Jeff Guo

speaker

1,187 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 11 Sep

Jeff Guo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Planet Money · Big Lettuce meets Small Intestine · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

I always compare it to being like a really big garden.

This really big garden, a strip of farms running 90 miles through the middle of California, produces a huge portion of the fresh produce we eat in the United States.

How big of a deal is lettuce to the farmers in California to grow it?

Now, lettuce didn't used to be a big deal in Salinas.

It didn't used to be a big deal in the United States even.

But it became a big deal because of one big advantage lettuce has over all the other vegetables.

It's crunchy.

A head of iceberg lettuce can stay crisp for a pretty long time.

Pretty soon, lettuce became the first fresh vegetable to be available all over the place year-round.

Because you could grow it in California from spring to fall, and then places like Arizona in the winter.

The head of lettuce became the vanguard.

And at first, customers were buying whole heads of lettuce in their local grocery stores.

But the lettuce industry, and it was really an industry at this point, they kept trying to come up with ways of getting fresher and fresher produce to the East Coast.

By the 1980s, this technology had gotten so good that you could even keep that lettuce fresh long after you had chopped it.

And this bagged lettuce revolution completely changed the economics of America's favorite leafy green.

A head of lettuce was a commodity.

The price was determined by whoever could sell it for the cheapest.

But a bag of lettuce, that was a manufactured product.

Companies were chopping it up, mixing it with other vegetables, putting it in salad kits, and charging us a lot more money for those ready-made salads.

This is the beginning of value-added products in the fresh produce industry.

Showing 321–340 of 1,187 · page 17 of 60