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Guess what Will? What's that game? When I say brazil nuts, is there a specific country that comes to mind for you? Call me crazy, but I feel like there should be an obvious answer to this one. I don't know if this is a trick question, but I'm gonna guess Brazil. Yeah, it is a trick question. The answer I'm looking for was Bolivia, No, which actually produces almost as many brazil
nuts as Brazil. Together, the two countries are responsible for ninety percent of the world's brazil nut crop, and Bolivia exports more of the processed and shelled nuts than Brazil.
So if I go buy a back of trail mix with brazil nuts in it, I'm probably eating Bolivia nuts.
M That's right, all right? So how come Brazil gets all the glory here? I mean, as with most things, blame the conquistadors, right. So, brazil nut trees are native to the Amazon, particularly Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, and there's evidence that indigenous people ate the nuts as many as eleven thousand years ago. So when Europeans arrived in the
early fifteen hundreds. They called their landing place Terra do Brazil, a reference to another tree the brazil Would and as they made their way across South America, they discovered these huge trees with big, delicious nuts, which they began calling chestnuts from Brazil what else? And one of the first European references to brazil nuts comes from Juan Alvarez Maldonado, a Spanish conquistador who relied on them to fuel his
troops during an expedition through Peru. And later Dutch traders began impoort brazil nuts to Europe, where they became a popular treat at Christmas time, and from there they made their way to the US. But despite the fact that Brazil can't claim a monopoly on the nut and Bolivia produces a ton of them, the name just stuck.
It does feel like the kind of thing that a really savvy marketing expert could help them solve.
Right, Yeah, it's a branding problem, really yeah.
I mean they just need a good slogan, like you can't spell brazil nut without Bolivia, you know.
I feel like, actually, that's it. I think I nailed it. Yeah, let's keep brainstorming that one. In the meantime, though, today we have nine weird and wonderful facts about nuts and things that aren't technically nuts, but for all intents and purposes are nuts, like the brazil nut, which, yes we know it's a seed. We'll get into all that and more. So let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.
I'm Will Pearson.
And because Mango couldn't be here today, we do miss you, Mango.
Hope you're having fun. Our old pal Gabe Luzier is here with me instead. Gabe, it's always so good to see you. It's a pleasure.
And over there in the booth shotgunning a can of mixed nuts and wearing a T shirt that says, hold on, let me make sure I'm getting this right. It says fancy nuts for a fancy man. Dylan, you never let us down. It's our pal and producer, Dylan Fagan.
Ah that Dylan so fancy, so fancy, All right, Gabe.
Well, before we go any further, I think we should get ahead of all the emails and comments that people are composing in their heads right now.
You saw it coming. At the top of the show.
We said this was an episode about nuts, and then we started by talking about brazil nuts, which, as you mentioned, are actually seeds. I feel like we're gonna have to say that repeated that we do get that, and this is going to be a recurring issue in this episode, so let's just get ahead of it and talk about it now.
Yeah, okay, So here we go. The botanical definition of a nut is a dry, hard fruit with a single kernel inside a shell that doesn't split open when it matures. So this narrow definition excludes things like almonds, cashews, pine nuts, brazil nuts, even walnuts, lots of things you know which
have nuts in the name. Walnuts in particular, are somewhere between a drup and a nut, so not quite And for the purposes of today's episode, we're using nut in the colloquial or culinary sense, meaning if you'd find it in a bin labeled nuts at the grocery store, we're calling it a nut. That seems fair enough, all right.
Well, now that we've got that cleared up, let's move on to our next fact here, which concerns one of my favorite nuts, which is the pistachio. In fact, I have already eaten a handful of pistaschias today, I'm happy to report.
So did you get caught up in the Dubai chocolate craze? Gabe A little bit. Yeah, I think the the high cost of the chocolate bars kind of curbed that a little bit, but I will admit I gave into temptation. I had to try it out, and yeah, I mean, pretty good pistachios hard to go wrong. Did the same thing. I'm a cheap chocolate eater.
But it was funny, like you knew the craze was in fact a craze when you started seeing them at the checkout counter, like at your local convenience store. That's when I knew it had gone pretty far. But anyway, long before pistachios were associated with trendy candy, they were associated with red food dye.
Oh yeah, yeah. I remember seeing red pistachios in the store when I was a kid, and you know, I would beg my mom for him. I insisted that they tasted better and she was like, no, that's just red dye. But I always wondered, you know why they did that.
