834: Vegetable Nerds Wanted with Ali Francis

20:29I do. I love this question, actually and it's like a strange sort of image I suppose that's like kept popping into my head as I've been writing because at first I was sort of like I grew up on a farm in Australia in the middle of sort of nowhere but technically Queensland and it was actually a cattle farm which is pretty funny now because I don't eat meat and I'm like the black sheep of my family but when we were growing up my mum did have this incredible veggie patch where she grew like beans and snap peas and carrots and lettuce and all that kind of thing and I have this one visceral memory which I must have been unsupervised because it's honestly unsafe where I like went to I would go to the garden all the time and just pick whatever I felt like eating and this one particular day I was like you know had this haul of amazing carrots and I remember viscerally eating them while like bouncing really high on the trampoline and like that's like a choking hazard um but it's like probably my one of my earliest um I suppose like vegetable memories where I willingly ate the vegetable and I think it was still like pretty dirty like I don't even think I washed it really um but I just remember bouncing on the trampoline which was one of my favorite activities at the time and the carrot was like homegrown so it was super sweet no idea what variety it was but yeah that is definitely an early uh food memory wow I love like an equally wholesome and dangerous

21:53Matt Rodbard:childhood food memory to share. That's very sweet. And I think so funny to be, you know, from cattle ranch to curious vegetable detailer. Yeah, curious vegetable detailer. I'm stealing that. That's great. That's your new bio I've just given to you. I'm always curious talking to people who grew up in places outside of the U.S. just about the foods that were familiar to them? Do you think there were any vegetables or pieces of produce in Australia that now living in America maybe seem like harder to find here? Or was it pretty universal? I would say supermarkets, a lot of the produce you'd see, I mean, that's like kind of the whole point of this book, right?

22:36It's like supermarkets around the world are fairly ubiquitous in terms of what we can access. So we had all of that sort of stuff growing up. But I think like something that stands out to me is sort of the cultural difference, I think, around produce. Like I would say Australia, if it was, you know, most akin to a state in America, it's very like Californian. And so our produce was always like grown in really optimal weather. And we had in the far north, extremely tropical, very humid weather because it's, you know, really close to Southeast Asia. And so, you know, we would get things like coffee and macadamia and mangoes.

23:11Our mangoes are like the one thing I kind of just like crave constantly in the U.S. because they we have I mean every like every mango growing country is like very you know proud and defensive of their particular mango but in Australia I just I love them so much I have all these memories of just like doing that like hedgehog trick and having like juice running down my arms and I just haven't really had like a great mango oh you know so like I this is a hill I will die on that I think like the best slicing method for a mango You would have seen this. You probably just didn't call it a hedgehog.

23:44But it was like where you'd cut the cheeks off both sides of the mango and do like a crosshatch pattern and then kind of pop it out. Like I'm doing a lot of gestures right now that you can't see that I think would be helpful in this moment.

23:55Matt Rodbard:No, I know exactly what you're talking about. And that is, I think, a great way to slice the mango, because when you pop it out, then the cubes kind of lift up off of the peel, especially if they're ripe and you can kind of nibble them off with your teeth. I've just never heard it called hedgehog method. That's very cute. I might have coined that just now, so we can run with that. We're pointing a lot and we just started. So I'm excited about what the rest of this episode will have in store. And I think clearly it seems like you were a kid who was just kind of generally curious and, you know, had some foods that you were interested in.

24:30Matt Rodbard:But I'm wondering if maybe in regards to your professional life as a writer who writes kind of across food, but also other topics, like what excites you so much about vegetables? Has this played a role in your kind of professional writing career at all previously before this book? Yeah, definitely. I have a pretty wacky career, to be honest. It's not one that I really enjoy making a CV around. But it's like when I studied journalism in Australia and sort of didn't really know exactly what kind of journalism I wanted to do and ended up getting this internship at an agricultural newspaper. Basically, I would report on everything from political issues that farmers would face to pests and diseases that were ravaging crops and that kind of thing.

25:16And so I'd grown up on a farm myself and always really enjoyed cooking. My mom was an incredible cook, and so I always helped her cook. And food was a big part of our lives on the enjoyment side, but also the production side. And so I think I actually found a really natural fit at that newspaper and got to travel all around and just kind of like meet people and hear their stories in all sorts of different commodities. And I think I just got this huge appreciation for exactly what it takes to get like a chickpea from the paddock to the plate, you know. And it's incredible what humans have been able to do both now and since the dawn of agriculture, really.

25:55And so I think I've always been like fascinated by food and sort of like very, you know, reverent to the supply chain itself. I went from that kind of agricultural reporting job and I moved to the US. I was sort of coerced to come and hang out with my brother who was living in New York at the time and ended up obviously falling in love with the city and staying. That was more than 10 years ago now. And so I worked initially in on the food side, like I'd been in the agricultural journalism and then was like, OK, hey, like one of the biggest problems we have is that consumers, like vegetables have a PR problem, you know, and I think customers like don't find them exciting or interesting or particularly delicious in the US.

