Cozy Autumn Mysteries

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Speaker 4 Hey, Dakota Ring listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive.

Speaker 10 And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too.

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Speaker 10 We tend to think of seasonal traditions as old, established.

Speaker 13 They're often repeated and so presumably something we've done before.

Speaker 24 And yet, all traditions have to start somewhere.

Speaker 27 Santa Claus was not always a fat, rosy-cheeked man with a white beard and a red suit until he showed up in a Coca-Cola ad in the early 1930s, the same decade kids started trick-or-treating.

Speaker 19 Old Lang Zine didn't become the New Year's song until Guy Lombardo's band played it on the radio in 1929.

Speaker 19 And Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas couldn't hop the charts every December until it was actually released in 1994.

Speaker 24 And one of the fall season's most sippable autumnal traditions did not become established until 2003.

Speaker 41 Could you you have ever imagined the cultural shift that happened when Starbucks debuted the pumpkin spice latte? Like just the obsession.

Speaker 42 Wow.

Speaker 11 Don Martin is a writer and podcaster who has thought a lot about the Starbucks pumpkin spice line since he started ordering Frappuccinos in college.

Speaker 41 Back then, I was all about like give me a big frothy pumpkin spice flavored basically milkshake that like somebody had whispered the word coffee next to.

Speaker 41 I think I have a photo of me with some terrible hair of like French

Speaker 45 of like French kissing a pumpkin spice frappuccino.

Speaker 48 How do you French kiss a pumpkin spice wrapperccino?

Speaker 35 There's like a lot of tongues.

Speaker 41 Um listen, I was young. I'm not proud.
We all do things for love.

Speaker 22 And Don is not the only person who has ever fallen hard for this beverage.

Speaker 50 It's officially PSL season.

Speaker 52 Pumpkin spice is back at Starbucks, y'all.

Speaker 53 First pumpkin spice of the season. Oh my God.
Oh my God.

Speaker 26 According to Starbucks, the drink originated in a group brainstorm convened to try and recreate the success of a peppermint mocha drink.

Speaker 12 The pumpkin spice latte was intended to just be a one-off released that fall.

Speaker 24 But when the PSL, as Starbucks refers to it, was introduced, something, if you stop to think about it, really bizarre happened.

Speaker 56 This sweet spiced coffee drink became a lifestyle phenomenon.

Speaker 41 I don't think anybody could have like prepped for like the seismic cultural shift that that was.

Speaker 16 By the 2010s, hundreds of millions of drinks had been sold.

Speaker 12 And pumpkin spice was not just in coffee cups, it was everywhere.

Speaker 27 Pop-tarts, Pringles, cereal, beef, jerky.

Speaker 41 Do you remember that era a few years ago where there was pumpkin spice toilet paper?

Speaker 46 I do not.

Speaker 45 Oh my God.

Speaker 23 I have a gross question, which is like, how do you know it's pumpkin spice toilet paper?

Speaker 58 That was my question as well.

Speaker 41 So I did, of course, have to buy it for science. It just, it smells like it.

Speaker 12 And putting pumpkin spice into consumer products was only part of the PSL's cultural reach.

Speaker 59 For many, the drink had become one of the very hallmarks of autumn.

Speaker 41 Where it's like, oh, the seasons are changing. Oh, God, I have to have this in order to start fall.
You know, like, I need to pull out my knee-high boots.

Speaker 41 I need to get my puffer vest, and I need to go and get that pumpkin spice latte, like to celebrate the changing of the seasons.

Speaker 57 It's officially fall, aka pumpkin spice season.

Speaker 63 Let's get the first pumpkin spice latte of the year.

Speaker 64 The first sip instantly made me want to pull out all the fall decor.

Speaker 41 It tastes like fall. It's a big cup of fall.

Speaker 41 Or at least it used to be.

Speaker 57 Because for all the excitement that to this day greets the PSL's annual arrival, it's also accompanied by a certain amount of grumbling and suspicion.

Speaker 33 And I'm not just talking about the eye rollers who find it and the the women who love it unbearably basic.

Speaker 41 There's usually a mention of, I remember the pumpkin spice latte tasting better. And I went and tasted.
I hadn't had one in years and I wanted to go back and try it.

Speaker 41 And it just doesn't taste the same.

