal miles away. They land on the fig, finds the small opening at the base, and crawls inside. That passage is so narrow that she loses her wings and antennae getting through it. Which ultimately means she can’t get back out.

Inside the fig she travels around the dark chamber, spreading pollen on the flowers as she moves, while also laying her eggs in others. When she’s done… she dies. The fig is her tomb and she went in knowing, in whatever way an insect knows anything, that she wasn’t coming back out.

Then… the fig does something that took researchers years to fully document.

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A single almond takes about 1.1 gallons of water to produce. A handful takes about 10. A jar of almond butter takes around 3,000. These numbers don’t change based on where you bought it, what brand it was, or what the packaging said about sustainability. They’re fixed into the biology of the tree and the climate of the one place on Earth that grows 80% of the world’s supply.

California doesn’t have enough rain to grow almonds. It never did.

The water comes from underground. California’s Central Valley sits on top of one of the largest groundwater basins in the western United States, aquifers that accumulated over thousands of years of snowmelt and rainfall seeping down through layers of rock and sediment. Farmers drill wells and pump that water up to irrigate their orchards. The almonds grow. The water doesn’t come back.

In 1997, California had 442,000 bearing acres of almond orchards. By 2022 that number had grown to 1.3 million acres. More than tripled in 25 years. Every new acre planted in a drought state needed a new well. Every new well pulled more water from aquifers that were already running a deficit of nearly 2 million acre-feet per year.

Then, of course, the ground started reacting to to this, and the reaction wasn’t good…

Since the 1920s, excessive groundwater pumping has caused land in sections of California’s San Joaquin Valley to sink by as much as 28 feet. A government report from 1999 described the total historical subsidence as “one of the single largest alterations of the land surface attributed to humankind.” NASA commissioned satellite radar data from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed it’s still happening. Parts of the valley are sinking at rates as high as 2 feet per year. A Stanford study published in 2024 found the average rate of sinking for the entire valley reached nearly an inch per year between 2006 and 2022, with more than 4,000 square miles dropping by over 12 inches.

...The ground is collapsing from the inside. Slowly. Measurably. Visibly… from space.

The sinking has already taken out thousands of wells. Public ones. Private ones. Wells people were depending on. State and federal water agencies have spent an estimated 100 million dollars on related repairs since the 1960s. When an aquifer collapses the space it held is gone permanently. The water that once filled it has no place to go back to. The valley that’s been feeding America for a hundred years is slowly compressing under the weight of its own production.

None of this is on the label of the almonds in your kitchen right now.

The bag says how many grams of protein per serving. It says whether they’re raw or roasted, salted or unsalted, whole or slivered. It says where to store them and when they expire.

It doesn’t say 1.1 gallons per nut. It doesn’t say the valley that grew them sank another inch last year. It doesn’t say the aquifer underneath it took thousands of years to fill and is leaving on a timeline nobody alive today will see the end of.

Which is pretty insane.

Sources

1. Food Revolution Network. “Almonds & Sustainability: The Truth About Almonds & Water Use.” https://foodrevolution.org/blog/almonds-sustainability/

2. The Green Shot. “Almond Milk’s Environmental Impact: The Truth.” https://www.thegreenshot.io/uncategorized/why-almond-milk-is-bad-for-the-environment/

3. ScienceDirect. “Water-Indexed Benefits and Impacts of California Almonds.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X17308592

4. USDA NASS. “2025 California Almond Forecast.” https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publications/Specialty_and_Other_Releases/Almond/Forecast/202505almpd.pdf

5. NASA Earth Observatory. “San Joaquin Valley is Still Sinking.” https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89761/san-joaquin-valley-is-still-sinking

6. NASA Science. “San Joaquin Valley is Still Sinking.” https://science.nasa.gov/?p=1134794

7. Stanford University. “Groundwater Pumping Drives Rapid Sinking in California.” https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/11/groundwater-pumping-drives-rapid-sinking-in-california

8. Central Valley Flood Protection Board. “NASA Data Shows Groundwater Pumping Causing Subsidence.” https://cvfpb.ca.gov/news/nasa-data-shows-groundwater-pumping-causing-subsidence-damaging-water-infrastructure/

9. EcoMotion. “Almond Farming and California Water.” https://ecomotion.us/almond-farming-and-california-water/

10. Grist. “California Almonds Drink Up 3 Years Worth of LA’s Water Use.” https://grist.org/food/california-almonds-los-angeles-drought/