26:34And so I worked for Digg, which is a farm-to-table food company that still exists in the northeast. And, yeah, and I was working on the content marketing team. So I was creating all these really cool stories and videos and basically media with our farm suppliers. And it was a really cool restaurant group at like, basically bought 100 % of the produce and meats from directly from farmers. So the whole point was that they would get more profit. And also we would get better, more localized produce. And so I think that was like a big, a big influence here as well. But then also, as you know, I worked at Bon Appetit for a number of years as well.

27:12And I think a lot of my reporting there really sort of focused on sort of industrial agriculture, but sort of Trojan horsing it. So how do you make someone care about the plight of chickens in an industrial system? We would often go in through like a food trend, like the chicken sandwich wars or something like that, so that people would realize, oh, this thing that I pay$2 for every day, perhaps there's a reason for that. You know, it's very difficult to get people to care about animal welfare and climate and that sort of thing in the media without figuring out sort of an entry point that is really exciting and interesting and accessible and that's probably what led me to like vegetables as well you know I think vegetables are just these like unproblematic queens you know like they're so cute they're so delicious they're little sculptural works of art like nature just makes Romanesco you know and it's just like ridicule is just a thing that exists in the dirt in Italy and I just like couldn't I just can't really fathom that to be honest yeah and so for me I was like oh these are wonderful entry points to telling these bigger stories about climate and biodiversity and migration war history and like who humans kind of were you know totally I really appreciate that

28:28Matt Rodbard:overview because it's interesting to see you know the media side in-house at a restaurant group side I think like maybe a common thread is just kind of this interest in seeing the story telling potential around vegetables, not just how chefs like to cook with them, but the way that these vegetables were cultivated, either through human interaction or nature or a combination of those things. And that seems to be kind of a thesis in this book, The Curious Lives of Vegetables, as well. But I'm wondering if you could tell me about how you developed the idea for this book, how you would kind of explain it to somebody who's picking it up for the first time.

29:05Yeah, so how this book came about is, in all honesty, like, probably not something I should share publicly, but because it was just so like, nobody should get to write a book with that kind of like process. but basically um I remember I was like it was winter of probably very early 2024 um and I was like in the parking lot of Brighton which is a local Salt Lake City beloved ski mountain you know like getting my snowboard ready whatever to go up on the mountain I was kind of like you know taking a little day off and I was just checking my messages and I had um one from my really good friend Adriana, Adriana Picker, who lives in Sydney, but we actually met working out of the same co-working space in New York City before she moved home during the pandemic.

29:55And, you know, we're good friends. So the message chain is unhinged, but it was, you know, something to the degree of like, oh, I really want to draw vegetables. She's an illustrator. She's a botanical illustrator, incredibly talented and just like, oh, I want to draw vegetables. and I was always like oh vegetables are the sickest thing on earth you should totally draw vegetables and she's like yeah but like I want to do a book and I was like oh I want to write a book about vegetables and so this is all happening like as I'm like buckling my snowboard and stuff you know it's just like not a serious conversation but then we were like oh let's just like get on a call and so we kind of started noodling back and forth and realized we both had this kind of Adriana also grew up you know surrounded by farming in Australia and had this equal reference for produce and I think we both just kind of like oh we're a really good fit in terms of passion and diversity of skill sets and that kind of thing and so from there we really just worked hard to figure out exactly what you're asking which is like what is the central thesis of an illustrated book of vegetables and I think for me the big thing I kept coming back to that vegetables I think are like a sort of underdog in is like climate and and biodiversity and so the book really developed from there like at first we were focusing more on botany and and sort of like sort of the technical details of these plants and what they could offer the world from that perspective and then the more I dug into different specific vegetables and varieties the more I just realized these are conduits for humanity at large and so you know each vegetable really tells us so much about where society has been what society valued um you know what like what kind of war and migration and cultural focuses were, you know, in different places at different times, they became these like kind of living archives really.

31:43And so I think then I was like, okay, this is even more my kind of wheelhouse in terms of reporting. It's very cultural and anthropological more so than it is botanical. Like the book is not scientific. I mean, it is, you know, but it's not like, it's not like that's not the main focus. It's really more about sort of the interwoven dependence between humans and plants. uh and and you know how we've kind of coped with that as a society so you know it developed from there where we worked on a pitch obviously and um found an agent and she's incredible and yeah we worked on that over the course of 2024 because in all honesty we were just having fun with it we were like this is interesting to us like let's take our time we both had other things going on and then we ended up pitching it sort of at the end of 2024 with our agent and got like quite a more interest than I definitely saw coming.

32:30I thought I was the only like vegetable freak in the world. And yeah, a lot of publishers were really interested in the book. And we ended up having like six or so, six or seven interested publishers and interviews and then got three offers in late November.

