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Hey, this is Outside In A Show Where Curiosity and the Natural World Collide. I'm Nate Hetchie. So far I have spent my January shoveling snow, like a ton of snow. Six feet, to be exact. My arm hurts, my shoulder hurts. All that's to say, I sincerely hope your new year has been a little bit more relaxing than mine. But relaxing or not, you know what I bet your past few weeks have been full of? Really good food. We're talking turkeys, stews, pies, maybe some black eyed peas on New Year's Day. I swear there are certain foods that just taste better around the holidays. There's an episode we did last year that celebrates exactly this. It's like a tasty little love letter to food. And even though author Amy Nizucca Matatil and I talked in the middle of summer, I mean heck I was still living in Montana, it felt like the perfect conversation to return to for this season. So here it is and bon appetit. Right now it is the middle of the summer. Where I am in Montana, this is the best time of the year. Hot, clear skies, rivers are flowing. But down in the south, in Mississippi, summer is a whole another story. It is sweltering, oppressive, which is why poet Amy Nizucca Matatil is so excited for the state's annual watermelon carnival. That comes in August when the entire south is that it's the hottest, you know, most human part and then when you get that first chilled slice of watermelon, there's just, that is summer. For Amy, food isn't just calories. In every bite, there's a story. Take that watermelon slice. It helped get the small town of Water Valley, Mississippi out of the Great Depression. It started the watermelon carnival way back in 1931 after the local bank had failed and the railroad had skipped town. Nowadays, upwards of 20,000 people go to the carnival every year because what brings more people together and in different ways than food? In a world that wants us to be fast and get food instantly, I think people are longing for that moment in time when like, oh, look what we can do with our kitchen garden. Look what we can do with the bounty shared to us from neighbors. Today on the show, a conversation with poet and author Amy Nizucca Matatil. Her work has a way of re-injecting wonder into the things in nature we often take for granted, the intricate tale of a peacock or the sounds of insects that inhabit her garden. In her new collection of essays, Bite by Bite, Nourishments and Jamborees, she's directed that infectious curiosity towards food, from flavors that seem so universal through thought of as mundane to more exotic dishes tied to very particular moments and places in her life. So, for this interview, we asked her to prepare a three-course meal. Three stories that reveal how food connects us in unusual ways. I hope you brought your appetite and stay tuned. Next, it's Bread Flare and his new band. Dropping hits every week. Find the new slots. I'm in the kitchen with Charlie Bigam. So what have we got here, Charlie? My brand new pan-fried pad thai noodles. Noodles? But your Mr Fish Pie guy? Guilty. And while ovens rule at roasting, the pan is king of noodling. Whether it's pad thai, yakisoba or laxer, finding that perfect texture is a bottomless noodle rabbit hole. But all I have to do is stir it in the pan for six minutes, right? Bingo! Try the new Charlie Bigam's Asian Pan-Fried Noodles. My noodle range, handmade in my kitchen. Pan-fried in yours. Hey, this is Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgie. Pop quiz. What is the world's favorite smell? I'll give you a second. Okay, a hint. It is the main scent that realtors use when hosting an open house. It is the most consumed flavor of ice cream in the world. You probably have a bottle of it in your pantry. That's right. Vanilla. The first of Amy's three-course meal. Vanilla is one of those quiet, homey-er smells that just feels soothing. It smells soothing, I think, to people. It doesn't jar us awake or anything like that. Now a lot of quote-unquote vanilla that flavors your ice cream or sits in the back of your kitchen shelf, it isn't real vanilla. It's an artificial flavor. And sometimes it can come from some really weird places. One of the sources is actually from the glands of a beaver. Beaver glands are one of the only things on this planet that even come close to the smell of vanilla, which does not appeal to many people, of course, that that's being flavored, but it's still considered a natural flavor because it comes from nature. So that was something that kind of took my breath away a little bit like, oh, some of the, some of the imitation vanilla's out there have a base of beaver gland. This beaver goo is known as castorium, and they use it in combination with their pee to mark territory. And while it was a very popular artificial vanilla flavor back at the turn of the century, you can take a deep sigh of relief because it is rarely used now. Instead, companies use a much more vegan-friendly synthetic chemical compound called vanilla, because while real vanilla might be the world's favorite smell, it's actually really tough to grow, making it the second most