A Little Pompeiian Fish Sauce Goes a Long Way
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Hey, it's Latif. So today we have a brand new episode. I'm very excited to share it with you. It even has a special guest, but I sort of have to level with you about something first. Our parent station, WNYC, is in dire financial straits. We went through a round of layoffs about a year ago, and then just this month, we went through a second round. And

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And without further ado, let's get to the episode. And if you get to the end of it, as I said, there's a special guest, which I'm just going to tell you who it is because I can't help myself. It's Samin Nasrat, the chef. If you don't know and love her, you should, and you probably will anyway after this. Enjoy. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.

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Hi. What's up, Sarah? I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Sarah Khari, sitting in for Lulu this week. This is Radiolab. Do you have any idea what we're going to talk about? No. I was like, this must be what Christmas morning feels like. Not that I would know. It's like, get a present? In this case, it's a story? Yeah. But anyway, yeah, no, I know nothing. Perfect. Perfect.

So today on the show, we have kind of the mother of all missing persons reports is what it is. It's the story of how about 50,000 people vanished off of the face of the earth. And then how almost 2000 years later, one man tried to find them.

Okay, there we go. Okay. This is my speaking voice. Great. So how do you, what should I call you? Steve, Steven, Professor Tuck, something else altogether. Steve, if you call me Professor Tuck, I'm expecting you to make a great appeal. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I also wanted, that's the real reason for this call today. This is for an extension. All right, so Steve Tuck is a historian at Miami University.

And the moment in history that he has just buried himself in for the last decade is, I mean, is arguably the most iconic dramatic disaster tragedy story in history. The eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction, particularly of the city of Pompeii. Have you heard of Pompeii? Yeah, like the city that got covered in ash, people frozen in time. Yeah. Like an entire population just wiped out in an instant. Right. Right.

And that's sort of the popular perception. This entire town is wiped off the face of this planet. Museums, movies, books, the story is always basically the same. The people died instantly of heat exposure. There was no way out. Their tragic deaths have made Pompeii world famous. It's sort of the one thing that everybody knows about Pompeii. Making it one of the most lethal volcanic events in human history. Everybody died instantly. No survivors. Right.

However, Steve, being the good historian that he is, always had this thought, like, we all keep saying that there were no survivors. But as far as I could tell, no one had ever gone to look for them. Really? Yeah. According to Steve, you know, the one thing we all know about Pompeii is actually just an assumption.

And through his work, the way I see Pompeii is completely changed. The way I used to see it is kind of like a cartoon tragedy. But then hearing him talk about it, it's become so much more human.

Okay. So I had this question, you know. Yeah. Okay, so the first thing Steve told me was that something that's always left out of these popular accounts of Pompeii is just the cold, hard math.

Pre-eruption, the city of Pompeii. The nearby city of Herculaneum and the surrounding countryside had a combined population of. Maybe 50,000 people. That's 50,000 people in the red zone, right? So just imagine the area completely destroyed by the volcano. Right. Okay. And then how many human remains were discovered? So between all of the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, the villas that have been excavated, about 1,200.

1,200? That's it? Mm-hmm. That's like, what is that? Like, less than 5% of the people? That's tiny. Yeah. Of course, it could be that, you know, the rest of the bodies are actually there, but just haven't been found or dug up yet. How much of the red zone has been excavated? Oh, yeah.

A tiny fraction. Oh, wow. A tiny fraction. There's a lot of land there to dig through. Okay, okay. I see. So maybe the other bodies are just buried in these other places that they haven't. Maybe the other bodies are buried in these other places. Maybe. But all of them? It seemed unlikely. But still, like...

The town is right at the base of the volcano. You think people could have gotten out? Well, it's a very complex eruptive event. Okay. Okay. Do you want to just walk me through it? Should we just play it out? All right.

Pompeii is a city right along the coast of the Bay of Naples. It's a beautiful location. I sound like a real estate agent, but, you know, it's a gorgeous location down there in southern Italy along the coast. If you don't mind volcanoes, it's great. It keeps the property values down. Okay, so this is 79 AD. On August 24th in the morning, there were earthquakes, but these were common occurrence. So no one really paid attention to them. Probably just felt like a normal day.

