Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Garlic

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Alex Schmidt and special guest Ellen Weatherford explore why garlic is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show.

Garlic known for being tasty. Thymus for being smelly in good ways and bad ways. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why garlic is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alec Schmidt.

And I'm not alone. As you heard probably last week as well, my buddy Katie Golden is out. She has her own news to share when that comes. But if you've heard recently, she is pregnant. And so she's doing that, which is great. And also, I get to be joined by a wonderful returning guest on this episode. Among many wonderful things, she's the co-host of Just the Zoo of Us on Maximum Fun, which is a tremendous podcast all around.

Ellen Weatherford, hi. Hello. Thank you for having me back. I'm so excited to talk to you. I always have a great time when I'm here. Everything that we've ever recorded together, I feel like, has been like a total blast in a fantastic time. So I always know when I see your name pop up in my Gmail, like I'm like rubbing my hands together. I'm like, ooh, it's time for something good.

That's very kind. And I'm now thinking of like, I think it was the last maximum fun drive we taped together for like 10 minutes on a thing. And I was still like, this rules. This great. And even that. I'm able to, you know, there's no time limit on goblin behavior. You know, Goblin, somehow it makes me think of the topic this week. Yeah, it is very energetically adjacent, I feel like.

This is another suggestion from you folks that you picked in the polls. Thank you to Tapin Lisa for suggesting it on Discord, also to XKarex, Lucifer, President, and others for supporting it. Ellen, what is your relationship to or opinion of, garlic? Me and garlic, go way back, baby. Nice. An intimate relationship with garlic, I would say. We are like, oh, thick as thieves being garlic. Just an absolute staple, a permanent fixture of my life.

One time, so my husband Christian, who's also my co-host on Just the Zoo of Us, he couldn't be here today. But he does send his best wishes, obviously. It was too spicy. He was like, too spicy. Oh, oh, no. That's really funny because between the two of us, my husband is the one that loves spicy food. So like when he goes to like Thai restaurants and stuff, we were just at a Thai restaurant last week. And the waiter was like, how spicy do you want it?

And Christian was like, how spicy can you make it? I want max it out, please. Like as spicy as you can go. And the waiter was like giving him that like, are you sure? Because he's a pale guy. He's a fair complexion. And you know, the guy was like, are you sure? Because they can make it pretty hot.

And he's like, mess me up. Like, ruin me, please. And they, so he likes this food as spicy. It'll go. Me, I'm like, if there's a molecule of capsacin in this, I'm going to be in tears. Like, I'm a real spice wimp. I don't know about you. Are you a spice wimp or you like spicy?

I'm more on your end. I don't really seek it and I like some amount of it. And I also, I don't like the specific flavor of hot sauce and like buffalo flavor. Like, whatever that thing is tastes disgusting to me. Yeah, it's not good. It's not a pleasant experience. And I think there's like a physiological thing. But, but, okay, so Christian's family, his grandmother is Spanish. She's from Spain. When she passed away, we inherited a cookbook from her of Spanish recipes that she used to make. And one of the recipes in there that we made one time involved chicken and 40 cloves of garlic. It's like, basically, you don't. chop them up. You don't mince them. You don't do anything. Just, just 40 whole cloves of garlic that you kind of like put, it's like a bed of garlic almost that you kind of like cook the chicken. When we saw that

in the cookbook, we're like, that's crazy. We need to do that immediately. Because you know that thing where people say like every time you see garlic in a recipe, you just kind of assume you should like double or triple the amount of garlic they say. Yeah. Yeah. We're like, there's no way I'm putting 120 clothes of garlic Right, how would I acquire them even? Like, I'm not a garlic millionaire. How many heads even is that? Right.

And Christian has a funny story for when he was younger, you know, like, this is one of those like, you know, outliving on your own for the first time starting to learn how to cook for yourself sort of stories. Where he told me that he was cooking something and he did not understand the difference between a clove in a bulb. So he thought that like a clove of garlic was like the whole thing of garlic. Cool. Yeah. That's not clear, I think. Either word could be everything. Sure. So yeah, I am definitely the type of person who I'm loading everything up with like garlic salt, garlic powder. I get those big Costco size things of garlic salt, you know, like I'm a, I'm a

garlic girlie. I'm a I'm a garlic babe. Good. I'm similar. Yeah, I really, really like. like garlic even though I don't like heat so much. And it's, yeah, the flavor is just so wonderful. The smells wonderful. It's the perfect thing, I think. Yeah. I've never used so much of it that it's physically a bed under an entire chicken and maybe I should try it. Oh, you should try it. It's pretty good, actually. Because, you know, like, if you cook with a lot of garlic, you realize that, like, when it, if you cook like a whole clove of garlic, that really calms the garlic down, I feel like. Because, like, have you ever, like, bitten into raw garlic? Just, like, take a little bite. I have, yeah. It's like, it's almost like an electric shock, right?

Like, it's so intense that like zaps you. But like when you cook it, it really mellows. It's like onions, right? Like it's like, what do people make? Confi. Is that what it like when they like cook it and then just like it becomes like spreadable? Like that's not that overpowering. So like then at that point you're like, okay, 40 cloves of garlic kind of makes sense now because, you know, it's not going to be that overpowering like zap of garlic.

Yeah. That's completely true. And this is yet another SIF topic where it's vast, it turns out. Like, I wish we could do every kind of way of cooking it or something because, like, the world's been figuring them out for thousands of years. We love it. It's our best friend. People say dogs are man best friend.

I think it's garlic, baby. Yeah. Garlic is man's best friend for sure. Yeah, I'm doing fine without a dog. And if garlic went away, I would be, you know, marching in the streets. That's what I'm saying. And you know what? I don't have to pay an extra security deposit for,

garlic in my house. So I'm not paying garlic rent. Although when they hear the 40 cloves story, they're going to want to deposit. They're going to be like, the kitchen's going to be. They're like, there's a weight limit, actually. We have restrictions. Like, it's a small big brown sack of garlic. I don't know why I have to.

When they see you buying like three cloves at a time, they do a wellness check. We were just vampire proofing our house. That's all. Yeah. Also, vampires will be in the bonus show this week. A little something, a little tease. Yeah, and that's one where I figured I should say so people aren't just like waiting for vampires for the whole time, you know. It's in the bonus.