11. YIP Institute. “California Almonds: Weighing Economic Impact vs. Water Sustainability.” https://yipinstitute.org/policy/california-almonds-weighing-economic-impact-vs-water-sustainability/

12. Ohio State University. “Using Satellites to Track Groundwater Depletion in California.” https://news.osu.edu/using-satellites-to-track-groundwater-depletion-in-california/

Fake honey has been a problem since the 1970s, when cheap high-fructose corn syrup gave producers something cheaper to put in the jar. The math is simple. Honey costs money to produce. Corn syrup doesn’t. Cheap industrial sugar syrups can be added to honey without making noticeable changes in color or taste. So some producers stopped filling the jar with honey and started filling it with something else, then labeling it honey and charging the same price.

It worked….. For decades, it worked.

The FDA defines economically motivated adulteration as the substitution, addition, or omission of a substance in a product to increase its apparent value or reduce production costs. Simply put, it’s an effort to cheat consumers.

Honey is one of the most commonly flagged products in the world for this kind of fraud. More than 70% of the honey consumed in the United States is imported. That’s 70% of the supply arriving from countries where the FDA has limited ability to inspect or verify what’s in the jar before it clears customs.

Analysis of 95 commercial honey brands found that 27% were of questionable authenticity, meaning they had potentially been adulterated with cane or corn syrups and shouldn’t be classified as genuine pure honey. One in four brands tested. Sitting on shelves next to the real thing with identical labels.

But the fraud gets harder to catch than that.

Some rice syrup producers openly advertise the fact that their products won’t cause adulterated honey to fail the C4 test... There are literally companies actively marketing their product as the one that slips past the government’s own detection method.

The FDA acknowledges that they can detect undeclared sweeteners with its current methods and is still developing additional methods to detect the rest. That’s not really a loophole, that’s a supply chain built around it.

The tests being used today can’t catch everything going into the jar. The fraud is ahead of the science designed to find it.

And this all happening while bees are disappearing.

The total number of managed honey bee colonies in the United States dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to about 2.6 million today. Between April 2023 and April 2024, 55.1% of managed honey bee colonies were lost, seemingly forever, according to the Apiary Instructors of America. More than half of the hives people take care of are suddenly empty or dying.

Colony Collapse Disorder was first reported in 2006. Beekeepers began reporting high colony losses where adult honeybees simply disappeared from the hives, almost all at the same time. Few or no dead bees were found near the colonies. The hives were full. The queen was there. The brood was there. The honey was there. The bees were just… gone.

One-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants. And the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination. Every almond. Every apple. Every blueberry. Every strawberry. Every cucumber. None of it grows without bees.

The real thing is harder to produce every year, from a shrinking population of colonies losing half their number annually, managed by beekeepers watching their hives empty out overnight for reasons science still hasn’t fully explained. The fake thing is corn syrup or rice syrup, processed to look and pour like honey, sold in identical packaging, sometimes passing every test the government has available to run on it.

And on the shelf they look exactly the same.

Which is pretty insane.

Sources

1. The Conversation. “Honeygate Deepens as New Tests Reveal 27% of Brands Are Adulterated.” https://theconversation.com/honeygate-deepens-as-new-tests-reveal-27-of-brands-are-adulterated-104139

2. FDA. “FY25 Sample Collection and Analysis of Honey for Economically Motivated Adulteration.” https://www.fda.gov/food/economically-motivated-adulteration-food-fraud/fy25-sample-collection-and-analysis-domestically-produced-and-imported-honey-economically-motivated

3. FDA. “FY25 Sampling Results on Economically Motivated Adulteration in Honey.” https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-releases-fy25-sampling-results-economically-motivated-adulteration-honey

4. Nutrition Insight. “FDA Discovers Fraud in 10% of US Honey, Prompting Import Alert.” https://www.nutritioninsight.com/news/fda-discovers-fraud-in-10-of-us-honey-prompting-import-alert.html

5. Food Safety. “FDA Food Fraud Testing Finds Adulteration Among 10 Percent of Honey Imports.” https://www.food-safety.com/articles/8217-fda-food-fraud-testing-finds-adulteration-among-10-percent-of-honey-imports

6. FDA. “Economically Motivated Adulteration (Food Fraud).” https://www.fda.gov/food/compliance-enforcement-food/economically-motivated-adulteration-food-fraud