Well, to find the answer to this, we actually have to go back to the nineteen twenties, so over the years, there have been different claims about who first died pistachios red, and of course why they did that. But having spent a lot of time reading.
About pistachios this past week, I'm choosing to believe the story put forward by a family owned Detroit based nut company called Jermac. They've been around since nineteen twenty four, and according to their official story, founder Frank Jermack Senior, was the first person to come up with the idea of dying pistachios red. So he did this for two reasons.
So first of all, back then, almost all pistachios sold in the US were imported from Iran and Irani and pistachios have these reddish husks that discolor the shells during the roasting process, so red dye covered that up. Plus it had the added benefit of making pistachios maybe a little bit more eye catching, I guess which was really important here, because Germak began selling them in these penny
vending machines. He gave his bright red pistachios the brand name red Lip, and during the Great Depression they became popular as a cheap, nutrient dense snack. So for decades Jermak dominated the US pistachio business. To put it in perspective, a nineteen seventy three Detroit Free Press story noted that of the eight thousand tons of pistachios processed in the United States that year, Germac handled five thousand of those.
That is fascinating. But you know, now that I think about it, I can't remember the last time I saw a red pistachios for sale, Like, why did the stop?
I'm the same way, Gabe. Actually, it was one of those things. I'd really not thought about it until we started talking about nuts this week. But it was a gradual change in response to market supply and consumer preferences. So a lot of people didn't like the way the red dye stained their fingers and their clothes. And in the nineteen seventies the California pistachio industry just took off, and it was these domestic nuts that didn't have the
same discoloration issues of the important ones. And that was a good thing because since the nineteen nineties many consumers wanted to avoid artificial food coloring.
But if you.
Misread pistachios, or if you're curious and want to try some Germak does sell them now under the name Holiday Red, and they get their brilliant hue from a beat powder.
So there's actually no dye needed to create these, all right, Yeah, no, no excuse not to reacquaint myself. Then that's right, that's right. But okay, that was a you know, a fascinating cultural journey through the recent past. But now let's go back thousands of years to the heyday of the Silk Road. You up for that, absolutely, all right. So a Purdue University researcher named Keith Weiste discovered a connection between the
spread of languages across Asia and the humble walnut. So Wisti is a research geneticist who worked with the USDA Forest Service to study the genetic makeup of different trees, including walnuts. He and a team were analyzing samples from native walnut forests across Asia when they realized that many languages in the region had similar words for walnut. For example, in Kazakh, Kurghiz, and Uzbek it's yongok, which may some
sense because these are all Turkic languages. But the more closely they looked at languages, maps and walnut DNA, the more patterns began to emerge. Like genetically speaking, it turns out that walnuts in eastern Iran are closely related to walnut trees in the Himalayas. So that's a line running almost due east to west, which is not a pattern
you'd see if a tree spread organically. So left to their own devices, trees spread in concentric patterns as they gradually scatter seeds, not straight lines like we're seeing here. So by overlaying maps of walnut gene pools and major languages, the researchers concluded that the trees didn't spread by accident. They were planted by traders traveling along the Silk Road, making them the first known example of a forest station or planned establishment of tree cover where none existed before.
I mean, it's astonishing that they can analyze walnut DNA.
Thank you, I thought the same thing, Yeah, I mean, and this research has been going on for decades, but it wasn't until the advent of gene mapping technology that we could really start to solve this kind of mystery. That's just wild, all right.
Well, here's a less positive use of technology, and that is nut crime, which sounds like a joke, but it's not funny when you consider that it cost California nut farmers millions of dollars.
You know, we love a weird food crime story here at Part Time Geniuses. I know we've done entire episodes on cheese crimes and wine crimes, So tell me about the nut crimes. All right.
So, the California nut industry is worth billions of dollars every single year, and the uptick and crime seems to have started around two thousand and nine. There was one report I read that linked this to the two thousand and eight recession. This is when consumer demand for electronics dropped, making gadgets a less attractive item for theft and resale. Now, nuts are always in demand, they last a long time before they spoil, and unlike flat screen TV, they don't
have serial numbers or barcodes, so you really can't track them. So, between twenty thirteen and twenty seventeen, over ten million dollars of California almonds and pistachios were stolen, and the problem has gotten worse as organized nut thieves have become more sophisticated.