Right. If I were to walk down the street in Pompeii, the main drag, what would I have seen? You would have seen a long street with two lanes flanked by sidewalks. Many of the shops would have taken over part of the sidewalk. They move...

In the backdrop of all this, less than 10 miles northwest of the city sat a large, green, cone-shaped mountain.

And on this day, at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon, if you were taking maybe a midday break, having some fish, some wine with friends at a sidewalk cafe, and happened to glance up at this mountain, you'd have seen the top of it just explode. Explode.

It's just pulverized and blown straight into the air. This massive dark column of rock and gas. Rising up about 20 miles into the atmosphere. Towering over Pompeii, higher than modern airplanes fly. Oh my god. So high, in fact. It takes several hours for that material to rain down fully. So most of it at this point is just hanging out up there in the air. Huh. Huh.

Which means if people looked at that and then said, I think it's time to leave, they would have three, four hours to get out.

Wait, I always thought that people got covered in ash instantly, like frozen in the middle of taking a bite at dinner or something. I mean, three, four hours sounds like a lot of time to leave. Yes, but that assumes that people decided quickly. And the last time this mountain had exploded was 1800 years before. So nobody knew that this was a volcano. They didn't even have the word volcano in the language. Oh, my God. I

I mean, you don't really know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought the explosion was the worst of it. Maybe they thought this, you know, the stuff that kind of looks like smoke is just going to blow away. Right. But even if you were like, OK, I am getting out of here right now.

Just imagine, maybe you were out running around town doing something. Your family's at home. You'd have to get home first. But the sky is rapidly darkening. The earth is shaking. You're trying to get through the chaos with the earthquake. Push your way through the people, the animals, the carts. Trying to make it home and gather your family before you go. When you finally reach your house, maybe someone's missing. Maybe you have a sick relative who can't move so easily. You have no idea how much time you have. Who knows? There's a million ways this could play out. Yeah. But...

When archaeologists dug up some of the houses in Pompeii, they discovered a clue. Every house would have at least a small shrine to the household gods.

A little hollowed out alcove in the wall where they keep these little statues. They're mostly bronze figurines between six and nine inches tall. And the members of the household would pray at the shrine to protect the home and the family. And when archaeologists uncovered these homes, they noticed... All the household shrines are empty.

All these little statues are gone. Oh. And not only that, all the safes that have been uncovered. They're strong boxes of money. Those are empty too. All of these things are gone from the houses. Wait, what does that mean? Well, it means that people were trying to just grab whatever was grabbable and get out of there.

So in those three hours, you can imagine that people were out of their houses, maybe on foot or on horseback, dragging carts behind them, just trying to make their way through the crowded, chaotic streets. And the volcano, remember, is to the north. So you kind of can assume most people are trying to go south towards the southern city gates. Get a move on, people. No time to waste here. But that material, that tall column of debris that's been hanging in the air starts to collapse.

And because of the prevailing winds coming from the northwest, it collapses towards the south, pushed over like a Jenga tower directly on top of the city of Pompani. The ash is filling the air. It's hard to breathe. You can't see anything. And then this pumice stone starts coming down. And then...

heavier volcanic glassy stones, and those, they're like missiles. So all this stuff kind of rains down, the streets fill up, become impossible to move through, and a lot of those people who did try to flee... If you map the human remains that have been discovered, the vast majority of them are clustered around the gates. They got caught in a traffic jam, and years later, recovered from their bodies, were the little bronze statues of household gods. Huh.

Okay, but Pompeii, it's a coastal city, right? Like maybe a bunch of people left by sea. Because, I mean, if it was me, I would try to get on a boat. Why would you try to get on a boat?

would assume that I could get farther away more quickly on a ship. Yeah. And if I don't know what's going on, the very least I know is that the problem is on land. Well, maybe. Oh, God. So imagine there's a volcano. Imagine there's also earthquakes. So there are tsunamis happening here.

And those, they're disastrous. So this sea, this is not a calm sea. And unless somebody left early or timed it perfectly so that they could flow out of the Bay of Naples with those waves going out, once those waves come back in, there's no sailing against them. They would be trapped. Ah, okay, okay. Maybe not by sea then. Maybe not. Anyway, things just get worse from there.