Speaker 68 Everyone's saying that they changed the Starbucks pumpkin spice latte.

Speaker 63 Yeah, that's why it tastes different.

Speaker 70 There is something different about that. It's very, very strange.
Very, very weird.

Speaker 71 It's not normal.

Speaker 27 Reddit threads, Facebook posts, TikToks, YouTubes, and Instagram reels are full of people claiming that something is off.

Speaker 73 That this pumpkin spice latte, this beloved fall ritual, is just not what they remember.

Speaker 19 And instead of chalking this up to crankiness or faulty memories, it turns out there's a reason for that.

Speaker 41 And now it's just a little bit worse.

Speaker 55 This is Decoder Ring.

Speaker 21 I'm Willa Paskin.

Speaker 57 Some things just scream scream autumn, though exactly what may be different for all of us.

Speaker 6 Personally, nothing says fall to me like sweaters, slippers, and a screening of one hairing at Sally.

Speaker 74 But maybe you're a football fan, a really into spooky season, an apple picker, a leaf peeper, a candy cornaholic.

Speaker 19 Whatever it is, fall just seems to have a lot of these homey signifiers.

Speaker 27 And in today's episode, we're looking closely at three of them.

Speaker 32 First, we'll get to the bottom of whatever's going on with the taste of the pumpkin spice latte.

Speaker 54 Then we'll gaze deep into the enigma hiding inside a beautiful fall leaf.

Speaker 12 And finally, we'll finish off with some serious questions about the availability of an elusive cookie.

Speaker 11 So today on Dakota Ring, snuggle up to three cozy mysteries.

Speaker 74 It's fall y'all.

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Speaker 4 Hey decodering listeners, you know how much I love a good deep dive.

Speaker 10 And since you're tuning into the show, I know you do too.

Speaker 16 This holiday season, you can give the gift of endless exploration to like-minded friends and family with Apple gift Card.

Speaker 14 They can use it for research apps on the App Store, documentaries on the Apple TV app, or even ad-free podcasts.

Speaker 11 It's the perfect present for the curious mind.

Speaker 4 Visit applegiftcard.apple.com to learn more and gift one today.

Speaker 30 So, when we left off, Don Martin and many others had noticed that something seemed to have happened to the canonical fall beverage, the pumpkin spice latte.

Speaker 63 So, the pumpkin spice is different this year.

Speaker 82 Everyone keeps saying that it tastes wrong.

Speaker 83 I'll be honest, the pumpkin spice lattes weren't as good.

Speaker 68 It's worse than last year.

Speaker 12 And while most people didn't do anything with this information besides staging a personal taste test on TikTok, Don is not most people. He decided to investigate.

Speaker 19 And what he found led him back to 2014.

Speaker 41 A lot of this started in the heyday of like Facebook, back when like memes and infographics were becoming a primary method that people consumed

Speaker 41 news and information. And there was this blogger who goes by Food Babe.

Speaker 84 Hi, I'm Vonnie from FoodBabe.com. I'm about to call the Lean Cuisine headquarters.
I'm going to try to find out what exactly is natural about their honestly good product.

Speaker 77 Food Babe's real name is Vonnie Hari, and she had built a large following on social media as a self-styled investigator of what she deemed to be questionable ingredients.

Speaker 6 Hari had already been part of successful campaigns to get Subway to remove remove an additive from its bread and to get artificial dyes out of craft macaroni and cheese.

Speaker 64 Yellow number five and yellow number six specifically are known carcinogens. That means it's linked to causing cancer.

Speaker 33 In 2014, she posted a meme that went viral.

Speaker 27 It was meant as a wake-up call.

Speaker 31 The PSL was not what it seemed.

Speaker 41 So there was like a picture. a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, and it was like sliced down the middle and you could like see all the layers of the nefarious ingredients in there.

Speaker 41 Like, there's these dyes and these chemicals.

Speaker 12 This meme pointed out that the PSL contained two doses of caramel coating, which it annotated as being considered a carcinogen.

Speaker 13 Hari also claimed it contained a toxic dose of sugar and called out other food additives.

Speaker 31 But there was one complaint that really stood out.

Speaker 41 Food Babe specifically said, Do you know what isn't in the pumpkin spice latte?

Speaker 60 It's pumpkin.

Speaker 89 And that was true.