expensive spice in the world, just behind saffron. The vanilla bean is the fruit of the vanilla orchid, a soft white flower that blooms only once, and after it blooms, there's about a six hour window to pollinate. In its native Mexico, that work falls to a genus of stingless bee called the malipina bee. But when colonists brought vanilla plants from Mexico back to Europe and beyond, they found that the local insects weren't up to the task. So, unless there was like heavy rains that pushed the blossom closed, you know, bees, insects, they didn't, they don't pollinate like that. You actually have to hand pollinate them, it turns out. So outside of its native range, vanilla was nearly impossible to propagate. That is, until 1841, when a new method was discovered on the African island of Renyan, near Madagascar. At the time, it was a French colony. How did we discover that hand pollination? It was a boy. It was an enslaved 12-year-old boy named Edmund Albus, who was a gardener at this estate. And you know, through his careful observation and just noticing what was going on, he learned that if he pressed the two pieces of the flower together or used a little like kind of like a bamboo stick, kind of to touch them together, those flowers then bloomed and produced, you know, the beautiful, silky vanilla pods. Now, the thing that was so unusual about this is that the enslaved boy told the person who owned him, and that enslaver's best friend was a very famous botanist back in Europe. And that botanist was like, haha, I am the one who discovered this, you know, pollination. And the enslaver, in one of the rare instances of justice during that time, actually said, basically the equivalent of step off. You are not going to take credit for this. This is my gardener's work. And he was so adamant where this enslaver disavowed his best friend, white scientist, and actually put it in his will that forever the art of pollinating vanilla orchids was discovered by his gardener, Edmund Albeus. And he went so far as to even say, if anybody specifically my friend tries to claim it, it is false and he doesn't know what he's talking about. So he actually like, it was very, it kind of rocked the botany world because this best friend was a very prominent botanist. And it makes you wonder, what other things did he try to kind of usurp or steal, you know, but I mean, the bar is so low. I mean, also the other dark part is the enslaver never set him free. So if he truly wanted to, you know, do something great, right, that would have been the key thing. But I will say that that was one of the few things in food history where the enslaver actually gave credit to their, to the origins of a food development. And it's interesting because, you know, vanilla has this very poignant backstory, you know, but nowadays it's everywhere. I mean, the word vanilla means boring. Yes. That's what, that's the irony of it, right? What happened? What do you think happened? That is such a good question. And that is, that's the irony. I kept thinking of all of this, like the, to call someone vanilla is like an insult, you know, instead of saying, this is a, it comes from a rich and beautiful flower and it's one of the most poignant. If you ever have sliced open a vanilla bean and gotten some of the seeds on your hand, your hands will still stay fragrant for days, you know, I've never kind of understood that, description of someone being vanilla, because I've always, I've always kind of been a vanilla fan. I know I can remember very clearly in middle school, you know, I don't know, getting ice cream with my, my girlfriends and, you know, people would pick all the wildest flavors because the parents run around like, I'll have like double caramel fudge. And I remember getting vanilla and people would be like, what? That's so plain, but I truly love it. I mean, I truly love vanilla and I don't think it's, I don't think it's plain, you know? And to me, like the gooey caramel, but like whatever pieces of bubblegum in some cases like that is hideous to me. So but I wouldn't, you know, I mean, I would never say that to my friends, you know, directly, like to each their own, but I think vanilla is just such a gorgeous, gorgeous flavor in price cream. That's the irony of vanilla. It's a stand in for plainness, but the flavor is deceptively complex. It's absolutely everywhere and in everything, but the vanilla bean is exotic, specific and very hard to grow. And despite being native to Mexico and grown in Madagascar, it seems somehow weirdly American. Or maybe it just transports people back to their childhood. If I'm in a bakery of another country where I've never been before, vanilla is one of the smells that it's like, oh, everything else might be foreign to me, you know, but that's one tether home, you know, in some ways. And when I say home, it's also unusual as well because I'm Asian American, I'm the daughter of immigrants. And yet my parents, you know, my mom made cookies with vanilla. So there was a scent of coming home and having vanilla fill the air was very homey to me. That's not an Asian American thing. That's just a home thing to me. Two