Emma Peaslee
speaker
237 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 22 Jul
Emma Peaslee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The salad bowl of the world.
And it basically all revolves around lettuce.
Back in the 1900s, some farmers in California realized iceberg lettuce could even survive a train ride to the hungry cities on the East Coast, all while keeping its signature crunch.
This was even before the rise of refrigeration, which you can check out our Planet Money episode on that.
Yeah, lettuce was the first vegetable to defy the seasons.
And that's how, by the 1950s, lettuce beat out cabbage to become America's number two fresh vegetable.
And they realized that lettuce could keep a lot longer if you kept it in a carefully controlled environment with just the right mix of gases.
So the bags that our bagged salad come in, you're saying like that is a salad miracle, those bags that we see on the shelf.
It is hard to understate what a huge breakthrough this special, breathable bag technology was.
Because now, all of a sudden, lettuce growers could send chopped lettuce all around the country.
By the 1990s, bagged salads were taking over our grocery stores.
But these value-add bag salads weren't simple to produce.
To make the economics work, you needed a huge expensive factory, tons of capital.
Not everybody could do it.
Pre-chopped bagged lettuce was a game changer for those restaurants.
Saved them so much time and it made Taylor Farms a lot of money.
Pretty soon, Taylor Farms was expanding into bagged salads at the grocery store.
And by the time Jim went to work for them, Taylor Farms had become the largest salad processor in the country.
But as bagged salad and pre-cut broccoli and baby carrots and all these other value-added products begin to explode, so do our stomachs.
But also, Jim says the vast industrial way that we grow and process food was creating new risks, especially with bagged salad, where vegetables from all different farms are getting mixed together and then sent all over.
Showing 21–40 of 237 · page 2 of 12
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