Meet the Queen of Kiwi: The 96-Year-Old Woman Who Transformed America's Produce Aisle (ENCORE)

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The produce section of most American supermarkets in the 1950s was minimal to a fault, with only a few dozen fruits and vegetables to choose from: perhaps one kind of apple, one kind of lettuce, a yellow onion, a pile of bananas. Today, grocery stores routinely offer hundreds of different fruits and vegetables, many of which would be unrecognizable to time travelers from a half century ago. What changed, and how did Americans learn to embrace spaghetti squash, sugar snap peas, and kiwi fruit? This episode, we tell the story of the woman behind this transformation: Frieda Caplan, the Queen of Kiwi. (Encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, we're on the road reporting an exciting new story this week, so while we're out
0:06.8	scrambling around in the dirt and surviving on trail mix, we thought we'd treat
0:11.3	you to an encore presentation of one of our favorite episodes.
0:15.0	It's about a woman who revolutionized the variety of fruits and vegetables
0:19.0	were able to find on our plates.
0:21.0	Frida Kaplan was the Queen of the Kewi and plenty of other weird fruits besides, and
0:25.8	we're bringing this encore to you thanks to our friends at American Express.
0:28.7	Enjoy and we'll be back in just a week with a brand new episode.
0:35.0	Some of my favorite memories are getting on the phone and taking one of these orange spiky
0:41.8	hornmelons and trying to describe on the telephone to some guy because
0:45.7	everybody was a guy, you know, some young girl who's, you know, talking about this orange spiky
0:50.2	cucumber-ish thing that you've got to have.
0:52.4	Orange spiky cucumberish thing that you've got to have.
0:53.0	Orange spiky cucumberish thing?
0:55.0	What's going on and why does he have to have it?
0:58.0	That exact response is something Karen Kaplan has heard before,
1:02.0	many times. an endless chorus of what what is that why
1:07.1	would I want to buy that and Karen would tell the person on the other end who was
1:10.7	usually a buyer for a grocery store
1:12.8	that they just had to have the latest cool new fruit or vegetable
1:16.3	that their customers had never eaten,
1:17.8	but were about to fall in love with.
	...

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