The Romance and Sex Life of the Date

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture created a special department of men, called “Agriculture Explorers,” to travel the globe searching for new food crops to bring back for farmers to grow in the U.S. These men introduced exotic specimens like the mango, the avocado, and the date. In 1900, the USDA sent plant explorer, Walter Swingle, to Algeria to study the date. As Swingle took temperature readings and soil temperature, he realized that the conditions were very much like those in California’s hot, arid Coachella Valley, sometimes referred to as the American Sahara. In order to market this new fruit and promote the region, date growers in the Coachella Valley began capitalizing on the exotic imagery and fantasy many Americans associated with the Middle East. In the 1950s date shops dotted the highway, attracting tourists. There was Pyramid Date shop where you could purchase your dates in a pyramid. Sniff’s Exotic Date Garden set up a tent like those used by nomadic tribes of the Sahara. One of the most well-known date shops, which still exists today, is Shields Date Garden, established in 1924. Floyd Shields lured in customers with his lecture and slide show titled, “The Romance and Sex Life of the Date.”

This story was produced in collaboration with Lisa Morehouse.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Shields Date Garden is the only place in the world where you can see and hear
0:09.1	The Romance and Sex Life of the Day.
0:11.8	Back as far as we have any record of dates,
0:14.1	man has cut the male flowers from the male palm
0:17.2	and placed them in the tops of the female palm.
0:21.0	Today on the Kitchen Sisters present, the Romance and Sex Life of the Date, produced with Lisa Morehouse.
0:29.0	There you can see a female flower is starting to open.
0:33.5	The spath has split.
0:35.5	The little yellow beads on the strands on the elos.
0:39.5	Those will be dates.
0:41.0	The Halawi and the Barhi come from southern Iraq around Basra. The tradition
0:46.4	goes back thousands of years when Alexander the Great passed through in 322 BC, this is what he would have been eating bar he dates.
0:57.0	In 1898 the United States Department of Agriculture had this brilliant idea to start a department of agricultural explorers.
1:08.0	These explorers were kind of like the Indiana Jones of the plant world.
1:13.0	They travel the globe searching for new crops,
1:16.5	exotic crops that they could bring back
1:18.8	and encourage farmers to grow commercially.
1:21.8	The mango, the avocado, oranges. My name is Sarah C. Cates. I'm a
1:27.6	California historian. I grew up in the Coachella Valley in Indio, California,
1:32.1	the date capital of the United States.
1:35.0	David Fairchild, who started the agricultural explorers, chose to go to Baghdad to find dates, in part because he remembered stories from
1:45.3	one thousand and one Arabian Nights. Sinbad, Queen Chaharazad, Ali Baba and the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.