So what does a nut heist even look like?
Well, that's the tricky thing. Here it looks like a normal day at a nut farm. See, there's a complex web of growers, wholesalers, distributors, and retailers, all of whom contract with third party trucking companies to move these nuts from place to place. Now, one of the main ways nut thieves get their hands on the goods is by impersonating employees of a trucking company, So they create a fake cargo company, They show up early, and they leave
with the loot before the real truckers arrive. Now, another problem is that some victims are hesitant to report this kind of cargo theft. They worry about bad pr They assume that once the nuts are gone, there's no way to get them back. And these cases are difficult to pursue because they involve moving products across state lines, which
can make jurisdiction hard to determine as well. So a local police department might refer you to a federal agency, which might send you to a state agency, which might refer you back to the Feds. And unfortunately, even when the FBI has jurisdiction, they often lack the resources to go after small and medium sized cases that don't have a clear link to organized crime or terrorism.
Now, I badly want someone to make one of those CSI shows about nut thefts, you know, to raise awareness about the problem. Well, we have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we have more nutty facts for you, including a rare medical condition caused by a popular salad topping, and the toughest nut to crack don't go anywhere. Welcome back to part time Genius.
Now, before we get back to nuts, quick reminder that if you have a question or idea for the show, you can give us a call. You call us at three oh two, four oh five five nine two five. We always love hearing from you. We may even use your voicemail in a future episode if you're okay with that.
But if you prefer text based communication, you can always email us at High Geniuses at gmail dot com. That's Higeniuses at gmail dot com. Okay, Well, my next fact definitely pushes the boundary of the word nut. Let me say that in advance, and I will admit this is a seed, but it's so cool I just had to include it. I'm talking about the Coco de mare aka the ccoconut or the double coconut, and in fact, it's the largest seed in the world and one of the rarest too.
You know, I love coconuts, so I've decided to allow this exception as well.
Thank you will, very gracious. So for centuries, these giant cos have washed up on the shores of the Maldives. It said that a Roman emperor once paid four thousand gold florins for one, which I assume is a lot, and you know, he had it mounted on a gold stand. And so finding one of these it was a big deal. They were prized items for sale or trade, and they were used for medicinal purposes too, But that doesn't mean that the average person who picked one up got to
profit from it. At one point, any sea coconut that washed up on the beach was considered the property of the Sultan of the Maldives. He just claimed them.
All.
Wow, now you actually you've mentioned a couple times that they washed up there, So are you saying they don't grow in the mal thieves? Like they just floated there from somewhere else. Yeah, and for a long time no one knew where they came from. Legend had it that there was an underwater forest of exceptionally large palm trees, which sounds incredible, but the truth is pretty cool too.
In seventeen sixty eight, a French explorer finally figured out where the cocoa de mare came from a pair of islands in the Seyshells, about three thousand miles southwest of the Maldives. So this is the only place in the world where the cocoa de mare grows. And as for how the seeds travel from there, well, it turns out that when the coconuts fall into the ocean, they sink because they're so heavy they weigh about up to fifty pounds each and they don't float until their insides have
rotted away, which makes them unviable. So the seed can't spread beyond their native islands, but the rotten ones ride sea currents over to the Maldives. So this emperor paid a bunch of gold for a rotten seed. I guess, yeah, he sure did. But when you consider how rare these things are, I mean, I understand why he did it. And there's one more fun fact about this crazy coconut I have to share, because it's a double coconut. Remember, the two halves kind of look like a human butt,
and the local Seychelles creole. It's not called a cocoa de mare. It's called a cocoa fess, which means yes, bum nut.
Oh man, I feel like there's gonna be a lot of giggling going on on the listening of this episode.
But who doesn't love a bomb nut? Right?
All right, Well, let's continue with the tropical vibe for a moment. You've probably seen pistachios, walnuts, even almonds for sale in the shell, but there's one nut that's always sold shelled.
And that is the macadamia nut. Yeah. I mean, I never thought about it, but you're right, I have never seen macadamia nuts, you know, in the shell.