7. arXiv. “Honey Adulteration Detection using Hyperspectral Imaging and Machine Learning.” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23416

8. PMC. “Colony Collapse Disorder and Bee Age Impact Honey Bee Pathophysiology.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5513415/

9. USDA ARS. “Honey Bee Health.” https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/br/ccd/index/

10. Planet Bee. “The New Wave of Bee Losses: Is Colony Collapse Returning?” https://www.planetbee.org/post/the-new-wave-of-bee-losses-is-colony-collapse-returning/

11. EPA. “Colony Collapse Disorder.” https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder

12. National Invasive Species Information Center. “Colony Collapse Disorder and Pollinator Health.” https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/subject/colony-collapse-disorder

13. IFSQN Forum. “Latest 2025 FDA Honey Adulteration Testing.” https://www.ifsqn.com/forum/index.php/topic/50090-latest-2025-fda-honey-adulteration-testing/

Ancient Egyptians used extracts from the willow plant as an anti-inflammatory and pain reliever around 1300 to 1500 BCE. The knowledge spread to the Babylonians around 600 BCE, to the Chinese around 500 BCE, to the ancient Greeks around 400 BCE. Multiple civilizations across thousands of years, with no contact with each other, independently found the same tree and figured out the same thing. The bark works. Boil it into a tea. Drink it. The pain goes down.

None of them got the patent.

In 1827, a German chemist named Johann Andreas Buchner extracted and isolated the active compound in willow bark and called it salicylic acid. In 1853, a French chemist named Charles Gerhardt manufactured acetylsalicylic acid from it. The compound was getting closer to its modern form, but it was still too harsh on the stomach to use reliably. It needed one more modification. That modification came from a chemist named Felix Hoffmann, working at a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer.

On August 10, 1897, Hoffmann succeeded in producing a stable version of acetylsalicylic acid that didn’t destroy the stomach lining. Bayer named it aspirin, patented it, and marketed it around the world. Three thousand five hundred years of human civilization had been circling this compound without being able to refine it. Now it was a Bayer product.

That’s not even the insane part.

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For most of human history, the land around a house grew food, or it grew nothing. Decorative grass wasn’t a concept available to ordinary people. It wasn’t practical, it wasn’t affordable, and it wasn’t considered a marker of anything except extraordinary wealth. The only people with grass lawns were the ones who could afford to dedicate land to something that produced nothing.

That was the point… generally I guess.

At the Palace of Versailles in the 17th century, Louis XIV’s landscape architect André Le Nôtre designed what he called the “tapis vert,” the green carpet, a vast ornamental lawn maintained entirely by hand. Workers called faucilleurs arrived before dawn with long-handled scythes to cut the grass to an even height before the king could see it. Versailles employed armies of people just to keep grass short. The lawn wasn’t about the grass. It was about being able to afford to employ people to maintain something useless.

English aristocrats copied it. The sweeping green lawns of English manor houses became the defining image of landed wealth, kept up by armies of groundskeepers or by letting sheep graze. Only the very wealthy had them. Everyone else grew vegetables.

Then… Americans started going to Europe and coming back with ideas.

Thomas Jefferson of all people, saw the lawns at Versailles and went home to recreate them at Monticello. George Washington brought in English gardeners to design the grounds at Mount Vernon. Jefferson and Washington were the most admired men in the country, and pictures of their estates started getting around, showing Americans what the grounds of a respectable man were supposed to look like.

But there was a huge problem…

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Somewhere inside your mouth right now, sitting on the surface of your taste buds, are proteins called sweet receptors. Their job is to detect sugar molecules, bind to them, and send a signal to your brain that says sweet. They do this thousands of times a day, every time you eat or drink anything with any sweetness in it, so automatically and so constantly. Artichokes found a way in.

A compound in artichokes called cynarin latches directly onto those sweet receptors without activating them. It sits there, occupying the binding site, blocking any sweetness signal from reaching your brain. While cynarin is sitting on your sweet receptors, your brain gets no sweetness signal from them at all, even from things that are genuinely sweet.

Then you take a sip of water.

The water washes the cynarin molecules off the receptors. They’ve been suppressed for however long you were eating the artichoke, and now they flood back all at once. Your brain interprets the sudden reactivation as a burst of sweetness, a phantom sugar hit from a liquid that contains no sugar at all. Water tastes sweet. Wine tastes sweeter than it actually is. The next bite of whatever you eat gets a sweetness boost it didn’t earn.