By dusk, the ash and rock have built up so much that it was impossible to leave. Some people took refuge in their houses, but the volcanic material came down and the roofs collapsed. Those who managed to escape the collapsed roofs make their way through the darkness and the heat and the falling missiles and... Took refuge in public buildings and in low areas like cellars.

And it was around this time that the second phase of the eruption began with these pulses of super hot volcanic gas. Estimates between 300 and 600 degrees. That's Celsius, which is 500 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that in one case in Herculaneum... They found evidence of gray matter that had been turned to glass.

What? It got so hot that someone's brain turned to glass. What? Yeah. And these gases rolled down the mountain into the city. And they're heavier than air. And they displace the oxygen starting at the ground and moving up. So the people who are taking refuge in cellars or downstairs in houses are all asphyxiated. There's no way around that. You can't escape that. I looked back.

The closest we can get to actually imagining what it would be like in Pompeii at that time comes from the letters of Pliny the Younger, an aristocrat, an author, a lawyer, also a nephew to the famous naturalist Pliny the Elder. Let us turn out of the high road, I said, while we can still see.

for fear that, should we fall in the road, we should be pressed to death in the dark by the crowds that are following us. He was a teenager at the time, and he watched Vesuvius erupt from across the Bay of Naples, a much safer distance than Pompeii. But still, he and his mother barely escaped with their lives. We had scarcely sat down when night came upon us, not such as we have when the sky is cloudy or when there is no moon,

but that of a room when it is shut up and all the lights put out. You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men, some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied, one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family, some wishing to die from the very fear of dying, some lifting their hands to the gods,

But the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all and that the final, endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world. Wow. You know, I know Stephen Tuck set out to find people who survived, but...

All I'm hearing is the six million ways that they could have died. Which is what makes even more impressive what Stephen Tuck found after the break.

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Latif. Sara. Radiolab. Back from break. Okay, so before the break, we met Professor Stephen Tuck, who is on a mission to try to find survivors from Pompeii, but who then told us how totally and hopelessly devastating the eruption of Vesuvius actually was. Right. I mean, it's the apocalypse, basically. It's the apocalypse. Yeah. But we also learned that there were these windows, these moments where it might have been possible to escape. Yeah.

Okay, so then what? So where do you go? What's your next step? So my next step was trying to figure out how to find people, and I decided the way forward was Roman names. Family names in the ancient Roman Empire were very tied to place. And so Steve's plan was to look for...

Pompeian names that kind of newly popped up in other cities after the eruption. Okay. That's his kind of strategy, which is, I think, like a pretty good strategy. But then how do you find the Pompeian? Like, are there old Pompeian phone books or...

letters or I don't know. How do you like even find them? No, not really. Nothing like that. But the special thing about Pompeii is that unlike old ruins that have, you know, been weathered for 2000 years, this city was basically preserved in ash. And so you can find names everywhere.

Oh, yes. They're in the usual places, carved into stone. You know, epitaphs, tombstones. There were names carved above the doors of people's homes, like a name on the mailbox kind of thing. Right. Or on objects. Seal rings that people had with their names on them. But also... Fortunately... You can read names that were just written or scratched lightly on a wall. Graffiti and painted announcements. People signed all that.

with their family names. Oh, nice. There were even receipts written on walls. Loan records from banks. Filled with names. You know, so-and-so agrees to borrow this much money and we'll repay it at this rate of interest. And then nine witnesses have to sign off on those. Wow. And probably a lot of those loans did not, there was no volcano clause in there. I guess a lot of those loans did not get repaid. Right. Right.

Anyway, so what he does is he basically takes every single name he can find that has ever been excavated anywhere in this region. Puts them in a big database, does this for Pompeii and Herculaneum. So we have a huge number of names. And he's like, okay, these are the people I'm looking for.