Speaker 90 There was no actual pumpkin in the pumpkin spice latte.

Speaker 48 And for a lot of people, this was shocking.

Speaker 63 Okay, do you know what pumpkin spice is? Let me educate you real quick. Pumpkin spice doesn't actually have any pumpkin in it.

Speaker 56 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Speaker 91 So there's no pumpkin.

Speaker 92 in pumpkin spice. Pumpkin spice foods inexplicably seem to grow more omnipresent, even though there's no actual pumpkin in the drinks.

Speaker 66 But this was not news to Don.

Speaker 41 I never assumed it had pumpkin in it. Pumpkin spice was always the spice blend.
It's the spice blend that turns pumpkin into pie ingredients. Like, I never once thought it had pumpkin in it.

Speaker 27 Bakers have been referring to this mixture of cinnamon, clove, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice as a pumpkin spice blend since at least the early part of the 20th century.

Speaker 28 And Starbucks hadn't been keeping the lack of pumpkin a secret.

Speaker 57 But when the Food Babe meme dropped, the message was clear.

Speaker 41 They're lying to you. Starbucks is lying to you about what's in their product.

Speaker 29 The backlash was on.

Speaker 41 Oh my God, it went, I mean, it was everywhere. It was all over social media.
The news covered it.

Speaker 71 Hari made a big splash earlier this fall when she posted the previously undisclosed ingredients of Starbucks pumpkin spice latte.

Speaker 51 Seeing that a coffee drink is colored with this ammonia-based artificial food dye is very alarming that they are putting this chemical in my drink.

Speaker 62 Ultimately, it generated enough concern and hubbub that Starbucks was forced to respond.

Speaker 41 They were like, well, we're going to take your concerns to heart and we're going to reformulate our pumpkin spice latte drink.

Speaker 41 And we need to make this right by including the missing ingredients that they should have added in the first place.

Speaker 16 Namely pumpkin.

Speaker 46 Namely pumpkin.

Speaker 94 Starbucks has announced it will include real pumpkin in its pumpkin spice latte. No No artificial coloring.
Didn't know it didn't have any real pumpkin.

Speaker 94 But the coffee chain will make this change after a popular food blogger known as the Food Babe questioned the drink's ingredients.

Speaker 31 And so since 2015, the PSL is indeed not the same PSL that America first fell in love with.

Speaker 41 And I'm going to tell you, people can tell. That little bit of extra pumpkin.
I don't, I don't know. It just, it just makes it taste weird.

Speaker 23 Yeah, it is a weird thing to put into your coffee.

Speaker 46 It is.

Speaker 41 Like, I mean, raw pumpkin is what we gave my diabetic dog. Raw pumpkin doesn't taste good.

Speaker 12 And Don is not interested in all of this just because of the taste.

Speaker 34 He sees this whole incident as a harbinger of things to come.

Speaker 29 Because the uproar about what is really in the PSL has since recurred many times over in far more consequential areas.

Speaker 41 We present a problem people didn't even think that they had because it's not a real problem and tell people to be scared and tell people not to trust.

Speaker 41 And that in and of itself is a breeding ground for misinformation, disinformation, and for a whole host of other things.

Speaker 21 Vonnie Hari, the woman known as Food Babe and the person who kickstarted the outcry against the pumpkin spice latte, has since become one of the major players in RFK Jr.'s Maha movement.

Speaker 33 And she even spoke at the White House earlier this year.

Speaker 51 This has got to stop today, that American companies are poisoning us with ingredients. Americans deserve safe food and our children deserve safe food.

Speaker 20 She's been criticized for inaccuracies, fear-mongering, and making claims rejected by food scientists.

Speaker 32 But she's also clearly tapping into genuine anxieties about what we're putting into our own bodies.

Speaker 23 Getting a small dose of pumpkin added to a sugary, caffeinated, decadent treat that no one ever should have construed as healthy in the first place is an odd accomplishment.

Speaker 56 It's one that doesn't do much but make the PSL a little thicker, goopier, stranger.

Speaker 86 But maybe that makes the PSL even more exemplary of our current moment.

Speaker 33 When anxiety and mistrust lead people to be skeptical of traditional expertise and yet simultaneously credulous of individuals doing their own research, you get weird outcomes, compromises, workarounds.

Speaker 59 You get metaphorical pumpkin puree in your coffee.