You can hop there. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And with our main garlic topic here on every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that is in a segment called Stets child while you always count in numbers with me. Matt, my life. Won't you let Alex Schmidt be? That day was submitted by Amy Burton.

Thank you, Amy. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a misleading way as possible. submit through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. Maybe it's garlic. Or is it cloves? Yeah, she didn't know the topic. This could have gotten really wild.

Yeah, yeah. I'm a huge Sabrina Carpenter fan, so immediately I was like, yes, here we go. I love garlic. I love Sabrina Carpenter. I am so uniquely suited to this episode. I just tried to line up a bunch of specifically Allen fandoms. Like, surely you don't want a tabletop role-playing game involving rats or something. That wouldn't be interesting.

I would hate that. Folks should check out about a show where she did. with Tom and Ellen Carolina. It's great. It's really fun. But yeah, we have, it's a really big number section this week. And the first one is basically trying to classify garlic. The number is two kinds or a different way of seeing it as two kinds or many dozens of kinds. Oh.

All three of those are ways of counting the kinds of garlic in the world, which is confusing. Yeah. Hold on. My brain glitched out for a second. Mine, as I said it, yeah. There's like, if we categorize it as two kinds, there's wild garlic and cultivated garlic. Oh, I see. But then also the cultivated garlic, there are types that people basically call hard neck or soft neck. Oh. And then also there's a bunch of other plants that are alliums.

They're in the actual scientific genus, allium. And then people just kind of make up whether stuff is a garlic or an onion or a leak. or a ramp or something else. Yeah, I was about to say, like, they're definitely, they feel like sisters to onions. If they're not, like, taxonomically, they feel like onions. Yeah, it turns out they are taxonomically very related. Yeah, it's a genus called Allium.

And apparently, people love cooking with this kind of food so much that even the name Alliums broken out into cooking parlance. Like, people will say, oh, this needs Alliums, you know. Yeah. There's like memes and stuff about how like if you walk into a kitchen and you are just like greeted with the most like beautiful heavenly aromatic smell and you tell the person cooking, you're like, oh my God, that smells so fantastic. What are you cooking? And they're like it's literally just like garlic and onions in a pan. That's it.

A little bit of butter. And like that's like the Holy Trinity right there is like I know there's like in cooking. there's like an actual Holy Trinity that's like vegetables, but for me, the Holy Trinity is garlic butter and onions. We've never done onions. I'm also an onion super fan, too. I think all the aliams are my friend. We have a tenuous relationship, but onions are.

They're contributing different things to the dish, but they both have their, they both play an important role in the dish, I think. I think so too. You'd miss them if they weren't there. And yeah, and with those like categories. Again, that's two kinds or a different two kinds or lots of kinds. And starting with two kinds where it's wild or cultivated, taxonomy people have decided they're two different species.

So wild garlic is scientific name Allium Longacuspus, and cultivated garlic is scientific name Allium sativum. Oh, you got the setiva. You got the indica garlic or the sativa garlic. I had the same thought and I was like, I don't even consume. that and I still think it sounds like I'm gonna get high on garlic. It's weird. Well, you see the wild garlic gives you more of like a head high where the cultivated garlic is more of a body like thing. Wait, did you have a whole bulb or a whole clove? Oh no. Man, this clove ain't nothing.

30 minutes later. The other breath is just that tan yellow. color. Like, oh, okay, wow, cool, cool. And yeah, and the weird thing about these two species, the wild kind and the cultivated kind, is that they both originated in the same place. And basically, the cultivated kind is just a product of the wild kind in a way where we cultivated it and generated such specific varieties that the cultivated kind usually can't reproduce sexually anymore. We have to propagate it with clippings and so on. We're gatekeeping garlic reproduction. Yeah, yeah.

Now it depends on us if it's the farm kind. And the garlic, all of it originated in Central Asia. That makes sense. One plant science source this week, it's writing by Philip W. Simon, a researcher for the USDA. He says that the center of biodiversity for garlic is in what's now Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. Very good. Yeah. It does seem like a grassy plant, like a grassland sort of plant.

Yes. And then it is kind of all over the world because we love it and because it grows well, almost everywhere. Because in Central Asia, it had to tolerate harsh winters and summers and pretty dry conditions and not necessarily the best soil. So garlic can grow most places now. And if folks have heard the past tip about apples, this is a little bit like that because apples have now been brought everywhere, but they originated in what's now Kazakhstan. And you can find really extraordinary kind of wild combinations of apple varieties there. And then elsewhere, we've kind of farmed it out into being specific red delicious and other basic types. I was wondering, do you, do you have in front of you like the timeline of like when

garlic became like domesticated? I've always wondered why it is that there are like certain ingredients that you kind of see in like every type of cuisine all over the world. And I feel like garlic is one of those, right? Like, I feel like I've never heard of a cuisine that really just straight up does not incorporate garlic at all. Was it just that garlic was like domesticated so early on that it dispersed around the world with humans? Or like, was it just trade?

Like, I wonder what that timeline was like. It's the first thing. Yeah, we like don't have a date, but humans brought it and cultivated it everywhere. And yeah, apparently back to like ancient Egyptian tombs, we find garlic and just every other kind of old digger site and especially Europe and Asia. We just find garlic. Love it. We can't get enough of this stuff. Listen, if I was a pharaoh, I'd want to be buried with the things I love most. And garlic is going straight in there, baby. It's so good. It's always been so good. It's great. Yeah. They were ahead of the game. They had, you know,

beer. They had bread. They had honey. I feel like they had all the basics covered. Yeah. They were good at making blue pigment. They were good at makeup. I don't know. There was just a lot of like nice things happening. Head of the curve for sure. Yeah. And yeah, so garlic continues to grow in wild and interesting ways where the plants can sexually reproduce in Central Asia there. And then across the rest of the world, quoting Philip Simon here, in contrast to wild garlic as far as we know, garlic in cultivation throughout history has only been propagated asexually by way of vegetative clones. bulbs and bullbills or top sets, not from seed.