32:44Matt Rodbard:Wow. I love hearing about how it came out of this idea of collaboration and collaboration with an illustrator, because I do think the botanical illustrations in this book are so beautiful and psychedelic kind of. Like they seem to be, at least to my novice eye, like at once both very accurate, but also kind of dreamlike. And I think that's kind of a quality that kind of permeates throughout the book as well. Yeah, that's exactly, you know, what we were going for. This sort of, and I think Adriana is just incredibly talented at sort of taking, like we might've found an image of a random chickpea from a, you know, horticultural journal from like the 1800s.

33:25Not quite the 1800s. I don't even know if photography existed then. But we would, you know, take these agricultural drawings, sketches, renderings, and Adriana just doesn't really sanitize the image. Like the pumpkins are still gnarly and the, you know, the wasabi is all jagged and stuff like that. But they are, to your point, like extremely beautiful and dreamlike. Because I think that's what we both found ourselves gravitating towards is the vegetables that are the most stereotypically beautiful are actually our lesser favorites in terms of the drawings. We found the ones that are really like, yeah, kind of unhinged looking, frankly, to be our favorites.

34:01Matt Rodbard:And I think that maybe kind of goes into the vegetables that exist in the book as well. You have all these different sections. There's, you know, fruity vegetables and roots and underground gems. And you are talking about very specific kind of heirloom heritage, varieties. How did you decide what vegetables would appear in the book? And how did you like find out about all of these existing? Because I had never heard of many of them before. Yeah, I definitely had not either. And I think, you know, it wasn't this like singular reporting trip um it was sort of like a combination of like curiosity and note-taking i think so in the beginning it would just be like okay let's just like figure out the nerdiest books on vegetables that exist and flip through them you know we would buy catalogs from aloom seed companies and also flick through those and be like oh which of these seem interesting and have like stories attached to them so it kind of began by just like looking for strange facts and interesting anecdotes and things like that like this these vegetables had to do like a lot of work to make it into the book you know they had to be like visually interesting um culturally and historically fascinating and and also kind of like unsung like we really didn't want to put in very common varieties there's a couple of radicchio that you've probably seen before you know but apart from that we really did try to keep this as like a cabinet of curiosities really and there wasn't really you know most of the reporting happened from my desk I did go on travels and that kind of thing and be like oh wow like this is a weird cucumber let me like note this down and look it up later like that happened all the time but it was mostly interviews with botanists and seed savers historians farmers chefs you name it geneticists um that really kind of unlocked a lot of different ones you know like you might be like I would be I remember specifically one example where I was interviewing this incredible indigenous foods kind of advocate in Oklahoma about one specific vegetable and she was like okay okay this vegetable is cool but like have you heard of the candy roaster squash you know and so conversations like that would lead me down rabbit holes and and yeah it was it would sort of just be this like it was just like a dog with a bone kind of moment you know where it's just like pulling at the thread and following wherever it go.

36:31So it was really chaotic and honestly kind of overwhelming. But the other, you know, the other fact that we really wanted to make sure of was that the book contained geographical diversity. And I think we have like, apart from, you know, super icy places that don't have a lot of produce growing, we I'm pretty sure we had something from just about every continent and many countries. And that was really on purpose, because the more we looked into it, the more we realize just how widely food has traveled and how many different hands it's passed through to kind of become what it what it has so yeah it was this really like long

37:05Matt Rodbard:chase to be honest yeah I think it does seem like such a rabbit hole where you start to learn about different heritage varieties and then there are so many more and I'm sure like asking you for a single example is probably a torturous task but I'm curious if there's a vegetable in the book that maybe you learned about during the reporting process that you found really interesting or that somehow like exemplifies the kind of ethos of the book to you? One of the vegetables that I can't really stop thinking about is like a coob. It's this incredible sort of thistle-like wild growing. I think it's somewhat cultivated, but very rarely.

37:52And it's this wild growing thistle that, you know, is primarily native to Palestine and surrounding regions. And I think that was one vegetable that just sort of really illustrated to me the importance of biodiversity, not just in terms of climate and our safe food future, but also in terms of culture and belonging and memory. Because it's a very specific and beloved ingredient in Palestinian cooking. and, you know, over the last, I couldn't quote you exactly the amount of years, but over the last decade or so, Israel has kind of banned the foraging or very, very limited the foraging of this wild growing vegetable from Palestinian lands.

38:30And so it was just one of these vegetables that illustrated, you know, A, it's been, it's had a long role in terms of its place in Palestinian cooking, but also it really represents kind of land and livelihood for people. and so that is one vegetable it kind of still just breaks my heart and it's like hard to sort of think about that one um it also sounds very delicious it's kind of like an artichoke and so that one really illustrates to me the thesis of the book in terms of how important biodiversity is from different angles that's ultimately what the book is asking it's like what do we lose when we lose biodiversity and the answer is manifold you know so that one really stands out to me and then in terms of one that's just an absolute curious little freak i would say like the maltese mushroom is like it's the weirdest vegetable in the whole book it's this like it's not maltese i mean it does grow in malta um but it's kind of this club shaped weird like phallic looking thing that emerges from the ground it has this really specific set of conditions to even grow because it's parasitic so it can't it has no chlorophyll It doesn't like it gets energy basically by being a leech off of other root systems of other plants.