Speaker 41 I think all of the headache of the pumpkin spice latte eventually made me break up with the pumpkin spice latte. Like, maybe, maybe we don't need everything to be pumpkin spice.

Speaker 70 When we come back, we try and make you look at another fall signifier: autumn leaves a little differently.

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Speaker 27 It is a human foible that we don't always appreciate things until they're gone.

Speaker 90 That we don't remember to call our great aunt until she's very sick.

Speaker 49 That we don't go to that restaurant we loved until it announces it's closing.

Speaker 13 And that we don't appreciate a tree's leaves until they're about.

Speaker 77 to leave us.

Speaker 31 As the weather changes in certain parts of the world, as the days shorten and get colder, the leaves of deciduous trees begin to die.

Speaker 37 And only then do we get very excited about them.

Speaker 67 Look at the reds on that tree.

Speaker 63 Just beautiful. And then we got some oranges.
We've got some yellows.

Speaker 97 This is my favorite time of year. It's this, the fall foliage.
These colors go straight through my retina and feed my soul.

Speaker 98 You know what just grips, dude?

Speaker 45 It's just like some foliage, dude?

Speaker 76 Like, how does a leaf even do that? How is it even that color, dude?

Speaker 19 Annually, millions of leaf peepers descend upon places like Vermont and New Hampshire, where the foliage fireworks are most pronounced.

Speaker 37 Just to take it all in.

Speaker 60 We get to look down and kind of watch the colors wash down the hills.

Speaker 61 Yellows, oranges, reds. It's just, it's so beautiful.

Speaker 11 This brilliant display has inspired paintings, photographs, poems, and songs.

Speaker 42 The falling leaves

Speaker 58 drift by the window.

Speaker 58 The autumn leaves

Speaker 58 of red and gold.

Speaker 24 And it's also inspired a seemingly simple question.

Speaker 99 Why do leaves change color in fall?

Speaker 100 Why do leaves change color in the fall?

Speaker 99 Why do leaves change colors? Is it because they're tired of being green?

Speaker 40 And you'd think a kid's question like this would have a simple answer.

Speaker 19 But as we have learned and you're about to, it does not.

Speaker 13 It turns out that like are other people seeing the same shade of blue as me, it's a bona fide stumper.

Speaker 20 It gets right to the matter of how we know what we know.

Speaker 11 So it's an adult question, really.

Speaker 37 And the complications begin immediately because there has long been an answer provided.

Speaker 19 One you might already know yourself.

Speaker 101 The leaf is one of the most important parts of a plant.

Speaker 101 Leaves capture the energy of sunshine and use it to make food.

Speaker 11 The traditional explanation starts with why leaves are green in the first place.

Speaker 16 And it's that to make their food, they need a chemical.

Speaker 101 It is called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll has the power to trap the sunlight and harness its life-giving energy.
And chlorophyll is what makes plants green.

Speaker 38 And so leaves have a lot of green chlorophyll inside them.

Speaker 12 They have other pigments in them too, the story goes.

Speaker 28 But you can't see the yellows and reds and oranges because the green is so dominant.

Speaker 66 That is for most of the year.

Speaker 101 All summer, the leaves stay green.

Speaker 37 But as the days get shorter, the trees break down the chlorophyll and begin to pull all their energy and nutrients back into their trunks.

Speaker 31 And so the green starts to fade.

Speaker 34 And then suddenly,

Speaker 39 all the hidden colors are revealed.

Speaker 101 And so the leaves become more colorful than ever.

Speaker 25 This has long been the explanation for the vibrant colors of autumn.

Speaker 19 It's just a side effect of them preparing for winter.

Speaker 1 One that, lucky for us, happens to be very beautiful.

Speaker 66 I actually remember learning this in science class when I was younger, and I wasn't alone.

Speaker 98 What I was taught in a course of geobotany was the green disappears. You see the red and yellow because they are not masked anymore by lots of green.

Speaker 33 Simkhal Levyadun is an emeritus professor of botany and archaeology, and he heard the same story well into graduate school.

Speaker 98 This was the common belief.

Speaker 19 But he says there's long been a problem with this belief.

Speaker 1 It's incomplete.

Speaker 90 It does accurately describe what's happening when a leaf turns yellow or orange, pigments that have been lurking inside the leaf the whole time.