No sexual reproduction of true garlic seed was underway in cultivated garlic before the 1980s. Oh. So some very recent farmers are starting to grow sexually reproducing garlic again, but a lot of us have probably only ever eaten the clones cultivated kind. Oh, that's awesome. I love eating clones. That's great. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And like you can...

My diet is like 80% clone. Yeah, and a lot of those, especially if a clove starts to have a big green stem coming out of it, you can often plant that and get a garlic plant. But it's like a propagation of the previous plant. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Does that kind of imply that like all of that dispersal of garlic was like having to be like facilitated by people that like people had to like tend to it? And like it was just purely love of the game that people were like,

I need this garlic so bad. It doesn't even grow on its own. Like I'm going to put in the manual labor. I'm going to put the work in to make sure we have this garlic. Yeah. Apparently that's the story of garlic. Yeah. Oh, I love that. That is so like, that is so human, you know, that like it's not particularly nutritionally necessary. You know, it's not like a staple of our diet. It's not like, you know, something that's very filling. It's just so delicious. We just like it. It's pleasant and pleasurable that we're like, you know what?

I'm going to go the extra mile. I'm going to actually physically help this plant grow because it makes me happy to eat it. Yeah, everybody is you and me across like thousands of years. They're like, garlic's really good. Yeah. You guys heard about this stuff? Oh, you can't reproduce? It's okay, garlic.

It's okay. It's okay. I got you. I got you. We'll get you there. It's okay. They're the pandas of the pandas of the plant world. They don't reproduce on their own, but humans are like, I love you so much.

I am actually going to help you out on this one. And we're all like, I can't have too many pandas. But then your house fills with pandas and you're like, this is actually kind of a lot of pandas. That was too many, actually. Can't get to the door. All right. These things are way bigger than I thought they were. And with our buddy garlic, so there's the wild and cultivated.

And then within cultivated, there's two major varieties that people call soft neck or hard neck. You point to me on a garlic where the neck is. What are you talking about? I had hardneck for the first time, like recently, through a farmer's market. Oh. And if folks want to Google it or I'll link pictures, Hardneck is garlic that often has a purplish color. That's just because it has more of something called anthocyanins. it's the same species and usually the same flavor.

Slay. But it has a really long, hard stalk out of the top. Did you feel like the flavor was different from what you've had before? No, it felt similar, yeah. So it's just kind of a different way of growing it and making it. And apparently the hard neck plants are more likely to reproduce sexually. That might be similar to the wild kind. Oh, interesting.

That kind of reminds me of like the purple potatoes. Like you can get like chips and stuff made. of like purple potatoes and then you have it and you're like oh yeah i mean taste wise it's exactly the same that's true yeah it's good but these are blue again okay fine i don't know yeah as someone who appreciates aesthetics and appreciates presentation and visuals yeah that's awesome i even loved you remember you remember this move you remember the purple and green ketchup from yes i do a thousand years ago it was disgusting but i i I was a big fan.

I loved that. I think I asked my mom about it and she said, oh, we'll think about it. And then we did not get it. Is my memory? Oh, that's also a parenting hack right there is what I've been doing recently is next time I'm at the store, I'll check to see if they have any. And then you know for sure your kid's going to forget about that in like 30 seconds. You're never going to have to think about it again.

Right. They'll see a next commercial or squirrel or, you know, they'll just move on. Yeah. Yeah, you can just say, oh, yeah, next time I'm at the store, I'll check. And then that's it. That means I am not getting that. thing. And I guess speaking of the store, then the soft neck garlic, also known as white garlic, basically if you've been to a U.S. or Canadian grocery store and gotten garlic that doesn't have

a huge stem out of the top of it, that's this other soft neck or white garlic kind. And they're very similar. I don't think you're missing a lot, but those are two styles you can find in a lot of shopping. They got the shiny version. Yeah. And then beyond those two species, it all It also turns out there's a bunch of other alliums around the world that we have either called garlic or not. So there's really no number of garlics, too. Oh, garlic is a construct. It really is, yeah. This is also found in the Americas.

It's not just a Europe, Asia, Africa kind of thing. And one key source this week is a book called Garlic and Edible Biography. And it's by non-fiction author Robin Cherry. and she says that the Americas are full of garlics. One of them, scientific name Allium, Canadense, is better known as meadow garlic. I believe it's named after Canada. And for thousands of years, native people have foraged that and then turned juice from it into poultices and soothing balms and stuff, which is really cool. Also, I'm sorry, if you title your book in Edible Biography, there's like a 99% chance I'm trying to take a bite of that book.

Like, I'm putting it in my mouth once to be like, is this what you meant? And then I take a bite. I'm like, oh, that's not what you meant. Sorry. And then we need our parents to step in and say, no, don't do it. Don't eat the book. Spit that out. What's in your mouth?

Drop it. Drop it. And then there's also another species called Allium Trichakum. And that's only been called garlic by some people at some times. A lot of recent modern people in the U.S. will call that ramps. Not the garlic purists. Sorry, guys.

It's not a true garlic. Right. And like, it is or isn't. It's an alium, but people call it a wild leak or call it a ramp. And so the world is full of maybe garlic, kind of all over. Listen, as a garlic anarchist, let them all be garlic. Who cares? Although, I guess, you know, if it has like a distinctly different, like, flavor or texture,

you know, then if I go to the store and I buy what's labeled as garlic and I get something different from what I'm expecting, then maybe I would not want that to be labeled as garlic. But, you know, I give it a fun name. Yeah. We could have a bunch of fun, cool names. Like, this one could be Canada garlic and this one. Like, even meadow garlic is a cool name, you know? Like, give them cool names.

Yeah, and then there's even the later thing where we started giving the word garlic as like an animal. adjective on the front of other plant names. The big example is garlic mustard. Oh. According to J-Store Daily, that's a mustard. It's not an allium, but just its flavor reminded us of garlic. So the word garlic's all over plants, too. I do feel like we already have like garlic as a prefix, as like a flavor-based prefix all over the entire supermarket.