And so he puts up a map on the wall of his office. A very nice map that I made of the region. And of the roads, the Roman roads at the time. All the roads that led away from Pompeii and Herculaneum. And he's like, okay, I'm going to go through the neighboring towns and communities. There's thousands of communities. One by one to see if he can find any of these names properly.

popping up after the eruption. Okay. I started with the close cities. No survivors. Nobody in Sorrento or Salerno. He looked at the town of Velia. It's right on the coast. Everything you might want. Nobody in Velia either. He looked on the islands. I thought some people might have gone to the islands of Capri or Ischia. But no. Nothing. And like you could just imagine his finger like running down the map, following the road, crossing off this town, crossing off that town. The whole Sorrentine Peninsula, which makes up

the bottom half of the Bay of Naples. And it's outside the blast zone. Nobody in any of those communities. He tries moving inland, away from the coast. Yeah, they're close. There's roads. There's connections to Pompeii in some of these communities. But were any Pompeians there? No. City after city. Just nobody. It just keeps getting bleaker and bleaker. ♪

But then he thinks, OK, the town that would make the most sense is this one south of the Bay of Naples called Pestum. And Pestum is a beautiful Roman port city. It's on the West Coast, like Pompeii, like Herculaneum. It checked all my boxes. He's like, this is the place. It's everything that Pompeii is, but just outside the blast zone. He checks all the names in that town. And I found...

Nobody. No. None of the Pompeii names. Nobody from Pompeii, nobody from Herculaneum, nobody from any of the villas. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. There's just nobody. Oh. And as time went on... As I spent weeks or months doing research with no results, you know, I thought, okay, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, maybe everyone did die. ♪

Wow. Now I'm like so sad about this. Okay, just wait. Just wait. Okay. Because this whole time, Steve had been mostly looking in communities south of Pompeii. You know, Vesuvius is on the north side of the city. So he assumed that people in Pompeii... They look at the eruption and they flee south. Which makes sense.

But... When that eruptive column collapsed, the one that was 20 miles into the sky, when that collapsed, it collapsed to the southeast. So it's possible that if anyone tried to flee that way, they would have been killed by that collapse. In any case, Steve runs out of south, so he looks north. ♪

towards this big city. Guteoli, which is north of Vesuvius. It's the major harbor city for ancient Italy. And it's the largest community outside of Rome. And as he starts to go through all the names in the city, he comes across a clue in the shape of a bottle.

Are you ready? Yeah, I think so. A bottle that used to hold something called garum or garum. The word garum, it just like tickles my soul. This is Samin Nasrat. I'm a cook and a nerd. Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and Ancient Rome Enthusiast.

I'm a nerd cook. And she graciously agreed to help us make some garum. I've always kind of wanted to make a pot of it. Sardines. Stinky stuff. Why are we doing this? Okay, what is garum? Why is it a clue? What does it have to do with Pompeii and bottles? Great questions. And why are you all of a sudden cooking with Samin? Okay, I promise I'm going to get to that. Okay. Okay, okay, so...

When Steve was collecting Pompeian names, there was one he came across more than any other, which was this guy named Aulus Umbrichius Scarus. Aulus Umbrichius Scarus is the Garum king of Pompeii. He is the king of the fish sauce manufacturers. He had workshops all over Pompeii where they would bottle this...

Condiments. These are crunchy. Made from fresh sardines. Yeah, I think you want to expose guts. Chopped into pieces. Your cutting board looks like you have... Covered in blood. Butchered a person. Place fish guts in a vase. Mushing up fish heads, fish blood, fish scales. You put a ton of salt on there. That was pretty easy. And then you leave this whole jar in the sun. Stirring multiple times a day. To rot.

And over time, the fish and salt ooze out this brown liquid. And because most ancient Romans ate pretty...

plain food? Bread or some kind of grain and simple vegetables. Garum, and this guy Aulus Umbrichius Scarus is garum in particular. It's salty and fishy. You only need like a few drops, man. People would just buy it by the bottle and put it on everything. I think it was truly like the condiment on the table at all times. And when archaeologists began to dig up Pompeii, these bottles were found all over the place. Can you describe the bottle and the label?

So the bottles are very plain terracotta bottles. They've got a very narrow neck and a rounded body and then a narrow round foot at the bottom. But then across that sort of globular body was handwritten in ink, some of it's black, some of it's red, the labeling. And the labeling formula was always...

The flower of garum, which is a little hyperbolic. The flower of garum of scaris. The flower of garum of scaris. All these bottles had these words. This is like Mike's hot honey, but like... It's exactly Mike's hot honey. Yeah. It's like the Heinz ketchup of antiquity. And actually, this is, so far as we know, the first example of like a product with brand labeling in history. Wow.