Speaker 49 But it does not explain why a leaf would turn red.

Speaker 32 Because the red pigments are not there all year.

Speaker 13 In fact, trees do not even begin to produce them until the fall.

Speaker 98 They are synthesized in the leaves before they are shed.

Speaker 87 The chemical that produces the red is called anthocyanin.

Speaker 33 Anthocyanins are what give fruits like blueberries and grapes their colors, and they take a lot of effort to make.

Speaker 98 Not just energy, but time and materials to construct those molecules.

Speaker 22 Why would a tree bother to do this right before its leaves are about to drop anyway?

Speaker 98 You have an old car, you want to send it for metal recycling or whatever, or just dump it, you don't put money in it before you dump it.

Speaker 57 But that's exactly what the trees seem to be doing, making all this costly red for their leaves even as they are dying.

Speaker 20 It's a head scratcher, and one that scientists had long been aware of, but that they hadn't really gotten to thinking about.

Speaker 98 People were not really interested in this. I mean, it was a byproduct.
Nobody paid attention.

Speaker 35 But that changed around the turn of the millennium.

Speaker 98 This was the time that people started to understand that something is happening, though.

Speaker 19 The person most responsible for a new burst of interest in autumn leaves was a renowned evolutionary biologist named W.D.

Speaker 9 Hamilton.

Speaker 103 The more influence life has in the universe, the better, as far as I'm concerned. So it would be nice to think of the whole world as

Speaker 103 one living organism in some sense.

Speaker 12 Hamilton was a giant in his field, generating all sorts of creative theories about the workings of evolution.

Speaker 59 He was one of the first people to argue that there was an evolutionary basis for altruism.

Speaker 36 He thought sexual reproduction evolved as a way to avoid parasites, and he proposed novel explanations about the behavior of everything from wasps to algae.

Speaker 33 And in the late 1990s, he turned his attention to fall foliage.

Speaker 67 If a tree is expending energy to change colors, he thought, then the tree must have evolved to do so for a reason.

Speaker 98 What was so important was that he said that the colors has a function.

Speaker 73 But what could that function be?

Speaker 32 Well, we have long known that plants and animals use color to communicate.

Speaker 81 Dazzling flowers tell bees and butterflies, come here.

Speaker 104 Brightly colored poisoned dart frogs and coral snakes signal, stay away.

Speaker 98 They advertise their qualities. They say, listen, I don't hide myself.
It's better, don't deal with me.

Speaker 20 Hamilton figured: if the natural world is full of species communicating with one another via color, maybe autumn leaves were a communique too.

Speaker 33 Maybe the trees weren't just inadvertently putting on a show for us.

Speaker 50 Maybe they were defending themselves.

Speaker 39 And so he and a couple colleagues at Oxford co-authored a paper with a brand new theory.

Speaker 98 They proposed an anti-herbivory hypothesis.

Speaker 86 What does anti-herbivory mean?

Speaker 98 Means it stops herbivore from eating the plants.

Speaker 12 And the paper made a guess as to which pesky herbivores they might be defending themselves from.

Speaker 58 There's an insect that all gardeners loathe.

Speaker 103 Aphids.

Speaker 87 Aphids are a family of sap-sucking pests.

Speaker 54 There are more than 5,000 different species of them, and some are known to cause tremendous damage.

Speaker 97 They're a nightmare for anyone growing veggies.

Speaker 61 They pierce leaves and stems with their stylet and suck out sugary sap.

Speaker 59 Hamilton and his colleagues' hypothesis was that the bright colors in autumn leaves were to keep aphids from doing exactly this.

Speaker 21 That the colors were basically a warning sign to deter aphids, telling them, hey, don't suck your sap here.

Speaker 19 Their paper was published by the Royal Society in 2001, shortly after Hamilton died.

Speaker 27 It cited data that seemed to suggest that aphids behaved differently depending on a leaf's color.

Speaker 37 And suddenly, scholars started to pay attention.

Speaker 98 It was controversial very quickly. There were several dozen papers published with some nasty quales.
Some papers were not so polite.

Speaker 19 Botanists who tend to study the specifics of how plants really work faced off against ecologists who tend to take a broader view of species interactions.

Speaker 98 And it's very good in science when people start to argue because it intrigues many others and people start to think.