39:46So it needs these very specific conditions to grow. And then, you know, it's got all of these cultural laws. Like our ancestors were extremely literal. Like if something looked like a body part, they assumed that that vegetable was good for that body part. So this one's all about fertility and virility and things like that. And it's also like dark maroon. So they thought it would help your blood and they would use it to like staunch wounds and that kind of thing during wars. but it was so considered so sacred that this group of knights sat on this rocky outcrop of an island outside of Malta literally just to protect the plants that were wild growing there and it's so bizarre it was yet used medicinally it was eaten I think it tasted kind of like a sour apple and it has all these tiny little flowers on it but from a distance yeah it just looks like this like dead limb like a club fist kind of thing and it's just extremely bizarre and so I think it's an example of just how many species there are in the world that we have no idea about and that we pay no attention to and actually it's it's medically being sort of looked at I think because it has these healing supposed possibly true healing properties and yeah I think that one's just a fun little weirdo like compared to you know some of the stories obviously are very really heavy and heartbreaking and others are just kind of like what on earth were these knights thinking being like sure I'll take a role as like a sentry for this weird looking vegetable

41:07Matt Rodbard:you know yeah i looked this one up because i this is one of many that i had never heard of which was such a delightful kind of rabbit hole for me to go down and there was a line on the wikipedia page that i thought was so interesting it said among many other uses it has been used as a contraceptive a toothpaste and a non-fading crimson fabric dye yeah exactly like get yourself a mushroom that can do it all exactly and it was like it's like not even a mushroom the thing is this thing is so weird that it's like it's the only species in its genus like they were literally like i don't know table for one like we don't know where to put you and so it's just a strange guy and yeah it's also you're not wrong it's like was used as a contraceptive and like nature's viagra and i'm like okay guys it's like the early instant pot and all in one totally it's the air fryer of of you know the early days this episode is brought to you by zbiotics pre-alcohol probiotic hosting a food podcast means I'm invited to a lot of industry dinners, book launches, chef pop-ups, and wine tastings that run four hours longer than planned.

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43:59Matt Rodbard:We are talking a little bit about the way that nature makes things all on its own. And then also, you know, human impact obviously has shaped the vegetables that are really widely available to us. And also, you know, even the way that some of them have been cultivated over time. And I'm curious, like your perspective on like how you think human impact has both like gained and lost the vegetables that are kind of prevalent in our world. Yeah, so human impact in our food system in general, obviously, but very much in terms of the produce we eat is inevitable. It's sort of the reason we have produce.

44:35I think a good example is corn, which was selectively bred by humans from Tiosinte, which is this really scraggly kind of grass, unappetizing, completely unappetizing looking grass. I don't know how early humans looked at certain things and thought, I have an idea, you know. And so it's like pretty incredible what our ancestors did manage to do with food. And so most, maybe not all, but I think most of the vegetables that we eat today, human hands, have had a role in shaping. But traditionally that was more, it was manual, it was slow, it was intentional. It was kind of selecting the best cobs of corn and rebreeding those.

45:15or, you know, a tomato might accidentally cross-pollinate with another wild species and they're like, oh, this has like more resilience, let's keep breeding the seeds of this. You know, it was very much selected for flavour, for cultural application, for its growing region. So I think the early evolution of plants, they very much evolved and adapted to their environments. And, you know, obviously as we developed more and more technology technology and our population admittedly kind of exploded with the advent of technology and industrialization and we you know had pesticides and herbicides and developed all of these kinds of things we were able to produce monocultures so those plants skip a lot of those selective breeding steps some are genetically modified and they aren't really adapted to a place or a time and so those are just planted in these giant fields that just look like enormous patchwork quilts from the sky and don't like they need so many inputs just kind of stay alive where we're growing them and so there it's not to say that i think industrial agriculture is entirely evil and heirlooms and localization is the only answer to our future i think at this point it's probably unrealistic and it'll ideally be a combination of both but industrialization definitely sort of has given us scale, but it has definitely collapsed variety.

46:42So I think, you know, things are selected these days for shelf appeal, so how good they look. You know, a tomato might be very red. I think we've all been catfished by a tomato that's like super red and delicious looking, but just tastes like water. And that's kind of the norm in supermarkets now, because everything's bred for its ability to be shipped and its ability to like last a long time on shelf and to look good to be basically eye candy for customers whereas a lot of the heirlooms are really funky looking like really strange they are um some of them are admittedly like fragile you know and so we've sort of bred away from flavor and culture and diversity and into like kind of resilience and we've just lost a lot along the way and i think that's problematic on a number of levels like definitely culturally like it's such a shame to lose recipes dishes memories and ecological knowledge that is attached to those plants but I think it's also such a shame because like monocultures are efficient to a point until as we see with bananas like one like disease comes in and ravages the entire global supply and you know we are doing that at scale across so many of our commodity crops now that like disaster is real disaster if we kind of lose these monocultures.