Yeah. You know, like you got garlic chips, garlic ranch, garlic whatever, garlic, you know, everything's already sort of garlic adjacent. Yeah, I got to find the story, too. At one point, there was garlic ice cream. I would try that. Yeah, I heard it's like, all right, you know. Yeah, I mean, I try it once.

And then that's probably it. That's probably all I need. Yeah. Yeah, so we love the taste of it. And also, there's a long history of people trying to find amazing properties in it. And it has some. The next number there is the year 1858. 1858.

That is when the eventually famous scientist Louis Pasteur observed garlic having antibacterial properties. That's my boy, man. Yet another dub on the board for pasture. I know. A common pasture dub. Right. Like later at his career, he would be in favor of vaccines and like making dairy safe and stuff. But this was a very simple experiment where he prepared some petri dishes with bacteria.

in them and then put a clove of garlic in each one. And then the next day there were little bacteria-free perimeters around each clove of garlic. Because the chemicals in it just like fought off the bacteria and made it in hospitable for it. That makes me then start to wonder if like, because I'm always thinking, whenever I think about like plants or foods that humans have particular affinity for, right? Like there would be a thing that like is widely not universally right.

There's always going to be some people who aren't into that thing, right? But there are going to be some things that are widely appealing to humans. So things like sugar, you know, like fats, like certain things that humans just have this sort of like instinct to enjoy and want to eat more of. And in the case of like sugars and fats, like those were things that like weren't necessarily found in high quantities in our diets like evolutionarily. And so it would make sense that you would want to be like sort of biologically incentivized to take those things in when you can get them. And so I'm thinking like, why do we like garlic so much? And that makes me wonder if like at some level something about the benefits we get from it is somehow like ingrained into our instincts to like it, like that we're like driven to like it because it does something good for us. Yes.

That is Ellen, that's like a perfect thing to wonder about because it seems like garlic has several mild. positive impacts on us. Like, it's not like pharmaceutical or medical or something. Mild. It's everything from antimicrobial to anti-inflammatory, antioxidants, better circulation. But it's all mild, but it's all good. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it'll do a little bit for you, I guess. Yeah. That's clearly not the reason I'm eating it. I'm not, I'm in it for the love of the game. Okay. It's not about health for me. Icing on the cake, really. Yeah, it's all these little benefits. And also it seems like the chemicals in it, which partly protect the plant from pests. It wasn't their goal to help us. But the chemicals in it are pretty amazing for killing and preventing microbes. The wildest number there is the early 900s AD. So a little more than a thousand years ago. Germanic peoples in what's now England. They wrote a medical text. The name of it is very medieval. It is balds. Leachbook.

Oh. Bald is somebody's name. Bald's Leach book. Okay. Sounds deeply unhealthy, but... Yeah, doesn't sound great. I don't feel like I'm about to get a ton of high-quality medical information from this leech book. You would really think.

And so, according to popular mechanics, there's a recipe in Bald's Leach book among many other cures and ideas and just some wild claims. There's a recipe in there for something to put on wounds. And it sounds very, very bad. The recipe is four things. It's garlic. It's onions, also good. And then a little bit of wine, and then a lot of the bile from the stomachs of cows.

So just acid soup. Just put a nice little acid soup right into your open wound. Yeah. And for better or worse, especially because it was the 900s, it seems like it was the best thing they had. And it worked pretty good. Anyone who's ever tried to like cut or cook with onions while you have even the tiniest microscopic cut on your hand that you didn't know about?

Like it's a visceral reaction I'm having to imagining just put all of the most caustic acidic substances you can possibly get your hands on and just mush them up right in there. Yesterday I was cooking and I forgot that I had just done basically a million different very harsh Velcroes with my hands for some baby stuff. And then I was like, why are my hands not right? Because I had just in a tiny way scraped everything. Oh, you got a bunch of microcuts on your hands. Live to tell the tale.

I'm brave. And so this terrible recipe, apparently modern scientists recreated it. And they were astounded to learn that it's able to kill a bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus. The big one. The big one for staff infections. Oh, geez. I hate that they were kind of right.

I've been dragging them this whole time, and you're like, well. And garlic is key to it, because then another study happens in the summer of 2020. People test the same gross concoction on a range of biofilm infections. A biofilm infection is one where the bacteria have grown into, a quote, mucous-like matrix of carbohydrate. Oh, gross. That sticks to the infected wound or area. It's incredibly hard to cure and clean out.

Oh. And not only did this gross bald leech book recipe work on it, but if he removed any of the four ingredients, it didn't work nearly as well. Are you kidding? It did a really good job in the 900s, and garlic is crucial. It's wild. So that's awesome to me.

It's really cool. I just wonder how much trial and error, you know? Like were they trying? Like, were they in the 900s? Just like, all right, this time, let's do it with no bile. All right, let's time. Well, of course, like scientific method hadn't been invented yet, right? But, like, they had to have somehow over, you know, centuries of just, you know, treating your own wounds and stuff.

they had to have eventually been like, hey, these four things are doing the trick. My guess is that if you know nothing that opens your mind to experiment again, just throwing stuff at the wall. So they got weird with it. So crazy. Thanks, bile, I guess. Yeah, bile came through wine, onions, and garlic, all four. Oh, my gosh. The big four.

You know, the wine onions and garlic, I'm like, okay, this is sounding pretty good. This has sounded delicious so far. This is a great recipe. then you come in with the cowbile and I'm like, I'm out now. It does feel like a made up accident of chocolate and peanut butter mashing together. Like my three good cooking ingredients got in the bile, you know? It's like the au jus. Yeah.

I'm like, well, hold on a second. Wait, hold on. Don't throw it out just quite yet. Try rubbing it onto your open wound. See if that does anything. And then garlic is also in this weird sort of medical middle ground where there's a bunch of mild effects. There's also real antimicrobial amazing abilities. And then people assigned too many ancient beliefs to it medically.

The amazing numbers there go back to Egyptian papyrus in the 1550s BC, more than 3,500 years ago. An ancient Egyptian wrote medical advice on papyrus that is one of the oldest documents of what Egyptians thought about health. And they claimed garlic cures 22 different ailments, including tumors, heart problems, headaches, something called general malaise, like everything. And apparently this was not unique in Egyptian belief. There's another papyrus from a few centuries later.