Speaker 98 So new ideas are coming, are added to this theoretical soup.

Speaker 30 Soon scientists had to mix our metaphors, chewed some holes in the original soup.

Speaker 37 That first paper had made no distinction between yellow and red leaves.

Speaker 31 It said aphids might be deterred by both.

Speaker 47 But other scholars proved within a year or two that far from deterring aphids, yellow seemed to do the opposite.

Speaker 98 Yellow attracts aphids because when it's becoming yellow, it's full of amino acids, and many aphids drink it like we drink some juice with a straw.

Speaker 77 So, yellow did not seem to be defensive, at least when it came to aphids.

Speaker 20 But what about red?

Speaker 27 A 2008 study showed that aphids did appear to find red leaves less attractive than green ones.

Speaker 32 And there have been many, many ideas proposed as to why.

Speaker 57 It could be that red is there to cover up the yellow aphids like so much.

Speaker 11 Or that the red just makes the leaves appear dark and thus invisible to bugs.

Speaker 57 Or maybe it's not the color itself, but the chemicals, smells, tastes, and toxins that can go with it.

Speaker 27 Simcha has studied the research extensively, and he believes all 25 years of work adds up to a basic confirmation of Hamilton's original hypothesis.

Speaker 86 At least one of the functions of autumnal leaf colors, and red in particular, is a defense against pests.

Speaker 98 Not only aphids, many, many, many types of herbivores are deterred by red. The red says pay attention.
The red is danger.

Speaker 86 He thinks the evidence shows caterpillars and fungi also get the message in various ways, and that the trees are protecting themselves against all of them.

Speaker 98 And I think this is enough.

Speaker 56 But not enough for everyone.

Speaker 106 If there was a person predisposed to believing in signaling from plants to herbivores, it's me. Of course, plants signal to insects.

Speaker 19 Suzanne Renner is a botanist and an honorary professor of biology at Washington University in St.

Speaker 59 Louis, who first became enamored with her field by observing bee and flower interactions.

Speaker 106 But

Speaker 106 there's so many implausible aspects of the idea that red or yellow leaves in a fall would signal to insects. There is no evidence.

Speaker 49 Suzanne doesn't buy that a tree would be expending all this energy to ward bugs off of leaves that are on the verge of dropping anyway.

Speaker 106 We are talking about leaves about to be shed from which the nutrients are being removed. Why would any tree have a selective advantage from telling some aphid to either eat it or not eat it?

Speaker 32 Besides, she argues, in the autumn months, aphids don't care about leaves.

Speaker 56 What they care about is bark.

Speaker 106 They're looking for a crevice to put their eggs in. They are not looking for leaves.

Speaker 106 They are not feeling concerned about putting their little eggs in a protected protected place so it will be able to withstand frost.

Speaker 25 Furthermore, she says that in the nearly 25 years since the paper came out, nobody has been able to identify a species of aphids that actively avoids red fall leaves.

Speaker 106 I think it is implausible that we will ever find an herbivore pollinator or fruit disperser reacting to the leaf red. I think it is completely implausible, completely implausible.

Speaker 11 But just because she doesn't think the red is deterring pests does not mean that Suzanne thinks the red in leaves isn't doing anything.

Speaker 20 It's just that her research has led her to a different conclusion about what.

Speaker 19 It started with some observations about where leaves turn red.

Speaker 38 As you may or may not be aware, autumn's color palette is different depending on where you live.

Speaker 55 When people travel from all over the world to Vermont, they're seeking out multicolored forests streaked with red.

Speaker 23 But that's a different view than the one you might get in, say, Colorado.

Speaker 106 You never see a red leaf in Colorado. I'm only exaggerating very, very slightly.
All of Colorado is yellow.

Speaker 27 And it's not just a matter of how far north you are.

Speaker 23 Boston and Rome are on the same latitude, but you won't spot many red leaves along the Via Appia.

Speaker 27 And when Suzanne conducted research on a species level, she confirmed that this was the case.

Speaker 106 What we found, both experimentally and by monitoring, is that many more species in eastern eastern North America produce the red color than European and Asian tree species.

Speaker 11 To be clear, it's not that all trees in eastern North America turn red in the fall.

Speaker 19 And there are Asian species that do turn red, like the Japanese maple.

Speaker 23 But in general, Suzanne found there was a pattern.