48:01And so the idea of having seed banks and having biodiversity is not just, yeah, for flavor and enjoyment and history and belonging. It's also just to safeguard our future, basically, because they have genetic traits that we might want to select for once. Like I'm looking out my window and there's a plant that has all these rough leaves. And we might find at some point that like, oh, those leaves are really good at repelling this one specific type of pest that doesn't want to sit on the leaves or something like that, you know. And if we've lost those seeds and we've lost those genetic traits permanently, we can't really save our food system.

48:33Matt Rodbard:Yeah, absolutely. And you're referencing the, I think, the Cavendish banana and what happened with that. But maybe for someone who's listening who's not familiar, could you briefly summarize this banana situation? Yeah, I think it was the Gros Michel, actually, the one that came before the Cavendish. yeah and so um i what was it called i can't remember exactly what the panama disease i think it's called now which is we also obviously name diseases in such absurd and kind of offensive ways um but yeah i think it was panama disease that came in and essentially this this banana the gromachelle had been developed uh for its various traits you know early bananas were like early bananas were bananas and they were they were these kind of like They weren't particularly fleshy.

49:21A lot of them were filled with the type of seeds you might find in certain pawpaws. You're like really big, like hard black seeds and had more seeds than flesh and actually were eaten more so for their blossoms, like the flowers, than the actual bananas. And so over time, humans either crossbred those or they naturally mutated in the wild. And then from there, you know, we came in and developed this more hardy, more palatable, Like you still see the ghosts of seeds in bananas. They're those tiny little specks, but they're not really seeds. And yeah, we bred this variety that tasted palatable enough to everyone.

49:58It could ship around the world. It was hearty, those kinds of things. It grew abundantly. But then this disease came along that it was not immune to at all. And it just wiped out a lot of the banana supply. And from there, we developed the Cavendish, which is now the predominant banana around the world, even though growing up in Australia, you know, we had like seven different varieties of bananas at the farmer's market.

50:20Matt Rodbard:Yeah, I think when I left the US and I realized that there were many more kinds of bananas available than I had previously tried for the first time, it was very interesting. And the lore about this banana that is no longer available that I find so interesting is that this is what the artificial flavor of banana is based on. So I think a lot of people try, you know, banana candy or something, and they say that it doesn't really taste like banana, but it's rather that it tastes like a banana that doesn't exist anymore because we were monoculture growing it in such a large scale and bananas are genetic clones of each other that um you know they all just got wiped out exactly that was a key component that i totally didn't include yeah they're genetic clones so they're propagated not by seed but by cuttings because we've bred like the seeds out of them yeah well we could have a whole banana podcast it's so interesting oh for sure also in terms of like the labor like the whole human rights of it all in bananas is like pretty depressing and mind boggling as well.

51:18Matt Rodbard:Yeah. How much did like labor and kind of cultivation of agriculture come up for you in working on this book? It's definitely tangential, but in a lot of, you know, a lot of the vegetables that we kind of take for granted in the US arrived in the holds of slave ships, you know, and were cultivated and nurtured and grown by enslaved Africans. And so I think that's a thread that it was sort of shocking to me how many times that came up, you know, from everything from okra to peanuts, which we snuck in because we're like, it's a legume. We owe our kind of produce chain, a lot of it, to Indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans.

51:59And I think it's just something that we take for granted when we, you know, open a jar of like Skippy that this peanut has actually, that people went through hell and back to grow and deliver this peanut to this country. And so I think it's a theme not so much in terms of like agricultural labour rights today, which is a huge issue, but I think a tricky thing about writing a book like this is it kind of still has to make sense in 10 years. And so, you know, a lot of the very, very timely stuff we didn't get into, but in terms of historical labor rights of indigenous populations in general it's a huge theme of the book like there's another vegetable called camas which is this beautiful tuba that grew in vast like areas of the pacific northwest and and sort of western states of what's now the u.s and it was a really important vegetable like culturally and in terms of nutrition for indigenous tribes and it sort of just got in completely wiped out when colonizers like came through and basically took the plains where it grew for livestock.

53:06And that's a big theme in Australia too. Like livestock kind of ravaged a lot of native vegetables that hopefully are having kind of resurgences in those countries now, which is really cool.

53:17Matt Rodbard:Yeah, it is so like this book is encyclopedic, not only in the variety of vegetables that are in it, but also in the kind of level of information that you're trying to provide, how these vegetables came to be widely eaten or not widely eaten, the significance of them in the first place. I imagine adding recipes into that would have just been far too much. But I was curious if that was something that you'd ever considered. Definitely crossed my mind to include recipes in the book in the beginning. But in the end, we definitely intentionally decided against that. I think for a number of reasons, like one being the same vegetable in various different cultures has a different history a different role a different place culinarily and it kind of I didn't really want to prioritize one culture over another or have to make those kinds of decisions when it's you know like something like okra would have been impossible like what kind of recipe do you put in for okra and so I think we didn't we intentionally didn't want to sort of prescribe experiences based on on a single culture and didn't necessarily feel like I had the credentials to do that either, to be honest.