Scientists first documented this in a formal setting in 1935, when geneticist Dr. Albert Blakeslee served artichokes as an appetizer to 250 biologists at a dinner party and recorded what happened. Sixty percent of them reported that water tasted sweet after eating the artichoke. The other 40% noticed nothing unusual. Blakeslee noted the difference but couldn’t explain it. The effect didn’t have a name yet.

It took until 1972 for Dr. Linda Bartoshuk and her colleagues to publish the mechanism in the journal Science, identifying cynarin specifically as the compound responsible and documenting exactly what it does to the sweet taste receptor. The paper confirmed something that cooks had been noticing for centuries without being able to explain: artichokes make everything taste different, and they do it invisibly, while you’re eating them, before you’ve taken a single sip of anything.

...Sixty percent of the biologists at that 1935 dinner party noticed something was happening to their water. Forty percent noticed nothing. That split isn’t random. Scientists believe it comes down to individual variation in taste receptor sensitivity. Some people carry more sweet receptors, or more sensitive ones, making them dramatically more susceptible to the cynarin effect. The same artichoke at the same dinner table tastes fundamentally different to the person sitting next to you, and neither of you knows it.

This is why artichokes are the one vegetable sommeliers genuinely fear. A dry wine paired with an artichoke course can taste inexplicably sweet to 60% of the table. A balanced wine can tip into cloying. The cynarin effect lasts four to five minutes after each bite, long enough to affect every sip taken during a meal course, and there’s no way to turn it off once it starts. The only solution wine professionals have found is to lean into it: pair artichokes with wines so dry and mineral that the cynarin-induced sweetness boost improves them rather than ruining them.

The artichoke’s been doing this for as long as people have been eating it. It’s been in the Mediterranean diet for thousands of years, in Italian antipasto, in French braise, in Greek stew, making wine taste strange and water taste sweet and the meal around it taste like something it isn’t. Nobody knew why until 1972. Most people eating artichokes right now still don’t know why.

Their sweet receptors are being occupied without their knowledge.

The artichoke found them first.

Which is pretty insane.

Sources

1. Academia.edu / Research Paper. “Sweet Taste of Water Induced by Artichoke (Cynara scolymus).” https://www.academia.edu/124428696/Sweet_Taste_of_Water_Induced_by_Artichoke_Cynara_scolymus_

2. Reader’s Digest Canada. “How to Trick Your Taste Buds: The Surprising Science of Flavours.” https://www.readersdigest.ca/food/cooking-tips/4-surprising-foods-trick-taste-buds/

3. Things We Don’t Know. “The Sweet Taste of Unknown.” https://blog.thingswedontknow.com/2021/01/the-sweet-taste-of-unknown/

4. Springer / Journal of Physiological Anthropology. “Pairing Flavours and the Temporal Order of Tasting.” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s13411-017-0053-0.pdf

5. Specialty Produce. “Cocktail Artichokes Information and Facts.” https://specialtyproduce.com/produce/Cocktail_Artichokes_2017.php

6. The Kitchn. “Food Science: Artichokes and Sweetness.” https://www.thekitchn.com/food-science-artichokes-and-sw-80499

7. Paste Magazine. “8 Foods Resistant to Wine Pairing.” https://www.pastemagazine.com/food/wine/8-foods-resistant-to-wine-pairing-and-what-to-pair

8. The Daily Meal. “A Sommelier Explains Why It’s So Difficult To Pair Artichokes With Wine.” https://www.thedailymeal.com/1537119/why-its-hard-pairing-artichokes-wine/

9. Armchair Sommelier. “The Iron Chef’s Artichokes Wine Pairing.” https://armchairsommelier.com/food-and-pairings/artichokes-wine-pairing/

10. PsychoTropical. “Taste, Wine, Food, and Combinations.” https://www.psychotropical.com/taste-wine-food-and-combinations-advances-and-insights-from-science/

In the early 1980s, Mike Yurosek was running one of the largest carrot farms in California, over 20,000 acres in the Central Valley, and throwing away most of what he grew. Up to 400 tons of carrots a day, roughly the weight of 80 fully grown elephants, discarded because they were too twisted, too short, too lumpy, or too bent to meet grocery store cosmetic standards. They were perfectly edible. Nobody would buy them.

Yurosek tried to put the waste to use. He fed the rejected carrots to his animals. He fed them so many carrots, for so long, that the fat on his pigs began to turn orange.

