Growing up, Sawyer Clark did not understand the allure of pistachios.

My first memory of pistachios is watching my grandpa crack them

and put the shells into a bowl.

And I couldn't imagine why someone was eating those weird green nuts

with a shell on.

That was hard to get off. But Clark eventually had a change of heart.

Today, he helps run a pistachio farm.

He spends his days thinking about nitrogen levels in soil

and calculating nut yields.

In the fall come, you know, late August, but usually more September,

you keep an eye on the crop and when the nuts start splitting and the holes start peeling back, you shake the trees,

cuts the nuts, bring them to a processor and get them to consumers.

There's a reason for his change of heart.

A few decades ago, there wasn't much of a commercial market for

pistachios in the United States. They could only be found at farmers markets or in

the bulk bins at health food stores. These days it's a different story.

Pistachios are touted by celebrities in Super Bowl ads. They're sold in huge display

cases at major grocery chains and they're now the fastest growing nut product in the country.

In the 1990s the USDA says the US produced about 250 million pounds of pistachios.

This year, the estimate is going to come in bigger than 1.5 billion pounds.

So that's more than 6X in 30 years just within the US.

For the Freak economics radio network this is the economics of everyday things.

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