In 1,200 BC, there's a text that claims garlic can be used as a test of fertility in women. Okay. And the wild test is that a woman should take one clean peeled clove of garlic and insert it into their vagina. Yeah, that's where I was thinking this was going. I tried to kind of hints to people where we were headed. You picked it up, thank you. That's where I figured. That's where I figured this was, like, she's either going to pee on it or she's sticking it up somewhere.

Like, usually that's it. Yeah, that makes sense. They also, I think, were figuring out diabetes based on the smell of pee. They were in all the zones here. Yeah, you had to like taste it a little bit, I think. Yeah, to be like, which is true. Like, that's a true thing. It's true.

It's true. Really can. Like, that part's true. But like, for a while, there was a fertility test that involved peeing on frogs. So that's why I was kind of like thinking that was where we were going. People just want to do that, I think. Anyway. That was a different thing.

So this fertility test, you leave the clove of garlic in the vagina overnight. And then in the. the morning. Get a nice marinade go. So, and then in the morning, we're not doctors or chefs. Really incorporate the flavors. So this is amazing because this stupid test does seem to have caused a thing that we're about to talk about. But their false belief was that in the morning, if the woman's breath smells like

garlic, they are fertile and are able to have babies. That's not true. That's not how it works. Interesting. But Robin Cherry writes that they probably got a lot of false results because of how the chemicals in garlic can travel through our skin and bloodstream. And that gets us into takeaway number one, garlic is always on the verge of a chemical reaction that can last for days, travel through our bodies, and make breast milk more appealing

to babies. Huh. Interesting. There's a bunch of amazing studies of how the chemicals in garlic react with each other and can move through our bloodstream from any point on our body to the rest of our body. Oh, it's just fully like doing some secret agent spy like, I'm in. Like, I'm crawling through the air vents. I was imagining air vets too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Osmosis Jones behavior. I fear. Oh, wow, it is. And again, this is amazing stories about the basic chemical reaction that happens if we, like, manipulate a piece of garlic at all. Apparently, the way garlic is structured is at a cellular level, there are two different chemicals that really, really want to react with each other. But they're separated by cell walls. Oh, forbidden lovers.

The extremely basic just touching, manipulating the garlic a little bit, breaks cell walls, they react and several things happen. If you've ever had like two dogs separated by a fence, but it's like a very like, like a sliding glass door even, that like they're barking each other, they're getting all riled up at everything. And like it's just that one little thing. They're like, ooh, ooh, if I get my hands on you. Ooh, if I catch you.

Yeah. Did I ever tell you about the zebras at the zoo I used to do tours of? I don't know. I don't think so. Because you probably know like zebras in the wild, it'll be kind of males separate from the herd of the women and the babies. And so our zoo had one yard of the women and the babies and another yard with the male in it. The women. Yes. I respect them as adults, I guess.

The ladies. But we basically the one male zebra in the adjoining yard with a see-through fence would just stand on it, front hooves on the fence with a huge erection like a lot of the day. It was very difficult to do tours about because that's noticeable. That is so good. Yeah. So that reminds me of the chemicals and garlic because it's just that one thin chain link fence in between. Ooh, baby, even work for the cell wall.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's like, this is one one key source here is the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh. They say that, quote, inside each garlic cell lies one piece of the puzzle, an odorless molecule called Allen. Then outside the cell between the individual cell walls lies the other puzzle piece, an enzyme called Alan Ace. And when these puzzle pieces lock together, a complex series of reactions is triggered. So when Allen and Alan Ace finally get to react, several chemicals come out of it. there's a flavorful sulfur called alicin.

There's a couple things that cause odors, especially allyl methyl sulfide, which if you have enough of that going on, it can leave a garlic smell that lasts more than an entire day. Oh, for sure. For sure. Listen, I've had garlic smell on me. It does, like, permeate. Like, it feels like it, like, it does feel like you would begin to incorporate garlic into your actual, like, body.

Like, I feel like I'm, like, sweating garlic. Like if I cry, my tears are garlic, like it does feel like it kind of like seeps into you. Totally. And there's also a thing you can look for when you're cooking. Another story is it's Serious Eats. It's a piece by food writer Jay Kenji Lopez Alts, who says that. Oh, he's the author of the food lab. He did the food lab book.

Yeah. Yeah. He's amazing. And he says that like whether your garlic is white or purple, because we were talking about that before, that, you know, there's maybe little differences. but the colors to really look for are a green or a greenish blue. Oh. Because that means that the garlic has aged a bit. And it's still totally edible, but it's going to be stronger and maybe overpowering.

Because that green is a result of some of the reactions already starting. And making one compound that has a similar chemical structure to chlorophyll in plants. Oh, interesting. So if it's a little bit green, it's like really. really going to be strong garlic. Interesting. I guess that's not always what you want, though, right? It could be too much.

Like, sometimes you want garlic that's going to play nice with, like, the other things you're cooking, right? You don't always want a garlic that's going to be, like, punching through. Exactly. Another source here is popular science. They describe an experiment you can do, especially with the Allison compound that comes out of garlic reacting with itself, because that can travel through your bloodstream in a way where If you want to, you can have garlic touch your feet, and then after a while you will taste and smell it in your head.

I thought you were about to say, you could put garlic in your vagina. I'm very Egyptian, folks. This is an interactive episode. There's a play-along-at-home element to it. You know what? Especially if you're driving. Normally I would say not if you're driving, but go for it, man. Pull over.

With that Egyptian fertility test, we think the test lasted in medical beliefs because if you put garlic in your vagina, it might go through your body and it smells like garlic around you because of how these chemicals work. Oh, yeah. Maybe it's just because it's like permeating throughout your body and maybe like coming in your saliva or something like that. Maybe it's like incorporating in your saliva or something, which then would make you, I guess, able to take. taste it a little bit too, probably. Yeah, and then Egyptians just made one extra leap of, it must mean you can have babies, which is not true. But they were like something was happening, you know?