He still had more carrots than he knew what to do with.

In 1986, watching frozen food processors chop their vegetables into uniform pieces before packaging, Yurosek had a thought. Frozen processors got away with using irregular produce because they cut it up first. Nobody expected a frozen pea-sized carrot cube to have come from a perfect carrot. If a machine could cut the ugly ones down into something uniform and small, the ugliness wouldn’t matter anymore.

He tried a potato peeler first. Too slow… Then he bought a secondhand industrial green bean cutter from a frozen food plant that was going out of business, modified the blades to handle carrots, and ran a batch of reject carrots through it. The machine cut them into two-inch pieces. The potato peeler rounded the edges. What came out the other side looked nothing like the gnarled, twisted things that went in.

Yurosek packed a bag of them and sent it to his best customer, a supermarket in Los Angeles, without much explanation. The next day the store called back. “We only want those,” they said… The baby carrot was born in a phone call.

Within a year, carrot consumption in the United States jumped by nearly 30%. By 1997, the average American was eating 14 pounds of carrots a year, 117% more than a decade earlier. Baby carrots now account for 70% of all carrot sales in the country. The USDA noted in a 2007 report that fresh-cut carrot products had become the fastest growing segment of the carrot industry since the early 1990s, and within the 1.3 billion dollar fresh-cut vegetable category, carrots held the largest share of supermarket sales by a significant margin.

But what Yurosek actually invented was bigger than a carrot.

Before baby carrots, no fresh vegetable had ever successfully made the transition to grab-and-go snack food. The produce aisle and the snack aisle were separate worlds. Vegetables required preparation, a cutting board, a peeler, a pot. They were ingredients. Baby carrots required nothing. They came clean, pre-cut, and ready to eat directly from the bag. In 1986 it had never been done with a fresh vegetable at scale.

Every pre-cut, ready-to-eat fresh vegetable product that followed, the florets, the sticks, the sliced peppers, all of it, exists because Yurosek solved the problem of the ugly carrot.

He never patented the process. He didn’t try to protect the idea or license it or build a monopoly around it. Other farms copied the method immediately, which is part of why it spread so fast. The man who changed the snack food industry died in 2005.

...His obituary ran as a 30-second segment on NPR. Most people who heard it had no idea the thing they’d been pulling from their refrigerator for twenty years had been invented by a specific person, in a specific year, with a secondhand green bean cutter and pigs that had turned orange.

Which is… pretty insane.

Sources

1. Wikipedia. “Mike Yurosek.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Yurosek

2. Priceonomics. “The Invention of the Baby Carrot.” https://priceonomics.com/the-invention-of-the-baby-carrot/

3. Grokipedia. “Mike Yurosek.” https://grokipedia.com/page/Mike_Yurosek

4. Food History / Opened.ca. “Baby Carrots.” https://foodhistory.opened.ca/baby-carrots/

5. Forbes. “Profiles in Doing Both: Mike Yurosek, Father of the Baby Carrot.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/indersidhu/2010/11/04/profiles-in-doing-both-mike-yurosek-father-of-the-baby-carrot/

6. Carrot Process. “How Baby Carrot Invented.” https://www.carrotprocess.com/how-baby-carrot-invented/

7. Packaging Digest. “Baby-carrot packaging shakes bad snacking habits.” https://www.packagingdigest.com/packaging-design/baby-carrot-packaging-shakes-bad-snacking-habits

8. Packaging Digest. “Baby carrot junk food packaging wins recognition.” https://www.packagingdigest.com/packaging-design/baby-carrot-junk-food-packaging-wins-recognition

9. Fast Company. “A Carrot Company Is Using Junk Food-Style Marketing To Change The Way Kids Eat.” https://www.fastcompany.com/3034906/a-carrot-company-is-using-junk-food-style-marketing-to-change-the-way-kids-eat

10. Produce Business. “Shoppers Still Dig Carrots.” https://producebusiness.com/shoppers-still-dig-carrots/

Not scientifically… Not botanically... Not in any classification system that plant biology actually uses. Wolfgang Stuppy, a research leader in comparative plant and fungal biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, one of the most respected botanical institutions on Earth, told the BBC plainly, “The term vegetable doesn’t exist in botanical terminology.”

Fruit exists... Roots exist… Seeds exist... Leaves, stems, bulbs, and flowers all exist as defined botanical structures with real scientific meanings. But “vegetables” doesn’t. Its a culinary term, defined by things like taste and usage and human habit, with no scientific value whatsoever.