Speaker 106 So why could that be?

Speaker 1 Why would a tree species that evolved to survive in New England be more genetically predisposed to have red leaves than a tree that evolved to survive in Italy?

Speaker 24 And she realized the answer is light.

Speaker 106 This same latitude in eastern North America will get more incoming light in September compared to Europe.

Speaker 24 It may sound strange, but it's true.

Speaker 27 The northeast in fall is exceptionally sunny.

Speaker 10 It has to do with how land masses, oceans, and wind affect our cloud patterns.

Speaker 106 And this is highly statistically significant, okay?

Speaker 106 And so then if you have all this light coming in in September, October, then it makes sense that you would want to protect your leaves against excessive light.

Speaker 12 Just as it is with humans, excessive light can be harmful for trees.

Speaker 1 It can degrade the nutrients the trees are trying to pull out of their leaves.

Speaker 106 Excessive light can damage nuclei, can damage the cells.

Speaker 28 And Suzanne knew there was a chemical that had been shown to protect a plant against the dangers of excessive light, anthocyanin, the very very same chemical that makes leaves in the fall red.

Speaker 12 And so Suzanne had her answer.

Speaker 89 In 2019, she co-authored a paper arguing that the red wasn't acting as bug spray, it was sunscreen.

Speaker 106 Having this sunscreen, this red antocyanide sunscreen in your leaves would allow you to pull back the nutrients for a little longer, maybe seven days longer.

Speaker 11 And Suzanne says this is the answer to the mystery of why leaves turn red.

Speaker 106 Isn't that a wonderful story? Isn't this all wonderful evidence of how plants have managed to evolve strategies to handle all these terrible conditions they are exposed to? Isn't that wonderful?

Speaker 106 I think it's absolutely wonderful.

Speaker 95 Simcha Levyadun doesn't deny the sunscreen explanation.

Speaker 98 Yes, why not?

Speaker 26 But he's not too troubled that in the 25 years since the herbivore hypothesis was first proposed, there's been no new experimental evidence suggesting any actual pest is deterred by red leaves.

Speaker 19 It is, as ever, hard to prove a negative.

Speaker 98 Because the animals that are deterred by something are not there. So you cannot measure them because they are not there.

Speaker 65 He's certain that the bug spray explanation can be true at the same time as the sunscreen one.

Speaker 12 That a red leaf can protect against sunlight and simultaneously defend against aphids and caterpillars and fungi.

Speaker 98 Listen, you have a stove at home. You can cook potatoes and you can cook a chicken or pork or beef.
I mean, you have a tool. Why not use it for several functions?

Speaker 19 I have to confess, at this point, as a non-scientist, I felt properly unsettled.

Speaker 95 Discovering that we could not reach consensus on even the simplest seeming kids question surprised me.

Speaker 34 My instinct was to make Lake Simka and say, hey, why can't all of these these things be true at once?

Speaker 50 But maybe that's an oversimplified dodge.

Speaker 32 Just because a stove can cook sweet potatoes and chicken and carrots all at the same time does not mean that it is.

Speaker 19 It was all enough to make me want to go out and look at some actual leaves.

Speaker 41 Should we go through the woods? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 41 Right through here.

Speaker 39 I took a walk through Brooklyn's Prospect Park with Malcolm Gore.

Speaker 11 He's the Prospect Park Alliance arborist, which means he takes care of the park's 30,000 trees.

Speaker 86 What's those ones over there that are deal going?

Speaker 60 Those, that looks like a sweet gum to me. I like to call sweet gums the rainbow tree because they like change on a gradient from red to yellow to purple, from like the top down.

Speaker 60 So they're like gorgeous.

Speaker 32 The leaves in this park and elsewhere are not aware of the debate raging around why they do what they do.

Speaker 43 They are not aware that even this seemingly simple matter has run afoul not only of the limits of our knowledge, but the limits of our ability to agree about that knowledge.

Speaker 31 They just keep doing their thing.

Speaker 60 The maples are classic and they have different variation in their color.

Speaker 36 Like two of them look like they have like, they have frosted tips. Yep.

Speaker 72 And the other one is like...

Speaker 60 Mostly red, right?

Speaker 46 Yeah.

Speaker 60 A tree that we have in Prospect Park that is not around in a lot of other parts of New York is blackgum or tupelo.

