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
I'm like writhing standing here.
Did you get
flavor?
Yeah, that was something.
the world.
This unsurprisingly will take us back to when Europeans showed up in Central and South America.
Columbus and his crew on their very first voyage in 1492, they were served a hee with their food by the natives in the Caribbean.
And so Columbus brought some of these precious berries back to Spain with him.
You couldn't grow black pepper in your garden in Spain, but you could grow chili peppers pretty much anywhere.
same thing.
Chili peppers became so popular in Spain that the Spaniards even developed their own varieties like the pimenton and padron peppers.
Portuguese brought peppers to India where they quickly became essential.
Chili is central to the cuisines of Bhutan and Korea, but arguably the largest country that today is the most closely identified with a chili pepper among all the many nations that couldn't possibly imagine eating without chilies.
I'd say maybe, probably, the winner is China.
That's coming up after this break.
Edward Wang is head of the Asian Studies program at Rowan University, and he says those regions adopted Chili's for a number of reasons.
First and most importantly, because the people who lived there were poor, like in Hangzhou, one of the poorest regions in China.
And then in China, chilies were even more of a hit because of their color.
So chili peppers were pretty and auspicious and they were relatively free since you could grow them yourself.
And Edward says this last advantage was particularly key because poor people in China, like in South America, they had a pretty bland, starchy diet of a lot of grains.
Showing 161–180 of 255 · page 9 of 13
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