Whoa. This fish sauce. In history? Yeah. And these garum bottles. They were a favorite outside of Pompeii as well. They're found as far away as southern France. Huh. It's like an empire. It is. It is. Yeah. But, of course, August 24th, 79 AD, along with the rest of Pompeii, Alessandr Brickius Scarus' home and all his garum workshops are buried in ash and stone.

And just like that, the production line for this famous fish sauce stopped dead. No more bottles shipped to southern France. You couldn't find it in Naples and Rome. No fish sauce bottles anywhere to be found post-79 AD. It was just one more casualty of Vesuvius.

Then, as Steve is digging around in documents from Puteoli, looking for Pompeian names, he discovers that... About 20 years after the eruption. There's a new product on the market in the town of Puteoli. Okay. Bottles, exactly like the bottles that Scarus had used at Pompeii. And this one has weirdly similar branding. It's the same labeling formula. In black or red ink. It says, the flower of Garum. Oh.

Of Putiolanus. Putiolanus? What's Putiolanus? Putiolanus just means the guy from Putioli. The man from Putioli. Hmm. So it's like a guy from Putioli that's making this stuff. Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like a ripoff, like somebody that's capitalizing on this brand that people used to love and is hearkening back to that. So it could be, right? Could be that someone's ripping off this guy's branding. Yeah. No. No? No. Because as Steve continues to dig for names, he comes across an epitaph. A group epitaph. And? And?

And guess what family he finds? Oh, my God. The Umbrichuses. Umbrichuses? That's right. Survivors. Wow.

And it's like, yes, there's somebody. There's somebody someplace. Wow. So that Alessandricius Scarus guy. He doesn't seem to have made it out, but his family did. And one of the young men. Probably Scarus' grandson. Is named Puteolanus. Like they named him after their new hometown. And he grows up to become. The Garum king of Puteoli. Succession of the fish sauce kingdom. The new heir, yeah. Yeah.

And now that he's looking in towns north of Vesuvius, Steve starts finding survivors all over the place. Six people in the little city of Nucaria. A person in Aquinum. Two people in Beneventum. A little cluster of five or six people. Over here. A couple dozen. Over there. Three families that moved to this small community in the mountains. There were three merchant families. They all made it out to Puteoli. Two families who owned private properties.

banks. Both settled at Cumi. He found rich people, poor people. Some of them had been well off at Pompeii and desperately poor later on. There's one story of a woman. She makes it out also to Puteoli. Who marries a gladiator. Called Aquarius. He's a water themed gladiator. Whoa. Yeah. He even finds this whole neighborhood in the city of Naples. Built just for the people from Herculaneum. Like it's like Chinatown or something, but it's like little Herculaneum. Oh.

The map he made just filled in with all this life. These people suffered tragedies. They became refugees. They fled. They moved into these new communities. You know, they named their kids after their new communities. They make religious dedications. They run for public office. They establish businesses. You know, they really just pick up.

I love that. Yeah. Okay, so all in all, how many people did he find? Well, it took him 10 years to comb through the names in 48 communities. Okay. And I found survivors in 12 of the 48. So in total, a couple hundred named individuals. Okay. Which, I mean, wow, people even survived. Yeah. But then, sorry, not to burst your bubble by saying this, but that leaves what, like 4,000?

48,000 people that are still unaccounted for? That's right. But what he sort of slowly started to realize is like... Well, let's say my house gets destroyed in, I don't know, a volcanic eruption today. I'm going to go move in to my parents' basement. I'm going to where my relatives are, right? Like, I'm going to where there's a couch I can crash on, where there's a roof I can stay under. You know, you go where they have to take you in, right? Like, that's probably most people's first impulse, right? Is to find...

Find relatives somewhere else. And so those people are invisible in the inscriptions because they're the same family name. They don't change the profile of a community. Right. You know, it's not a new family name moving into a community. Right. And I think that's where the vast majority of the people went. Now, what he believes is... Most people got out. The majority of people survived and almost always with their families. Wow. Wow.

I do find it just so tantalizing. Like, it makes you just want to know the rest of the story. Like, what happened to those people? How did they get out? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would love to know some of these details of what happened between the eruption and people resettling somewhere. Yeah. You know, what routes did they take? What occurred? You know, what traumas did they undergo, you know, on the way out? Yeah. It must have been just a terrifying experience. And we simply don't know.