54:26But we also just didn't really want the book to be prescriptive so much as like, go find this and make this, but more so a zoomed out. Like it's very, it's interesting, the book, because it's very detailed and very zoomed in and then, and then also very zoomed out at the same time. And so I think we wanted people to really fall in love with vegetables and understand just how much exists beyond the supermarket shelf and feel motivated to, you're not going to find, you know, like there's a very specific variety of Chinese lotus anywhere, but there's one village in China. You know what I mean? It's not practical that you're going to be able to cook with that specific variety, but it might encourage you to go to Chinatown and find another type of lotus.

55:07And we sort of more wanted it to be a source of inspiration and kind of, yeah, excitement more so than instructional.

55:17Matt Rodbard:Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. And I know you're saying it's hard to eat all of these, but I am curious if you have a sense of how many of these you have eaten. I actually, I have no idea. I think I know I've definitely eaten a few. Like there's a few I could tell you I've eaten. I've got one variety of collard, for example, growing in my garden right now that's in the book, which is the old timey blue. It's this really cool kind of, it's considered like a land race. So it's not, it's sort of developed maybe by a couple of families in one very, very small region of the American South.

55:52And, you know, it's just really cool that like families would keep growing these seeds for generations and that we can eat that produce today. And so I do have one of those varieties of collards growing. So I've definitely eaten that. We do have, it's kind of a long story how it got to Australia. we have a lot of African horned melons in Australia, which are those kind of, you actually can buy them in the U S there. Those really, they look like a mace or a kind of club and they're filled with this like chartreuse colored, like jelly and big seeds and stuff like that. But I did eat one of those in Santa Fe on, after a hike.

56:25And I was like, Oh wow, this is really delicious. Kind of is like a lemony, cucumber, like spa water wishes it was this. And, and so I was like, this has to go in the book. So I definitely ate that one and then put it in the book and my underrated the one that I'm like everyone needs to try this is celtus so especially now with cyclosporia everywhere because like celtus is grown for its stem and not its leaves although don't quote me

56:47Matt Rodbard:on that that might still be toxic but it's actually um like celtus I've been eating a lot of celtus so it is the it's the stem but then the leaves are called aichoi and they're sold as like a completely separate vegetable in like um Chinese markets and things and thought but they're actually just two parts of the same vegetable. Yeah, it's so cool. Right. And like the, I'm glad they're selling the leaves because a lot of times the leaves are discarded because people like, they're like, whatever, they're not the main affair, but I think they're wonderful still. But yeah, the stem is delicious. It's like this water chestnut meets radish and you can have it raw, you can stir fry it.

57:26Like it actually stands up to a dressing in the fridge for ages. And Seltz is at basically every China, like we have it at our Chinatown in Salt Lake City and I buy it all the time.

57:34Matt Rodbard:So it's having kind of a popular moment in some New York restaurants, I think, especially Lei, which is a great wine bar here in Chinatown in New York, does a saltus dish that has saltus with acorn jelly and then red vinegar together, like a kind of layered plate, which I think maybe other restaurants have been seeming to put saltus on as well. But I think it's most similar to the interior of a broccoli stem once you get past that kind of exterior. Yeah, although a little more watery, you know, it has a bit more of a snap to it. that I'm like obsessed with. But I agree. And it's like a portmanteau of celery and lettuce, which you can kind of see how they got that as well.

58:10But that was actually a name coined in the US. It's got different names abroad. But yeah, it's very delicious.

58:15Matt Rodbard:Yeah, I love that suggestion. And I guess the flip side of that is what vegetable in this book have you not tried that you would be most eager to try? Like all of them, obviously. But I think the one that I feel like as an Australian that I'm like, i really need to try this is mernong and so mernong is also known as yam daisy so when you see it in fields it's this just like beautiful yellow daisy like flower but it's hiding um little creamy colored like tubers and that you can eat them raw so apparently they taste very like crisp and coconutty and delicious like you can kind of mandolin them as you would maybe a radish and they just sound so delicious and then when they're roasted they were traditionally roasted in like earth ovens uh they apparently just get really caramelized and like kind of creamy and just delicious and sweet like really sweet and so that's a vegetable to me that i'm just like wow i must try this and it was it was native to australia and a huge part of indigenous aboriginal diets prior to colonization but unfortunately you know when livestock that aren't native to australia were brought in they actually like the hooves of sheep and whatnot kind of like trampled down this flower and and its tubers obviously that it was growing and made it sort of very difficult for the plant to grow in its native habitat because the habitat had changed so much and um it was found actually growing in this one little protected pocket in victoria which is a southern state of australia and now indigenous um community gardens and various chefs and activists are actually kind of regrowing it and bringing it to menus and farmers markets and stuff like that so it's having like a little tiny but hopeful revival.

