This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 25th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. It's easy to take for granted the

incredible variety of foods available to us because of globalization,

most particularly fresh produce that because growing seasons are different in

different hemispheres, that food has to come from another side of the world.

Heater Scott Linscomb details how globalization

broadens our pallets.

Scott, before we started recording you and I

were discussing our mutual love for the fractaled vegetable known as Romanesco.

Yes. And Romanesco is hard to get.

It is.

Well, and it's hard to get only, I think, in the sense that we are now so totally

and utterly spoiled by the all season ubiquity of fresh produce from anywhere and everywhere all over the world, right?

So, you know, when I was a kid, Caleb, the avocado, you know, you, when avocados were in season, okay, you got them. When they weren't, they weren't. Same with, you know, oranges and strawberries and all this type of stuff. And that's of course long, long in the past. But Romanesco, which is mainly I think only grown in California and only a couple times a year is still one of those things that you only get a little bit even in this wonderfully

globalized economy we live in because it's so I think difficult to grow. you know in general yeah we're just we're totally

spoiled you know why can't I have Romanesco delivered to my house in two hours in the

middle of January, right?

Well, you know, that's how it used to be for like literally all produce.

So for a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, the prices go up.

And then there's a season where there's a glut of the stuff, where it's everywhere. Yeah. And so we live, I think it's been said many times, we live better than kings.

Oh yeah.

With regard to the kings of old with regard to our ability to access foods from all over the

...