But we know people went back to their families. You know, they went through the dark shouting their names at each other, as Pliny tells us in his letter. And they connected up, and only then did they flee. I don't know. I find it quite moving. Yeah.

So that's, yeah, that's the story. What do you, what do you make of that? You know, so my family's Pakistani. Like, I grew up in the U.S. My parents grew up in Pakistan. My grandparents grew up in India. Yeah. And like, you know, the partition of India was like this giant traumatic thing that like, I don't think my family really even has its arms around. Like,

like all the ways in which it impacted us. But like there's so much that gets lost in a big traumatic move like that. And I feel so cut off from even just like the lives that my grandparents had in India that like I would kill for anything, like who they were hanging out with and what they were doing and, you know,

Any crumb is like gold. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's basically why I ended up making that fish sauce with Samin. Yeah. I mean, really what we're doing is we're time traveling.

Yeah. I mean, that's what I think is so magical about food. Again, chef Samin Nasrat. I mean, even in the span of your own life, you eat stuff and you travel back to like the first time you had it or some meaningful time you had it. And so this is another way that we get to go have a sensory experience that people were having, you know, 2000 years ago. That time we almost died from a volcano. Exactly. But it's true that I can't.

Like, I can't stop imagining. It's just one day out of the blue, no warning. Boom, you lose your home. Not just your home, you lose your entire hometown. You can never go back to it. You can never walk down the streets you walked on as a kid. And then 20 years later, you're resettled in a totally new place, totally new life. And you're grocery shopping and you see on the shelf...

the flower of garum and you buy it and you take it home you open the bottle and you taste it okay all right okay let's open it on three okay one two three oh wow oh wow this is smelling stronger than it was okay

I went real deep. I went nose into the jar. Okay. Oh, boy. Okay. Okay. We're ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready. Okay. I'm putting some on my tongue right now. Oh, it's very, I mean, it's very salty. It's not really that gross. It just tastes like salty. It's not that gross. No, no, no. It just tastes salty. Tastes a little like umami.

It's like, you know, like sometimes you're playing in the water as a kid at the beach and a huge wave comes. That's right. And then like it knocks you over and you're like losing your breath and like you have to swallow some water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, oh, and then you're like, why? Like it hits the top of your mouth kind of. Yeah. And it was kind of seaweed-y water. Or something. That's what it is. It's actually not. It's actually not.

This episode was reported by me, Latif Nasser, with help from Annie McEwen and Akedi Foster-Keys. It was produced by Annie McEwen. My culinary shenanigans with Samin were recorded by Adam Howell. Voice acting by Brendan Dalton. Original music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom. Hosting help from Sara Khari. Fact-checked by Emily Krieger. Edited by Pat Walters.

And I doubt anyone's going to want to try it, but we're going to link to the recipe for garum. And I also have a giant jar of it in my house that I'm trying to get rid of.

Before we go, before we sign off here, real quick at the end, I just wanted to shout out a podcast I've loved for many, many years, and it feels right to promote it at the end of this particular episode of ours because it is a podcast about history, about science, but more than anything, about food. It's called Gastropod. It's so charming, but also encyclopedic about food history. So, for example, I just had the question, has Gastropod done an episode about garum? And...

Of course they have. It's in their episode about the history of ketchup, which I probably shouldn't have, but I just took 45 minutes out of the middle of my workday to re-listen to it, and it was so good. Did you know, for example, that way before anyone ever thought to put a tomato in ketchup, it was a fermented fish sauce?

Whatever condiment or snack or dessert or ingredient that you love, there's probably a gastropod about it. One of my favorite all-time episodes of theirs, Better Believe It's Butter, is about the margarine wars. Don't just take my word for it. The New York Times, Wired, TED Talks, all of them have chosen gastropod as one of their favorite podcasts. Yeah, so subscribe to gastropod wherever you get your podcasts. That's it for us. Thank you so much for listening.

Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont, and here are the staff credits.

Radio Lab was created by Jad Ebumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyanusambandham, Matt Gilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Our fact checkers are Gayan Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio.

Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday.

For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high-quality news about science, technology, and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24-7, our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, climate change, genetic engineering, childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news.

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