Simon Mills
speaker
1,403 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2025
last heard 26 Dec
Simon Mills’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 Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Are there any plants that are bitter?
Yeah, bitter plants are very common and were highly valued in the old world.
In our times, probably the most bitter plant that people used in European terms was something called wormwood.
Now, you may not be familiar with that word, but the French for wormwood is vermouth.
And you think of the use of a drink before a meal.
idea was they used to call it an aperitif, something that stimulated your appetite.
So they would use bitters to improve your appetite.
And a low level of wormwood would be one of them.
Dandelion and burdock are two other bitters, which we now have as a soft drink, you know, particularly in America.
And we know that bitters do switch on the appetite, so we sometimes use them when appetite is poor.
And, you know, there's all sorts of reasons why you've got a low appetite, but bitters can really help, particularly if you're recovering from an illness.
They can help with...
getting the digestion juices flowing and the appetite up.
system.
Well, they do all sorts of things, actually.
When you switch on these receptors in the mouth, these taste buds, they're hardwired and they produce hormones down here in the stomach that switch on all sorts of things and effectively increase digestive activity, which involves more blood coming into the area.
So, yes, let's imagine you're living in some part of, you know, the desert area in the Middle East.
You know, you're eating a sheep or something that hasn't seen a refrigerator and it's a bit dodgy, you know.
And you think, after a meal, you turn to something easily available in that part of the world.
It's a plant called Café Arabica.
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