Rachel S. Gross
speaker
255 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 18 Aug
Rachel S. Gross’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 Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She visited the archaeologist site where some of the very earliest pepper seeds from food were found, and she saw villagers who live nearby the site preparing food from corn, root vegetables, shellfish, and not much else.
Honestly, the pep from the heat, in addition to all the great flavors in chilies, that spice can kind of make food more exciting.
It really does literally add
All of this explains why we might have been attracted to peppers, but it's been hard for scientists to figure out how long we've been eating spicy peppers.
Mostly that's because in the hot, humid regions where many of the earliest peppers grew, the seeds and all the rest of the plant disintegrate really quickly, which made one site in Peru really exciting.
But there was plenty of it at Waca Prieta, so the archaeologists took samples of the fossilized poop.
They had it analyzed using the new technique at the time of carbon fourteen dating to get a better read on how old it was.
But even more exciting, they sent that poop to a guy who founded an entire new field of research that uses ancient poop to figure out what ancient people ate.
spicy peppers.
Probably then and still today, there are around thirty species of wild peppers.
At some point around the time the El Brujo people were eating chilies, or since then, nobody really knows, we domesticated five species that we still enjoy today.
Anum is the most common domesticated chili and so unsurprisingly it's the most diverse.
Basically all the dozens of peppers you might eat in Mexico are anums, jalapenos, poblanos, bell peppers, all anum.
Tabasco.
The fifth and final species is called pubescens, and this one we almost never eat in the US or Europe because it doesn't dry well, and so mostly people eat it fresh in South America, or it gets shipped frozen and you might find it under the name Rokoto or Locoto in Latin American restaurants.
to try them.
We had eight different dried chili peppers lined up in front of us.
It wasn't the season for fresh.
We decided to start with the teppine.
It's an annum.
Showing 41–60 of 255 · page 3 of 13
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