Oh, hey, it's that friend who looks so good in hats, they never don't wear a hat.

Allie Ward, let's take a field trip.

Coincidentally, not coincidentally at all, this is Indigenous History Month here in the United

States of Colonized America.

So we're heading to the Pacific to chat about foods of native populations and this movement

to study and cultivate and reintroduce them.

Last summer, I had this rare opportunity while doing a symposium for USC's storytellers program.

I was teaching climate scientists about Psycom, and I got to meet some really lovely and super brilliant folks.

And one of them told me that he was working in breadfruit. And knowing Jack about it,

of course, I had to corner him on a boat dock on Catalina Island to start asking him one million

questions. One of these, you may have like me, is what is a breadfruit? Is it a baked good? Is it a

sweet, juicy thing on a vine? Is it a carb? Is it meat? What's happening here?

And we'll dig in. But first, a quick primer is that the islands of Hawaii are right in the middle

of the Pacific Ocean. It's like 2,000 miles in either direction from Polynesia or North America.

So about a thousand years ago, folks from Polynesia cruised over on these big

double-hulled canoes, guided by stars. They got to Hawaii. They were like, these volcano

might islands are great. Let's live here. Let's bring our pigs, chickens, dogs, and foods like

coconut and sugarcane and bananas and tarot and breadfruit. So many centuries

later, European explorers, we'll call them landed, then thought the islands were sweet and they

were pretty, they liked the food. So the roasted breadfruit smelled like bread to these colonizers

who called it breadfruit, although native Hawaiians have plenty of other

names for it, which we'll hear about in a bit. But a botanist on Captain Cook's ship took some notes

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