And there's a good reason for that. So macadamias are the world's toughest shelled nut. They require three hundred pounds of pressure per square inch just to crack. It actually makes you wonder, like back to the first person ever getting a taste to one of these, Like how they actually got to it. But you know, macadamias are native to Australia, but back in the late eighteen hundreds they were imported over to Hawaii, which is the place most
Americans associate them with. Hawaiians call them mac nuts, and it's a huge industry there, a real source of local pride. But harvesting them requires a ton of work, as we mentioned before. So first the mature nuts fall to the ground and they're harvested. Then the husk need to be removed from there, and the nuts get dried out so that the meat stays fresher longer, and the shells get
brittle and it makes them easier to crack open. So after that the processors have to use this specialized machinery, often imported from the Southern Hemisphere, just to open these nuts. Now, it may have gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole of the macadamia nut cracking equipment, and I have to say my favorite is the New Zealand company called Crackadamia. Of course, it's just such a great name.
I loved it. They invented a macadamia cracking machine that uses hardened sharp steel knives attached to these heavy duty flywheels. Now there are other commercial macnut crackers out there, but you can't beat the name Crackadamia.
Yeah, you really can't. I'm sure they're good at nut cracking, but they are really good at branding. That's their main thing. Yeah, yeah, right. Well I'm glad you brought up nutcrackers though, because that's what my next fact is all about. And I'm not talking commercial machinery. I mean those gadgets that your grandparents had lying around, or the decorative soldier guys you see at Christmas. People have used various tools to crack nuts
for thousands of years. Apparently Leonardo da Vinci even brainstorm the best way to open nuts, and his solution was a huge horsepowered press. Wow, that would take up a lot of space in a kitchen yeah, yeah, right, or a barn. And you know, over the centuries, nutcrackers took different shapes, from simple utilitarian tools to colorful fancy dolls. The decorative nutcracker really took off in the nineteenth century over in Europe, where toymakers began making elaborate versions in
their workshops. German author Eta Hoffman published his fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse in eighteen sixteen, and in eighteen nineteen Chaikowsky turned it into the famous ballet. So you know, nutcrackers have a long history both as art and as a culinary tool. But there are only two museums in the world dedicated to nutcrackers. That's too few right, One in Germany and one in Levenworth, Washington. And the Levenworth Nutcracker Museum is the world's largest nutcracker museum, with
over nine thousand handmade nutcrackers. It's run by Arlene Wagner, who recently turned one hundred and one years old. Happy birthday, Arlene. And She became interested in nutcrackers in nineteen seventy six when she was involved in a community production of the Nutcracker. Since then, she's traveled the world collecting them. One of the newest additions to her collection is a nutcracker modeled after her. It was made by some fans in Germany.
It holds a nutcracker in each hand, a tiny little one, and it's wearing her signature string of pearls. So I've actually never even heard of Levenworth, Washington, but I kind of want to go there now, I mean road trip. What do you say, fly? It's pretty far gay Yeah, okay, that makes sense, all right.
Well, since we're talking about Christmas, I have to mention roasted chestnuts. Of course, people ate roasted chestnuts before the Christmas Song was written in nineteen forty five. But then there's the question how did they become so associated with the holiday that Robert Wells and Meltormet included them in their lyrics. Well, the first part of the answer has to do with botany. Chestnut trees are resilient to cold, and the nuts are ready to harvest in late fall.
But also, chestnuts were historically considered a substance food, and they're connected to a fourth century Catholic saint named Saint Martin.
Now Martin was a.
Lowly soldier and then a cold winter day he ripped his coat in half to share with a beggar. His feast day, November eleventh, became associated with acts of charity, including giving away nutritious food like chestnuts. To this day, many parts of Europe celebrate Saint Martin's Day with roasted chestnuts. The tradition came to the US, where American chestnut trees
used to grow in abundance along the East Coast. Street vendors sold roasted chestnuts in East Coast cities because they were cheap and plentiful, and even tastier than their European counterparts, which are more starchy than they are sweet.
You know, just like with red pistachios, I feel like you don't see roasted chestnuts much anymore. No, that's true, and our good pal Doug mac actually looked into that for his Snackstacked newsletter. So the conventional wisdom is that American taste for roasted chestnuts faded after a twentieth century chestnut blight wiped out most of our native chestnut trees, leaving us with these less tasty European imports. But Doug
also discovered that that's not the whole story. So roasted chestnut vendors were still in the streets of New York as late as the nineteen sixties, apparently doing just fine. So I also dug into this and found newspaper articles from the seventies and eighties that raved about fancy French desserts like mont Blanc that were made with these imported chestnuts. So it's not entirely clear why roasted chestnuts disappeared, but one thing for certain. Next Christmas, you can always buy
a bag and roast them in your oven. Martha Stewart says to set the tempt to three point fifty in order to do so. Okay, good to know all right, it is time for our final fact of the day, and it's about a mysterious condition known as pine mouth. This was first reported in two thousand and one by European researchers who described eight cases of a strange taste disturbance after eating pine nuts. Now, some of the cases were so severe they were reported to local poison control centers.