more courses still to go when Outside In continues. Are you all at Campaigns Lighting of the Dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions. My boss asked for results. So we opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend £200 on your first campaign and get a £200 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com. Terms and conditions apply. I'm in the kitchen with Charlie Bigham. So what have we got here, Charlie? My brand new pan-fried pad thai noodles. Noodles? But you're Mr. Fish Pie Guy. Guilty. And while ovens rule at roasting, the pan is king of noodling. Whether it's pad thai, yakisoba or laxa, finding that perfect texture is a bottomless noodle rabbit hole. But all I have to do is stir it in the pan for six minutes, right? Bingo. Try the new Charlie Bigham's Asian Pan-Fry Noodle Range, handmade in my kitchen. Pan-fried in yours. I'm in the kitchen with Charlie Bigham. So what have we got here, Charlie? My brand new pan-fried pad thai noodles. Noodles? But you're Mr. Fish Pie Guy. Guilty. And while ovens rule at roasting, the pan is king of noodling. Whether it's pad thai, yakisoba or laxa, finding that perfect texture is a bottomless noodle rabbit hole. But all I have to do is stir it in the pan for six minutes, right? Bingo. Try the new Charlie Bigham's Asian Pan-Fry Noodle Range, handmade in my kitchen. Pan-fried in yours. Wait, wait, wait, don't skip this. Don't skip this. Don't skip this. This is not an ad. This is me, Nate. And I'm here to tell you that it is yet again time to open up the outside inbox to listen to our questions. We have been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs? Or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions. So please send us the weirdest, wackiest questions about science in the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER. Or even better, send us a voice memo to OutsideInRadio at NHPR.org. OK, back to the show. Hey, welcome back to OutsideIn. I'm Nate Hedgie. Vanilla is one of those enduring flavors that feel like it'll always be popular. But then there are the one hit wonders. The food fads that seem forever associated with a particular moment in time. In the 1960s, it was space age foods like Tang, the orange drink substitute. Have a blast. Have some Tang. In the 1980s, it was wine coolers. Seedles, forty wine cooler Seedles. And in the early 2000s, there was a brief fascination with something called the miracle berry. Do you remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when Willy Wonka gives one of the kids a special piece of chewing gum? It's the most amazing, fabulous, sensational gum in the whole world. What's so fab about it? This little piece of gum is a three course dinner. Bull. No roast beef, but I haven't got it quite right yet. This is what a bunch of media outlets have compared the miracle berry to, which by the way is our second course. It's a little berry. It's about the size of a jelly bean. That again is poet Amy Nizucca Motatell. It's bright red when it's fully ripe. And yeah, it's called the miracle berry. It has the protein, um, miraculine in it. Miraculine? Yeah, it's actually called miraculine. And I know a clever name. And what miraculine does is that it alters your, uh, taste buds. So for a moment, about maybe 30 minutes maximum, maybe a little bit longer if you're lucky. If you chew a miracle berry, everything you eat after that becomes sweet. Miraculine works by essentially rewiring our sweet taste buds to identify acids like a lemon or the carbon dioxide in your beer as sweet instead. It's actually used in hospitals to help people who have lost their appetite. But in the early 2000s in New York City, miracle berries became a full blown fad. Amy was living upstate at the time, working her first job as a professor. When one of her friends invited her to a bar in the city for a flavor tripping party. So we were all in this room in the back of the bar. Each of us were given a, like a small glass and a small ceramic bowl. And I had about maybe like, I don't know, five miracle berries in each one. So the host would say, okay, first serving and want everybody to take one, one miracle berry, chew it, you know, kind of like really finely get, they said to get all the juices as possible, like covering your tongue. Like so it was like a slow chew. It's a little TMI, I know, but that's how they made sure they wanted to make sure that we had the full of that. The things they were serving were ridiculous. It was not meals. It was like a tray of saltine crackers or a tray of olives, some lemon slices. These are not meals, but it was, they would say like first course, second course, third course, like that. And you could see just like a first nothing, people are like, this doesn't work. What a rip. And then before you know it, you just see everybody's face just start softening into a smile, like almost disbelief. Like what? You know, I mean, I remember when we were serving the lemons and that was such a shock. I mean, it was like, it was like one of the, like a mandarin orange, just so, so juicy sweet. So it still tastes like when you were eating the lemon, it still