This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

This is a time of year when it's popular for people to argue about food, one of my least favorite activities. I'm laughing. I'm laughing

because it's always time to argue about food, but there's specific foods this time of year that are the

subject of arguments. Yeah, I hate it. We could talk about that

behind the scenes on Friday, but I sure hate the food arguments. Anyway, a lot of the talk that

pops up around the holidays is about what kind of cranberry sauce people have at Thanksgiving

and Christmas dinners and other holiday feasts if you have them. We'll talk about why I hate that entire argument, but it reminded me that I actually put

cranberries on my list a while back, and then I kind of spaced out about them.

They got on my list because one of my BFFs is a cranberry girl.

I call her cranberry queen.

She may or may not have cranberry tattoos. And I love her.

And so I feel like a jerk for sitting on this topic for so long after I put it on my list.

But we're going to talk about cranberries today and their history. This is a largely North American episode, heads up, because cranberries are native to North America.

The cranberries we eat, there are other cranberries, not as popular for eating.

So, as Holly just said, the cranberries we typically eat today are native to North America, grown in other places.

Today, an estimated 98% of all the cranberries are grown in the U.S. and Canada,

with the U.S. producing about 400,000 tons of the fruit.

Canada comes in at a little less than half of that.

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