They seemed really, really into the whole idea of having babies. So I think a lot of things were like, maybe this is about babies. Yeah. Yeah, and here's how popular science describes a test where if you put garlic in a bag around your bare feet, here's what can happen. Quote, your skin has oily and watery layers, which means, makes it good at protecting you from outside molecules. However, garlic contains a molecule called Allison,

which has properties of both water and oil. Because of this, it can permeate the skin in your feet and travel through your blood all the way to your mouth and nose. You'll swear you can taste garlic and that the room has a strong garlicky odor. Which, okay, I do like that they're like, here's what could happen if you put your feet in a bag of garlic. And I'm like, God, I'm always.

I'm always saying this. Right, right. And it is, this has also made me like remember the thing I already know, which is that like the entire bulb of garlic in the store doesn't really smell like anything yet. Oh, that's true. Because nothing's like broken down or squished yet. So the chemicals are just waiting.

Yeah, like raw garlic is like nothing. There's no like smell to it or anything. It's not until you like cut it or, you know, even peeling it releases the smell, I feel like. Exactly. just that little bit of slicing or crushing or something, everything happens. But until then, it just sits there smelling like nothing. Yeah.

Huh. Wow. I didn't realize how much chemistry was going on. Me neither at all. I just thought garlic is garlicky. It's so good. There's a lot here. Love that.

And then the last weird thing we've learned is there's a study from back in 1991 at the Manal Chemical Sciences Center in Philadelphia. They wanted to study what a... nursing baby experiences if the baby's mother eats garlic. Okay. Interesting. And so they had two groups of moms. One group consumed garlic capsules before nursing. And then the description says that researchers measured the odor of the breast milk. I don't know how you measure it.

And then measured the suckling. Sniff it, write it down. I guess so, yeah. And they measured the like suckling behavior of their infant. How much and how long do they want to? apparently the milk develops a more intense odor peaking around two hours after consuming the garlic and the infants remained attached to the breast for longer periods of time if the mom had garlic oh that's really interesting so that like the human affinity for garlic is from day one yes

you'd think maybe it's too advanced or strong for little little kids but no we love it I also would have probably guessed that garlic would be a more like caustic flavor, but I mean, it's not like it's, you know, I guess baby is just like babies have good taste, I guess. A refined palate in the newborn baby. I'm excited about a pro baby take at the end. This is great. And I shouldn't say the end because there's more main show and bonus to go. We're going to take a quick break off of that big takeaway in numbers. and then come back with a couple more garlicky stories.

Let's go. We're back and we have two more takeaways for the main show. And one of them is about garlic in culture. And that idea we were just talking about of aren't people eating garlic? Because takeaway number two, for more than 2,000 years, rich Europeans have demonized garlic as poor people food while also really, really wanting to eat garlic. That sounds like jealousy.

that sounds like hater behavior. Yeah. You know it's good. You secretly know it's good. Although I feel like so much of like European high society and stuff was based on the sort of like denial of pleasure,

right? Like so much of like social convention was based on just like denying yourself of anything that makes people happy and makes life good. So I wonder if maybe it was seen as that sort of puritanical like, oh, if it makes people have.

happy and makes life better than it must be from Satan. Yes. Yeah, that's part of it. And then the other part is just that garlic was beloved and inexpensive and grew well everywhere. So because poor people had access to it, rich people said, I guess it's poor. It's kind of the perfect thing. It's the perfect plant.

Yeah, I really came out of researching this with nothing negative to say. It's great. No, no else. And yeah, in this story, particularly, focuses on Italy in a way that especially might be surprising to Americans, but he sources are a feature for Alice Obscira by Riley New Silly, feature for J. Strowdaily by Levera Gershon, and journalism for NPR by Sylvia Pujoli. Because for more than 2,000 years in Europe, people have used the basically slur of garlic eaters for either poor people or a specific ethnic

group or both. I mean, I do eat a lot of garlic, so I feel like. Like, I would be like, you got me there. Yeah, like, I do it and be nice to be. Yeah. And some of the oldest records of the Roman Empire doing it are in the 100s BC, and Romans saying that about Jewish people in the ancient Near East. Huh. In the 100s AD, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius visited that place and described Jewish people

as quote, malodorous garlic eaters. I feel like it wasn't about the garlic. I think so, too. I feel like garlic is catching astray on this one, I do think. And then also the Romans just extended that to insulting all sorts of poor people across the Roman Empire. And along with beans and a few other staples, garlic became seen as poor people's stuff. Isn't that kind of like lobster?

Didn't lobster have the same sort of like trajectory, how it started as like common or peasant poor people food? Yeah. And that's especially happened with garlic and fine dining because unlike lobster, I think garlic is still widely available for most people. But especially in Italy, there's a long time divide between the relatively rich north, the relatively poor South. If folks have heard the past Sif about Neapolitan ice cream, we talk about the South also being where a lot of migrants, to the U.S. came from from Italy. But as foodways developed in Italy, there was a weird period around the 1500s AD where there were a bunch of amazing Italian recipes using garlic

and a bunch of Italian nobles who didn't want to be seen as poor people eating garlic. But they wanted tasty food. Another example of elitism robbing humans of joy, right? Like you could have had such a better experience of life if you had not been, an elitist snob, you know? Yes, and they decided, hey, I'm going to still have the experience by basically cheating and doing a workaround. And this is a process that we now call ennobling food. Ennobling.

Like turning it into nobility. And what 1500s rich Italians did is they had their servants and chefs develop recipes that use garlic and then the rest of the ingredients are luxurious. So you create a cultural exception where the garlic is, quote, unquote, ennobled by association with fancy meats and aged cheeses and things like that. Oh, they had to give it, it had to like get in with a group. Like it had to be invited by a friend. Like a club or a fret party?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm here with him. I'm here with beef. Me and beef are here together. And they're like, all right, garlic. But then you show up with beef enough, and then you start getting invited on your own.

A real social climber in garlic is. Exactly. Apparently the biggest example was a sauce, because then you can put it on all kinds of stuff. In the 1500s, rich people developed a roasted garlic sauce called Agliata, that they made a point of serving on fancy stuff, so then it could just be around all the time. And they could just get garlic without either looking or feeling poor, in their opinion. They had to play hard to get with garlic. Like, they didn't want to look too desperate for garlic.

