Beth Shapiro

It was the thing of the day, the meat question.

People were talking about how are we going to survive?

There's not enough cattle.

Maybe we're going to have to eat our dogs.

And at the same time, there was a problem in the Mississippi and other places where the, I think it was the World Fair.

People had brought New Orleans, who was the host city of the, I think in Japan, they brought New Orleans this water hyacinth, this water, little, tiny, beautiful flower as a gift.

And they loved it.

And so they planted it everywhere.

And it just grew like absolute crazy and was choking up the river.

Like ships couldn't get through because of this like matted river.

People were like putting oil on it to get it to sink.

and trying to light it on fire and nothing would happen.

And this team of people that included a congressman from Louisiana came up with a solution for both problems at once.

And that was that they were going to import hippos from Africa into Louisiana to live on the bayous.

They would eat the plant, this water hyacinth thing, and then we could eat them.

And that was going to be the perfect solution to both of these problems.

Yeah.

It was an accident.

So it's actually a fun story.

You should look it up and read the whole story because it involved these two guys.