59:54So I hope that I can actually try that one when I go home next. Oh, I really like the sound of that flavor and also kind of the story of the

1:00:02Matt Rodbard:vegetable that it represents. I think that's a really good example to mention. Yeah, delicious. Sounds so good, but also kind of sad. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a reoccurring theme in this book. Not that it's a sad book, but rather that I think like sometimes people think of vegetables on a very surface level, but the stories of our food, you know, are as complicated as the stories of humanity itself. Yeah, exactly. And I think that was sort of the challenge, both in terms of the aesthetic of this book, like the font choices and color choices and whatnot. And also the text is we're not, it's, we're really not trying to doom and gloom our future.

1:00:37I think the point we're trying to make is the future is worth saving. And actually there are plenty of ways and plenty of people who are already doing that.

1:00:46Matt Rodbard:I like that thesis. And I'm curious as one who's gone through this whole book writing process and gone so deep into the rabbit hole of vegetables. Do you think you have a different perspective or have you learned anything new about the world or yourself, like maybe by going through this process? Yeah, definitely. I think something I didn't really expect to feel so often throughout this book process was just so emotional. You know, like there were, like I felt very like excited and proud, I think, after, especially after interviewing someone about, you know, a being that they've like loved in their own society forever and how it's endangered now or something like that.

1:01:30I felt a lot of pressure, to be honest, to represent that accurately because we are representing vegetables from far-flung parts of the world. It does scare me. Obviously, it worries me. I don't want to get anyone's culture wrong. It also made me really proud and really excited to be able to be a mouthpiece for these plants and these vegetables while at the same time doing my best not to. A lot of Indigenous tribes I might have spoke to were like, oh, we're really okay with you featuring this vegetable because it is already commercially available but this one you know we'd rather keep for ourselves type of thing and so it was really good to have those conversations with people and and try and do the due diligence of like making sure I represented cultures and and histories accurately while also not creating necessarily not every I think it's hard for us to believe in a very capitalist American society but not everyone actually wants to profit off everything and so I think certain cultures are well aware of what happened to their crops when they ended up in white or colonizer hands and are somewhat protective of some of them and so i think it was a balance to draw between kind of uh are we telling these stories well ethically and actually should we be telling the story at all and so that was like a really interesting thing that i think it's kind of made me reflect on a lot as a writer in general about how i tell stories and who's who should really be telling stories um but also yeah i think the the unexpected part was just how emotional i felt like there were days where i would just like get off a call and either because of awe or because of sadness, just like cry, you know?

1:03:00And I didn't expect to feel so moved by plants.

1:03:04Matt Rodbard:Wow. I love thinking about that. I think like it shows the amount of care that kind of went into the book. I think like as a reader that really comes across. So I'm glad you went through the process and felt the things that you needed to feel and resulted in this book ultimately. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I think I still obviously have anxieties that I've done someone wrong, you know? It's like the biggest fear with a book that is so heavily reported and so kind of ambitious in its scope, like this one. Right, it's such a long process also. Like you have a lot of time to try to work on it and then at a certain point you kind of have to put it down.

1:03:37Matt Rodbard:Yeah, exactly, exactly.

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1:05:26Matt Rodbard:I want to play a rapid-fire game with you to close today, so I'm going to make you play a lot of favorites. I hope that's okay. I know, great. Like, wait till you—we can offline about why that's difficult for me. But yes, we'll do it. Oh, you don't want to tell the world that? yeah I don't want to open the book on my neuroses that can be my next memoir yeah the curious life of Ali Francis okay deep breath your favorite cookbook Moosewood your favorite do you want me to explain or just answer I mean you can explain why Moosewood I mean the chilled borscht is the best borscht recipe I've ever had I'm my mom was born in Krakow and so I'm half Polish and love a beet soup and that one is so good and also I'm just obsessed with both the aesthetic and the ideology of like hippie vegetarianism.

1:06:15Matt Rodbard:Yeah, I appreciate the explanation. Although I think anyone who's writing The Curious Life of Vegetable book, like liking the iconic Moosewood cookbook feels very fitting to me. Totally. Your favorite season for cooking? Early fall, I would say, because tomatoes are actually often at their best. And but also you're starting to get some of the like next season's produce. And in Salt Lake City, it's not like blistering hot to turn on an oven. Your favorite ever farmer's market? I'm not saying this one is the best. It's probably not, but maybe the most nostalgic for me is Prospect Park. Your favorite use for a part of produce that sometimes gets thrown away?

1:06:55Oh, I love stir frying or snacking on broccoli stem raw. So I think most people just use the florets and toss away the stem. But my mom, probably because she grew up, she was born in Poland and grew up in a Polish family is a very like no waste ethos. So she would like feed us this. We would snack on the stem basically like while we were cooking. And I love just snacking on it, using it as crudite or stir frying it.