Yeah, and oddly, this, like, move in Italy has apparently never gone away. NPR covered a chef in the year 2007, a chef in Rome in 2007 who, like, made national headlines by trying to push for an anti-garlic version of Italian cuisine. Okay. Best of luck with that. Right. silly. And his name's Felipe Lamentia. Apparently, he said it should be more focused on citrus and other herbs.

And everybody from prominent media figures to the recent Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, like celebrated this and were elitist about it. Berlusconi is a weird right-wing elitist person. So it makes sense. Right. And then this bled into the United States in a huge way, because especially in the early 1900s, many waves of Italian migrants came. from especially southern Italy.

And as they brought foods with them, garlic became a slur against Italian-Americans, even though... What? Yeah, like, apparently it took until around the 1960s or 1970s for garlic to be relatively common in American food, in particular, through Julia Child. Oh. Apparently on her show, there was one episode where she said that people should stop seeing garlic as, quote, suspiciously foreign, probably subversive, and certainly very lower class. What? So she's on the right side, but like people thought that.

It's wild. But like being weird about it? Like, yeah. This also just went over my head the times I've seen it. In 1946, Hollywood made the movie, It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Christmas. Sure, you've seen it. Yeah. And at one point, he's trying to help a Italian family in this town.

And the rich guy, Mr. Potter, insults George Bailey and tells George Bailey he shouldn't be, quote, nursemaid to a bunch of garlic eaters. That's like 1946. I know we had just fought Italy in World War II, but people were like, garlic is Italian and negative. Now, that is an interesting uno reversal of like the originally like the Romans using that as an insult against Jewish people. has a feel to get a taste of your own medicine. Who's eating garlic now? Yeah. And this is only gone away kind of before our generation, but not a long time before.

I was thinking like, because I'm thinking garlic feels like a huge part of what I can, you know, I've been growing up eating American food my whole life. I feel like garlic has been in every meal I've ever had just about. But then I'm thinking about, you know, you know those like deeply, deeply cursed. Depression era like recipes that will be like it'll be like tinned tuna on like a MRE ration or something like that like the they there's a lot of cottage cheese somehow I don't know how a lot of cottage cheese it does feel like a lot of those recipes the palette must have been so averse to flavor that like the sort of intensity of garlic may have been too

flavorful. Like that's too much taste. I'm tasting this food too much. It has too much taste. Right, right. Like it appeared full on dangerous to a lot of especially waspy Americans. Because the last wildest example is to guys named Sokolan Van Zetti, who in the 1920s, they were convicted of robbery and murder, but it was probably just pinned on them because they

were Italian and leftist. Yeah. And one newspaper writing about them at the time said that Sacco and Van Zetti's, like, politics was, quote, the garlic smelling creed. And now just all of us eat garlic all the time and there's Italian restaurants everywhere. I was supposed to say, like, you were selling this, I feel like. Right. Great. Yeah, yeah.

The sauteed in butter creed. Like, say more. Yeah. So in our country, if you go back, I don't know, maybe two generations or more, people might have given you a look if you're trying to buy garlic in the store around town. They would have hated to see me coming with my 40 clothes. Yeah, I'm cloving all over town. Every day. Every day I'm cloven.

Not a whole bulb. Not a whole bulb. I can't do that. I'm in too deep. Pull me out. And we have one last takeaway from. the main show about even wilder garlic myths and magic. Because takeaway number three, at least four world cultures created myths about garlic

featuring transformations or murders. Oh, what a theme. Yeah, it's ancient China, ancient Korea, ancient Greece, and Hindu people. These are the four groups with wild garlic folklore. Oh, I do like a little mischief. Me too. Yeah, very into it. Some of them are amazing, like, transformations and powers, especially in Greece and in China. They both have myths about garlic essentially being a supermedic or providing immortality. I mean, I do feel pretty immortal. If I've had a nice garlic meal, I feel like I could take on the world. Yeah. I like that these very separate cultures did this because the Greek one, they say that garlic was created when a demigod was killed.

Aw. The demigod is, his name is Asclepius. If people have seen the little picture of a snake around a rod on medical stuff, that's his rod. That's probably his biggest legacy. I too would have tasted garlic and been like, surely this is of the gods. Right. This is from heaven. And he was half from.

He was the son of the god Apollo and a human princess. And the gods decided he had to die because he was too good at medicine to the point that he was preventing people from dying ever. And that's not the order of things. Like apparently Hades was the first complaint. Hades said nobody's coming in. Like what? Come on.

This is terrible for business. My foot traffic is suffering. Right. My fairy guys just standing around. Like, I can't have this. We're bored. Asclepius figures out an herbal remedy for death. He can raise the dead.

Excellent. And Hades goes to his brother Zeus and says, you have to stop this, please. This is kind of my whole deal. This is kind of my thing. Right. Like, then what do I do? I just loom? Like, I don't know.

It's tough. Just loom around town. So then Zeus says, okay, I'll check on Asclepius. And when Zeus looks, Asclepius is writing down a recipe for immortality. So Zeus throws a thunderbolt. kills Asclepius. Sniped. And then Zeus uses rain to wash the paper away.

Like, we'll just dispose of it that way. The paper melts into the earth. The sun comes up and a new plant springs up where the paper had been. And that's garlic. Close enough. I'll take it. You know what? I mean, if it's garlic or recipe for immortality,

sorry recipe for immortality. I'm taking the trade. Same. I love it. Yeah. I don't want to be alive that. long and the time that I have on this earth, I want to be filled with garlic. Right.

I'm here for a good time, not a long time. And you don't have garlic and onions. At what cost? And then totally separately, ancient China, there was a huge amount of lore about the yellow emperor. Oh, I've heard of this man. Yeah, he's the probably mythical first ruler of China. And it's credited with inventing basically everything, like pottery, silk, writing,

all of medicine. He just did it because he's amazing. The story was recorded at least 4,000 years ago. They were farming garlic really early there. And the legend is that the Yellow Emperor and some friends were walking. They found a fruit tree. They ate the fruit. It was poisonous. Hate it when that happens. And so they said, oh, no, we're all going to die. But the Yellow Emperor is smart and he sees wild garlic nearby. He has everybody eat that to see if it'll help. It does cure them and then he invents all of garlic farming. Love that. Love that.

