The History of Peas

How did a green vegetable reduce the court of Louis XIV to what contemporaries called "a fashion and a madness" — with ladies smuggling peas to their bedrooms and the Sun King himself eating so many that his doctors prescribed billiards as the cure? Why does the humble pea, which unlocked the fundamental laws of genetics, turn out to be better frozen than fresh — and what does a machine called the Tenderometer have to do with Mendel's monastery garden? And, how did a crop that fed Neolithic hunter-gatherers quietly become the building block of the plant-based food revolution?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of the pea — ten thousand years of the most underestimated vegetable in history...

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