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Finland's Great Hunger: The Last Famine of Western Europe
Episode 197
How did a single night's frost in September 1867 kill nearly one tenth of Finland's population — proportionally worse than the Irish Famine — and why…
9 hours ago
The History of Watermelons
Episode 196
How did a fruit that began as an ancient Egyptian burial canteen — a self-contained water supply buried with pharaohs — end up starting an American m…
1 week ago
In a Pickle
Episode 195
How did a jar of pickles keep Julius Caesar's legions marching, Cleopatra beautiful, Captain Cook's sailors alive, and Napoleon's armies fed — and wh…
2 weeks ago
The History of Peas
Episode 194
How did a green vegetable reduce the court of Louis XIV to what contemporaries called "a fashion and a madness" — with ladies smuggling peas to their…
3 weeks ago
The 1944 Water Treaty
Episode 193
How did a treaty signed in the middle of the Second World War end up with farmers seizing a dam at gunpoint, a woman shot dead by her own country's N…
4 weeks ago
The Parasite in the Salad Drawer
Episode 192
How did five farms in the highlands of Guatemala end up sickening nearly a thousand people across fifteen American states and two countries — and why…
1 month ago
Netherlands: Operation Manna
Episode 191
How did a Nazi food embargo, a frozen canal, and a railway strike combine to starve one of the most developed societies in Europe to below 400 calori…
1 month, 1 week ago
South Korea: The Cabbage Crisis
Episode 190
Why did the South Korean government fly in emergency cabbage from China in 2010 — and why was that decision experienced as a national humiliation as …
1 month, 1 week ago
Ivory Coast: Blood Chocolate
Episode 189
Why does the country that grows 45 percent of the world's cocoa receive between five and seven percent of the value of the chocolate bar it becomes? …
1 month, 2 weeks ago
England: 5,245 Acts of Parliament
Episode 187
Why did Parliament pass 5,245 individual Acts to enclose 6.8 million acres of English common land — and why does almost nobody in England know it hap…
1 month, 2 weeks ago