1:07:17Matt Rodbard:Just shaving off the kind of exterior. The rough bit. Yeah. Kind of like you would sell this. A lesser known produce item that you think more people should try. Okay. This is not in the book, but it's called mountain yam often in like Chinese supermarkets in the US because they're like labeling things in English. But I don't, I don't remember. I think it's a naigama or naigama. I can't remember what the actual Japanese name for this vegetable is, but it's this long, delicious yam that sort of has a radishy texture. But if you slice it up into medallions, pan fry those, and then add a ton of soy sauce at the end and like sizzle them in the soy sauce, they literally taste like hash browns.

1:08:00Matt Rodbard:that sounds really good i've only ever had it grated raw before when it has that kind of um sticky yeah yeah like the gelatinous kind of texture that's like really good too but i love it pan fried that actually sticky texture kind of like okra actually just makes it really crispy then because like yeah the proteins cook or whatever a most overrated piece of produce i feel like i'm gonna get some hate for this but i think blueberries are overrated I think blueberries are like fine you know but they're kind of they're just not that complex to me like I like a vegetable that is like maybe tart and something or fruit that is tart and sweet and blueberries often especially supermarket blueberries are just like sort of flat to me this is not to say I don't eat them I literally ate them yesterday I love them but I do think they're overrated I think the margin of error for a blueberry is like higher than other fruits maybe also like a squishy blueberry really ruins my day.

1:08:52Blueberries have high delicious variability.

1:08:55Matt Rodbard:They do. When they're good, they're good. Yeah. What you think is like an underrated piece of kitchen equipment or kitchen utensil? Oh, okay. This one is underrated because I have found myself desperately needing one and I don't own one, but a salad spinner. I have a ton of leaves in my veggie garden right now and like washing those, I'm literally drying each one with like a tea towel. It's absurd and obnoxious and I need to buy a salad spinner. Have you tried the technique where you put them in a clean dish towel and then close it up and whip it around really fast? Oh, no, I've done like rolling them up and kind of squishing it.

1:09:31But maybe I need to be whipping that thing.

1:09:33Matt Rodbard:You need to be your own salad spinner and go outside because otherwise I like whip water all over my kitchen. But you have to make sure the towel is really securely closed. Otherwise, the lettuce will just kind of fly out through the gaps. but you can basically centrifuge it yourself that way. Oh, wow. Okay. I'll let you know how it goes. I feel like we're doing like a kitchen therapy line now. Yeah. A favorite restaurant or food spot in Salt Lake City? I love this restaurant called Sara Thai in a neighborhood in Utah called in Salt Lake City called Sugar House. It's so delicious. They make this like spicy eggplant and tofu where the eggplant is like so melty.

1:10:10It's almost collapsed, but hasn't. And then they have this amazing like vinegary dressing that I love just drizzling on everything. But our food scene is not, we're not known for an amazing food scene, but I got to say it is actually pretty good if you're willing to like put in the time and find the kind of family run local spots.

1:10:26Matt Rodbard:That sounds really good. I love that. So good. Okay, final question. Is a fictional food scene like from a book or a movie or something made up that you wish you could magically eat in real life? i 100 want to eat the giant bowl of pasta that that hot chef makes for the little girl in no reservations um you know how she's like it's really sad because her mom died and she won't eat everything and she like has to go live with her auntie who is a chef at this like very fancy restaurant keeps making her like michelin-starred meals and this is like a child right and so she just like like kind of protests not eating and then one day she has to go to work with her auntie who is Catherine Zeta-Jones, and she's just like sitting in there and this guy makes like kid food.

1:11:08Like he makes this like delicious looking marinara, like simple pasta. The only edit I would make is like I would add parmesan. And of course she like he like leaves it and like goes back to his station and she starts eating it. And then she continues eating.

1:11:21Matt Rodbard:When you started saying this, I was like, I have missed a scene in the Anthony Bourdain TV show No Reservations where he's feeding a child. But now I know you're talking about the 2007 romantic comedy, No Reservations. Yes, I still actually pretty much exclusively watch movies from the 90s and aughts that exist in the romantic comedy genre. I think this was Abigail Breslin. She's the little kid also, right? Yes, her name's Zoe. And she's just such a, she's a great actor. I love her. And that pasta's dank. Like, I want it. Yeah. Well, I'll have to rewatch it for the pasta scene. But I appreciate a deep cut movie reference to round out a podcast episode full of deep cut vegetable talk.

1:12:03Matt Rodbard:And this has been so much fun, Allie. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Eliza.

1:12:12Matt Rodbard:This is Taste is hosted and produced by Matt Rodbard and me, Eliza Abarbanel. The show is edited by lead producer Clayton Gumbert and supervised by Pat Stango, director of media production and development at Penguin Random House. Thanks to Shalia Harris and the production team at Penguin Random House. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Episode portraits by Louise Zergang Pomeroy. Logo design by Ellie Skurzat and Ian Dingham. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com. And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on all cool things in the world of taste.

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