had like a lemon flavor, but just like extra sweet. You know what it was? We could smell the lemon, but the taste was all orange. The final course, the dessert, the piece de resistance was the Guinness, the pint of Guinness. I could smell like this smells like beer, but then when you drink it, I mean, I was drink, I had to slow down because I was like, this tastes like a chocolate milkshake. I could just down this whole thing. And then that would not be great. Amy told me that the reason she remembered the night so well wasn't actually the miracle berry. Sure, it was cool, but it was the people, the experience. She was with a special group of friends, mostly from college, the kind of friends that when you're single and in your early twenties, you were hanging out with all of the time, your crew. And after that night, slowly, one got married, others moved away. They drifted apart and miracle berries, they kind of drifted away too. You don't see them going viral on TikTok these days, but the memory of that night, it holds steady for Amy. None of us had phones. I think there was something like a track phone. We had to be in the same room together. And I think because of that and knowing how precious it was, I mean, oh my gosh, I'm only speaking for myself, but that's why I can imagine like almost what we were wearing, our facial expressions were because there was no, oh, let me take a picture of this. If you wanted to spend time with friends or loved ones, you had to be present like physically, literally present. I've got nothing against snapping a picture of a meal. Good food by itself can be more than just appetizing. It can be beautiful. But think about your all time favorite meals. Do you picture it on a plate perfectly in frame? Or do you picture the table, the restaurant and the people you shared it with? To me, it's the company that makes the meal worth remembering. I tell this to my kids all the time, you know, like back in my day, I think they look at me with pity, but we didn't need to record every meal or we didn't need to, you know, take pictures while we had like a dessert in front of us. Like we just remembered it. And they're like, oh mom, you know, but it's true. I think you I think you really hit upon something there. What's it taste like? It's tomato soup. It's hot and creamy. I can actually feel it running down my throat. So many community food events are characterized by a good spread. Bloody meals, potlucks, backyard barbecues, where you just load up a plate like it's a painter's easel with different colors and textures. But sometimes all whole community comes together to gather around a single food. In Mississippi, it's the watermelon. Where I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, it was brought worst. And in Western New York, it's the Concord Grape. The area is known affectionately as the Grape Belt. It's the oldest and largest Concord grape growing region in the world. When Amy was working her first post college job there as a professor, she says some days it smelled literally like grape juice. Driving in these country roads, you can just I never wanted to have my windows open because it just smelled like grape Kool-Aid is what I call that, you know, or grape bubblegum, all the synthetic forms of grape. You smell the real deal and that's the Concord grapes just really just ripening in the sun. Just a note here, the town where these grapes got their name is called Concord, Massachusetts. But just about everywhere else, including New York's grape belt, a lot of people say Concord, like the supersonic jet. Anyway, Amy moved there in the 2000s and moving can feel isolating. It takes time to meet new people to feel like you belong in a place. But then she found out about this legendary grape festival about 30 minutes from her house. And one weekend she decided, what the heck, you got to do something for the weekend. What did it look like when you got there? Utter madness. I mean, first of all, there was music, there was the beer tent, but like grape flavored beer and the like the pie and dessert tent, that was the happening place. This is the longest running grape festival in New York state. A three day party in a small town tucked along the coast of Lake Erie. It has an amateur wine tasting contest, a grape queen contest, grape parades, and the centerpiece, a wine stomping contest. Now, I have looked this up and this is not a quaint wine stomping tradition. This is a crowd cheering classic rock blaring grape smashing fest. All right, stompers. One, two, three, stop. Let's see how this goes. So, two, it crosses. And so you were by yourself and I can imagine if I was by myself, I'd be like, oh, I don't want to like, you know, put myself too much out there. But you, you actually did do some grape stomping, right? Yeah, I did. And I did. You get in and you know, I had all these questions like, is this sanitary? What's going on? I mean, you know, but also there was a part of me that was just uninhibited because it's like everybody, not a one person ever looked like they were in a bad mood. Everybody was just so joyful. Like I just had to join in. I quickly learned