Which means the argument was always a fight over a category that doesn’t exist.

In 1883, Congress passed a tariff act that would eventually reach the Supreme Court. The act taxed imported vegetables but not imported fruits. A fruit importer named John Nix had been bringing tomatoes into New York from the Caribbean, and the port collector, a man named Edward Hedden, taxed them as vegetables. Nix argued they were fruits. He was right… botanically. A tomato develops from the ovary of the tomato plant’s flower. It contains seeds. By every scientific definition, it is a fruit. Nix sued to get his tariff money back.

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The case went to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Both sides brought in witnesses. Both sides read definitions from dictionaries. The only witnesses called at trial testified that neither “vegetables” nor “fruit” had any special meaning in trade or commerce different from what the dictionaries said. Nix’s lawyers cited botanical definitions of fruit. Hedden’s lawyers cited the words pea, cucumber, squash, eggplant, and pepper, all botanical fruits that everyone in a kitchen calls vegetables.

On May 10, 1893, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the tomato is a vegetable.

The Court’s reasoning was not botanical. It was social. The majority opinion held that the Tariff Act used the ordinary meaning of the words “fruit” and “vegetable” rather than any technical botanical meaning, because that is how the words are used by people who actually grow, sell, and eat food. The tomato is “in common parlance” a vegetable because it is served at dinner, not dessert. It is eaten with the meal, not after it. That was the entire argument.

Nine justices agreed.

The highest court in the country defined a food category not by what it was but by when you eat it.

The tomato didn’t change… Its biology didn’t change... It still develops from a flower and it still has seeds. It is still, by every scientific standard available in 1893 or even today, a fruit. The Supreme Court simply decided that science was not the relevant authority on the question, and the law has used that logic ever since.

The category the court was asked to rule on, vegetable, has no scientific definition. The court acknowledged this and ruled it anyway, based on common usage. Which means the United States federal government has a legally binding definition of something that does not biologically exist.

Cucumbers, peppers, squash, eggplant, avocado, and pumpkin are all botanically fruits that someone decided to eat with dinner instead of after it. Every item you’ve ever called a vegetable is either a root, a stem, a leaf, a flower, a bulb, a seed, or a botanical fruit the law decided to rename.

There is no vegetable… There never was… There is only a meal, and the things you put in it, and a Supreme Court decision.

Which is… pretty insane.

Sources

1. Wikipedia. “Nix v. Hedden.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden

2. Legal Information Institute / Cornell Law. “NIX v. HEDDEN, Collector.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/149/304

3. Justia US Supreme Court. “Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893).” https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/149/304/

4. FindLaw. “NIX v. HEDDEN, 149 U.S. 304 (1893).” https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/149/304.html

5. ISCOTUS / Chicago-Kent Law. “The Supreme Court and the Great Tomato Controversy.” https://blogs.kentlaw.iit.edu/iscotus/supreme-court-great-tomato-debate/

6. HuffPost. “Botanists Say There’s No Such Thing As Vegetables.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/botanists-no-such-thing-vegetables_n_593fdbcee4b0b13f2c6dcd9c

7. CNN. “There’s actually no such thing as vegetables.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/05/health/what-are-vegetables-nutrients-plants-wellness

8. ScienceDaily. “Vegetable.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/vegetable.htm

9. New World Encyclopedia. “Vegetable.” https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Vegetable

10. IOSR Journals. “The Myth of Vegetables: Why They Don’t Exist in a Botanical Sense.” https://www.iosrjournals.org/manuscript_paper/863418.pdf

11. Pinetree Garden Seeds. “Vegetables aren’t real.” https://www.superseeds.com/blogs/know-your-roots/vegetables-arent-real

Cattle ranching accounts for roughly 80% of all deforestation in the Amazon. The pattern is consistent across decades: ranchers clear forest, burn the debris, plant non-native grasses, and run cattle on the new pasture. For a few years, sometimes ten, the land is productive. Then the soil begins to collapse.

Amazon soils are some of the most nutrient-poor soils on Earth. The forest that grows on them isn’t sustained by the soil, it creates its own nutrient system through decomposition, layering, and root networks built over centuries. When that forest is cleared and replaced with a monoculture of introduced grass, the nutrient cycle breaks. The soil compacts under the weight of cattle hooves. Erosion accelerates. The grasses that replaced the forest stop producing enough forage to make cattle ranching viable. Estimated to affect 50% of all Amazon pastures, this degradation cycle is not an accident or an exception. It’s the predictable outcome of the system.