Yeah, perfect medicine. Great. And also today, apparently China is the number one country for growing garlic, partly because of its size. And then the number one consumer per capita is South Korea. Garlic is huge there, especially in kimchi. Oh, yeah. In kimchi and in like, you know, a lot of sauces.

Yeah. They're not playing around with the garlic. It is like in your face. Oh, they do a cucumber salad that's basically like garlic with some pieces of cucumber in it. It will destroy your breath. But, I mean, it's worth it. Waving to the waiter, like, can you hold the cucumber in this cucumber salad? What's going on?

Could you give me a bowl of just like minced garlic that I can just eat with a spoon? Yeah. And also the Korean Peninsula, they were very early on understanding that garlic's amazing. and also seeing it as a medicinal thing beyond just being food. And it's in the founding myth of the first Korean kingdom. Oh. The first kingdom on the peninsula was called Chosun. And the myth is that human civilization begins because there's a sky god.

He sends his son to live on earth. His son creates humans and a community for them. And the community was so nice. Two animals asked if they could become humans and live there. Oh. Yeah. It was a tiger and a bear. Okay.

Nice. I like that. And the sun of the sky god says, here's a deal. There is a way to be human. You have to take this garlic and take this mugwort as another plant. Take those into a cave. Live there for 100 days, never seeing the sun, only eating garlic and mugwort. If you do that, you'll be a human at the end.

Oh, what a terrible sentence. Oh, no. And I've never had mugwort, but even still, I think I'm in. Yeah. You telling me, I got to go chill out in a cave and nobody bothers me for 100 days and I'm eating garlic the whole time. Sign me up. Yeah, it's quiet. The only drawback is you have to be human at the end.

It's true. It would be nice to be a tiger. Yeah. And so then the way the myth goes, apparently the tiger quit and said, no, I'm not sticking with this. But the bear stuck with it got to become a human woman. Then she wished for a child, the son of the sky god, temporarily becomes human. to have a child with her, their son becomes the next king of the human community and builds the whole kingdom. So garlic builds all of Korean society and the myth.

I mean, listen, like I was saying, that's man's best friend right there. Like, it's been with us from day one. Yeah, really far back. And then the last myth has a little bit of a darker tone, but still amazing. This ancient Hindu texts in the Sanskrit language from 1500 years ago, they describe the origin of both onions and garlic. They say that the Lord Vishnu was distributing nectar to various demigods and beings and so on. And two demons snuck into the line to receive nectar. Vishnu poured the nectar into their mouths,

then realized their demons, and then cut both their heads off before the nectar could go all the way down into their bodies. So it's on site. Yeah. He was like, oops demons, slice, slice. And one of their heads fell to the earth and became an onion. The other head fell to the earth and became a garlic.

And the lesson is that garlic is magic and healthful and provides strength, but also will lead to demonic thoughts. Oh, I mean, who does? Who among us? Like, what's a little demonic thought here and there? You know, like, I was having those anyway. I might as well also get some onions and garlic out of it. Yeah, like using garlic to represent that and stuff, you know?

It's incredible. It's so cool. Yeah. That is an interesting story. I do feel like I like the like cautionary tone of like it's good, but not too much because you see in like, you know, more puritanical like Christian stories will be like, oh, this thing was involved in a demonic story at one point. That means we have to kill it on site.

And if you ever come into contact one with one, you are doomed to hell for eternity. So like, you know, because like we have stories, you know, involving like snakes and stuff. So we're like, oh, snakes are demonic. Better not have anything to do with them. I like the more tempered approach of like, this is from demons, but you can have a little bit. Exactly. Like, it's good and bad and nuanced. It's so cool.

Yeah. They're like, what's a little bit of demon? It's okay. So everyone thinks garlic's magic, including us. I feel like I'm part of the whole human community. Totally agree. Yeah. 100%.

It definitely is for sure. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Again, Katie is out doing pretty exciting things. I'm so thrilled Ellen Weatherford could hop in and do another SIF episode. She's been on more than a couple before and is just wonderful at it. And if you haven't followed her on social media, I will link to her profiles there because she makes amazing videos about science communication and animals and more. And then she and Christians podcast, Just the Zoo of Us, is fantastic.

They rate animals in the most joyful way. They help you both appreciate them. And when it makes sense, like, kind of poke fun at them too. So absolutely tremendous show. I highly recommend it. And hey, you're in the outro of this show about garlic. Let's help you remember the episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, garlic is always on the verge of a chemical reaction that can last for days,

travel through our bloodstream, and make breast milk more appealing to babies. Takeaway number two, for more than 2,000 years, rich Europeans have demonized garlic as poor people food or Italian leftist food while also really, really wanting to eat garlic themselves. Takeaway number three, there's an extraordinary world tradition of garlic mythology, in particular myths about transformations or murders in Greece, China, Korea, and Hindu India. And then we had a vast numbers section on top of those takeover. takeaways, especially the various ways of counting the garlics in the world, either while they're cultivated, either purple or white, or many other aliums that kind of qualify, also a sort of

numerical history of medicine and science featuring garlic, and more. Those are the takeaways, and I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the garlicky origins of the name of Chicago and the origins of garlic stuff in vampire lore. Visit sifpot.com. Fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 23 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio.

It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a wonderful nonfiction book called Garlic and Edible Biography, that is by journalist and food writer Robin Cherry. Also tons of scientific and agricultural digital resources, especially writing by Philip W. Simon, a researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. also resources from the agriculture schools of the University of Wisconsin and from Oregon State

University, excellent food writing by Jay Kenji Lopez Alt for Serious Eats, and further science writing and science coverage from popular science, popular mechanics, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigoke people, and others. Also, Ellen taped this on the traditional land of the Duwamish people and the Cayuse Umatilla and Walla Walla peoples.

And I wanted to acknowledge that in my location, Ellen's location, many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. there is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 118 that's about the Great Lakes of North America. Fun fact there, most people say there's five Great Lakes, but there's really more like six, or four or nine, depending on how you count it. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my buddy Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more she will return soon and wishing her all the very best things. Our show's theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks. members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.