you had to do like kind of a stomp, stomp, stomp, pivot, stomp, stomp, stomp, pivot. The people who won or placed are the ones who stomped in multiple places. The ones like me who were just like, oh, la, la, la, I'm going to stomp in one place like a quick jog that produced almost nothing, you know. I'm smiling ear to ear because it was just such a kind of almost over the top, ridiculously joyful event and it happened once a year in this small little town. For months, Amy had felt like a stranger in Western New York. She was new to the area, new to her job, a person of color in a very white part of the country. So she was expecting the Festival of Grapes to go a lot differently than it actually did. I've been in festivals where it's more like people just stare and little kids come up and say, what are you? You know, things like that. You know, so I was bracing myself for that. I don't know why it didn't happen at this festival, but it was such a relief. Nobody was asking me, what are you? Excuse me, are you Portuguese? You have very good English, you know. I have to tell you, that's kind of a bummer when you're at some festival reminding your business at a grocery store and then someone taps you on their shoulder. It's just a bummer. So I think what was notable about this festival in particular is that people were just genuinely like amused, bemused that I was a new faculty member at the local college. They really seemed to really want me to feel at ease and they did that by food. All these different versions of grape pie and grape cobblers and things like that, which they would not let me pay for. To do that for strangers, I know it sounds so quaint and maybe the bar was so low, but they truly, like, they did make me feel welcome and gave me these really unusual, to me, unusual offerings involving grapes. There are hundreds of food festivals like this in the United States. There is the Lone Star Chili Cook Off in Texas, the West Side Knut Club Fall Festival in Indiana. I mean, Iowa alone has a sweet corn fest, a bacon fest and a sauerkraut fest. All foods, by the way, that you can find these days in grocery stores from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon. And, you know, there are festivals like this all over the place and they can be super cheesy. What do you think they accomplish in a world where the same food is available everywhere? What it does these festivals celebrate is community. You know, I mean, again, every food festival I've been to, even the ones where they kind of, you know, hone in on my skin color or something, there is still palpably a sense of community there. And especially, I think, today when we sometimes see a lack of generosity or a lack of sharing, it's all like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps or this is, take care of you and yours, you know, and that's it. I think these food festivals are a nice antidote away from that, that we're all stronger and happier when we share these things together. And also it's easier to dehumanize each other when we don't share in that, you know. So anything we can do to not dehumanize each other, I think, is a win. Amy Nizucca Matatil is a poet and author of the new book, Bite by Bite. We'll have a link to it in the show notes. This story was reported, produced and mixed by me and your host, Nate Hedgie. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, Marina Hanky and Jessica Hunt. One help on this episode came from our former intern, Catherine Hurley. Rebecca Levoie is NHPR's director of on-demand audio. Music is from Blu.sessions. Outside In is a production of NHPR. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask, even in 2026. Enter how to. The long-standing advice show and ambi-award nominated best personal growth podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host, who, me, Mike Peska. Each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond with help from a world-class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silences. You've got questions. We'll find the experts and the answers. So follow How To with Mike Peska wherever you get podcasts. Have you ever asked yourself, can the president really do that or wondered if there was too much money in political campaigns? Then check out the new season of You Might Be Right, hosted by us, former Tennessee governors Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam. We're back for a brand new season now and You Might Be Right cements the idea that constructive disagreement can lead to real problem-solving. This season we're going to dig into the role of the National Guard, AI regulation and a lot more. New episodes drop every other week. Follow You Might Be Right wherever you get your podcasts. A great story like Monsters Inc. stays with you forever and Disney Class is where you'll find your next great story. On the return of the award-winning hit series, Rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television. To the unmissable crime drama, High Potential. Gotta dead body, gotta go. A lifetime of great stories awaits. This spring on Disney Plus, 18 Plus, subscription required. T's and C's apply.