The researchers hypothesized that the pine nuts had oxidized, and they actually did a test with a volunteer who ate oxidized pine nuts and then reported having a bad taste in their mouth.
I mean, oxidized nuts would taste bad, right, Like, this doesn't seem like news.
Yeah, except it's not just about the food tasting bad as you're eating it. It's that you end up with a bad taste in your mouth for several days afterward, which sounds it's truly unpleasant. And you know, after these two thousand and one reports, the condition went mostly unnoticed until twenty ten, when a US physician named Mark David Munk published a paper reporting on his own experience with
taste disturbance after eating pine nuts. Doctor Monk wrote that his symptoms began twenty four hours after eating ten to fifteen roasted pine nuts as part of a meal. He felt fine physically, but he had a lingering, bitter, metallic taste in his mouth, so eating sweet food made it worse. He tried rinsing with salt water and mouthwash, neither of which did anything, and eventually the symptoms just went away.
And in fact, our own producer Mary had a very similar experience in the fall of two thousand and nine. She didn't write a paper about it, but she did tell me that it lasted for a week, during which time the only food she could tolerate were things that were really sour, like grapefruit and vegetables with like vinegary dressing. She reported it to the main Department of Health, who and I quote told me they were very sorry to hear it, but they had no idea what I was talking about.
Believe it or not, I have not experienced it, but both my wife and my younger kid experienced this probably it was probably about a decade ago, and yeah, they reported everything they were tasting was disgusting and in fact it ruined the taste of a couple different things that they.
Would regularly eat or drink.
I think milk, for example, was something our kids used to drink a lot of and after having pine mouth, no go anymore.
It just made everything taste really bad to this day, are they off milk now?
They don't drink a ton of milk maybe in cereal or things like that, but yeah, the way it happened was they then went on social media and you know, posted sort of along the lines of Maria and we're saying, you know, we keep everything we eat taste disgusting right now, there is something going on with our taste buds.
What is this? Yeah?
And then a couple people chimed in and we're saying, you know, have you eaten pine nuts recently? That sounds like pine mouth. So fortunately crazy the collective knew what it might have been thanks a lot pine nuts.
So do we know what causes this? Like, is this still happening? We still don't know exactly what causes it or why it only happens to some people. It's possible that rancid oil in the pine nuts could be a factor, but a more intriguing theory emerged from a Swiss lab where researchers discovered that some commercial bags of pine nuts included two varieties that aren't usually eaten, the Chinese white
pine and the Chinese red pine. Apparently, there are over one hundred different species of pine nuts, only twenty nine of which are classified as edible. Each species of pine nut contains a slightly different mix of fatty acids, which could lead to differences in taste or symptoms of pinemouth.
I assume there's no way to tell by just looking what kind of pine nut you have.
Oh no, that'd be way too easy. No, pine mouth doesn't appear to be spreading or getting worse. But if you're really concerned, just steer clear of pine nuts and general or bring your meal to a Swiss lab for testing, you know, before you dig in.
That's pretty great advice, Gabe, all right, I think for that and the incredible story about the bumb nuts, you deserve today's trophy.
Congratulations. Hey, I'll take it. Thanks Will Well. That does it for today.
Be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app. And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. We'll be back next week. But in the meantime, From Mango, Dylan, Gabe, Mary, and myself, thank you so.
Much for listening.
Part time genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by my good pal will Pearson, who I've known for almost three decades now.
That is insane to me.
I'm the Utaco host, Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super producer. I'm gonna fix that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier, who I've also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more. Dylan Fagan is in the booth. He is always dressed up, always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record and then mix the show after he does a great job. I also want to shout out the executive producers from iHeart my good pals Katrina and
Norvel and Ali Perry. We have social media support from Calypso Rallis. If you like our videos, that is all Calypso's handiwork. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's it from us here at Part Time Genius. Thank you so much for listening.