When the land stops producing, ranchers leave. They don’t restore it. They move to the next patch of forest, clear it, and repeat the process. Behind them, on the degraded pasture they abandoned, something begins.

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Most people know it as the reason they won’t eat okra… nothing more than a texture complaint. Something to cook around, to fry out, or even avoid entirely. But that slime, technically called mucilage, is a natural polymer with a list of documented scientific applications that reads less like a vegetable and more like a material that hasn’t been fully discovered yet.

Okra mucilage is made up of something called polysaccharides, complex carbohydrate chains that are non-toxic, biodegradable, and capable of forming flexible films and gels. When these chains come into contact with contaminants in water, they bind to those particles and pull them out of suspension. The particles clump together, get heavy, and sink. The water above them clears.

Researchers have been studying this property for years as an alternative to the synthetic chemicals currently used in water treatment. Those conventional chemicals, primarily aluminum and iron-based compounds, work well but leave residues that raise long-term concerns. Okra mucilage, unlike those chemicals, leaves nothing behind. It’s biodegradable. It breaks down. And in controlled studies, it has reduced the cloudiness in water samples by more than 98 percent.

Then… the microplastics research came in.

A 2025 study published by the American Chemical Society tested okra and fenugreek extracts against real-world water samples. Surface water, ocean water, groundwater… all from multiple US regions, all contaminated with different shapes, sizes, and types of microplastics. Okra extracts removed the majority of microplastics across all sample types. The researchers noted that okra and fenugreek could serve as a much better alternatives to polyacrylamide, the synthetic chemical currently used in most wastewater treatment facilities worldwide.

...Microplastics are now found in human blood, lungs, breast milk, and placentas. The thing that could help pull them out of drinking water is sitting in a produce aisle, being avoided because of how it feels on a fork.

The wound healing research is its own separate story. (working on it now)

Okra mucilage has been studied as a drug delivery platform, a material that can carry medications to a specific site in the body and release them on a controlled schedule. Its pH-responsive behavior, the way it swells or contracts depending on the acidity of its environment, makes it useful for delivering drugs to precise locations in the digestive tract. Separate studies have tested okra-derived hydrogel dressings on diabetic wounds, which I recently found are notoriously difficult to heal.

And then theirs the films.

Because okra mucilage forms strong water-retaining films, researchers are investigating it as a component in biodegradable plastic packaging. Films that break down naturally. Films that could replace petroleum-based packaging for food and non-food products. Films made from the same substance people scrape off their cutting boards.

The plant has been cultivated for at least 3,500 years in northeast Africa and the Middle East. Its been eaten in every warm climate on Earth. It has also survived everything from Egyptian cuisine to Southern American cooking. The one consistent complaint, across every culture that grows it… is the slime.

And the slime is the whole point.

Which is pretty insane.

Sources

1. American Chemical Society. “Research Update: Okra, fenugreek extracts remove most microplastics from water.” https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2025/may/research-update-okra-fenugreek-extracts-remove-most-microplastics-from-water.html

2. PMC / ACS Omega. “Fenugreek and Okra Polymers as Treatment Agents for the Removal of Microplastics from Water Sources.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12019522/

3. ScienceDirect. “A comprehensive study to evaluate the wound healing potential of okra.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378874121010734

4. ScienceDirect. “Grafting modification of okra mucilage: Recent findings, applications, and future directions.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0144861720308274

5. ScienceDirect. “Enhanced wound-healing by hydrogel from okra mucilage.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014305725000369

6. ScienceDirect. “Plant-based mucilage with healing and anti-inflammatory actions for topical application.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667025921000054

7. Redalyc / Scielo Colombia. “Evaluation of mucilage and powder of Okra as bio-flocculant in water treatment.” https://www.redalyc.org/journal/3420/342063962003/html/

8. Dr. Clark Store. “How Does Okra Remove Microplastics?” https://drclarkstore.com/blogs/news/how-does-okra-remove-microplastics

9. IJCRT. “A Review On Okra Mucilage Packaging Film As A Biodegradable Material.” https://www.ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2504669.pdf

10. Springer Nature / Applied Water Science. “Microplastic removal using Okra seed from aqueous solutions.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13201-024-02249-5