Today we are back with Adam Alexander the Seed Detective, upcoming book by the way of

the same name coming out on September 29th, so you can check that out in the podcast description.

So Adam, the title of today's show, An Ancient Fava Bean in Syria.

I would love to know the story here.

Well, thanks for asking me Kevin.

It's, I've, over the years, I've found myself in a number of, you know, interesting and

slightly hairy places and Syria was one of them and I was there in 2011 right at the start

of the Civil War and I went to Syria because I, it was the bread basket of the Middle East

and it's at the center of what is known as the fertile crescent, which is the kind of crucible

of the, of what we call the Great Founder Crops, which is where wheat comes from and chip peas

and lentils and a number of other crops, a lot of which I write about, talk about in the book.

And one of them is the Fava Bean or as we call it in, in, in Britain, the broad bean.

And I love growing them and I've been collecting them from all over the place and when I was

there in Syria, it was, I found myself in the ancient Roman city of Palmyra.

Now Palmyra is a ruin and, but it's a magnificent old Roman ruin in the desert with all these

great stone columns and arches and it's, it's, it's, it's just like something straight

out of a, out of a movie, it really is.

And there were very few, actually of any, there were no tourists there when I, then when

I was there because everybody had been told they couldn't come, it was too dangerous.

And in fact, the Syrians are the some of the loveliest people I've ever met in my life.

And I was in this little restaurant in Palmyra and there was a wonderful dish that was presented

to me of, it was a salad of Fava beans and this, these Fava beans, they've been skinned

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