Speaker 60 It's kind of more of a southern tree and they get this like iridescent red. It's like they almost like glow with their like reddish purplish hue when they change color.

Speaker 38 And all the color.

Speaker 6 The reason that people really care about autumn leaves in the first place is what Malcolm thinks is most fascinating too.

Speaker 60 It's just a beautiful thing. Like for me as a practitioner, I'm not a scientist.
I, you know, maybe trees are just doing it because they like to be pretty.

Speaker 60 Like, you know, it's their show-off season or something like that.

Speaker 11 Like peacocks? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 60 It's possible that they are doing it for

Speaker 107 us, you know?

Speaker 58 Probably not, but.

Speaker 7 Why does it seem

Speaker 7 so inviting?

Speaker 59 When we come back, we're turning to a more edible fall mystery.

Speaker 55 It's the case of the cookie

Speaker 67 you can't get in summer.

Speaker 28 Some days we celebrate the wins, like calling your best friend to congratulate them on a big promotion or texting your grandmother, happy birthday.

Speaker 35 Other days we work through the tough stuff, like calling a partner to deliver bad news.

Speaker 2 Whatever the reason for picking up the phone or sending that message, staying connected matters.

Speaker 8 That's why in the rare event of a network outage, ATT will proactively credit you for a full day of service. That's the ATT guarantee.

Speaker 10 So, what are you waiting for?

Speaker 2 Send that message to someone you miss.

Speaker 30 Make that call you've been putting off because those are the moments that matter most.

Speaker 2 ATT: Connecting changes everything.

Speaker 11 Terms and conditions apply.

Speaker 2 Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers.

Speaker 2 Must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage. Restrictions and exclusions apply.
See ATT.com/slash guarantee for full details.

Speaker 27 This episode is brought to you by SACS Fifth Avenue.

Speaker 37 SACS makes it easy to find the perfect gifts and holiday looks that suit your personal style.

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Speaker 19 So, as you've heard, for some, fall is a time of pumpkin spice lattes or of changing leaves.

Speaker 33 But for others, still, autumn means something else entirely.

Speaker 85 My mother, she really does associate it with the release of Malamars.

Speaker 106 I just love chocolate.

Speaker 39 The first voice you just heard belongs to Lauren Tarr.

Speaker 85 I am a writer and a editor and a blogger.

Speaker 100 And I'm Grace Dewey, and I'm an 82-year-old mother of this darling daughter.

Speaker 85 Almost 83, so we should clarify that.

Speaker 90 And for most of those 83 years, Grace has been a fan of the Malamar, a cookie based upon the classic campfire treat, The S'more.

Speaker 90 It's a disc of chocolate sitting atop a round graham cracker bottom, and both are coated in chocolate.

Speaker 19 They look kind of like brown hockey pucks, and Grace finds them totally irresistible.

Speaker 100 I leave them in the refrigerator and I kind of pick at them all day long.

Speaker 93 How many do you think you eat a day?

Speaker 106 I'm not so sure she's going to be honest about that answer.

Speaker 100 At least a half a dozen.

Speaker 35 Do your friends know about this?

Speaker 100 Of course they do.

Speaker 23 Do they come over for a Malamar?

Speaker 90 No.

Speaker 56 No.

Speaker 109 No, I'm not sharing.

Speaker 80 And Grace is not alone in her Malamar obsession.

Speaker 97 These are Malamars, the best cookie known to man.

Speaker 98 Every single time that they see them, I always have to buy two boxes.

Speaker 55 The marshmallows, the cookie, the chocolate.

Speaker 52 It's like the trifecta of flavors and textures.

Speaker 97 This is a superior snack.

Speaker 11 And the testimonials aren't just on TikTok.

Speaker 102 They're all over popular culture.

Speaker 64 Well, why don't you just say something so I can become hysterical, eat a box of Malamars, and get it over with?

Speaker 103 They're beloved by both the golden girls and the gilmore girls what the hell is this my birthday malamars she says like i should just know this they've been celebrated and when harry met sally got malamars the greatest cookie of all time and even tony soprano guards them jealously i do something wrong sunday my house box of malamars on the counter and empty you think i don't know it was you

Speaker 66 Despite having so many fervent admirers, you may not be familiar with them at all.

Speaker 95 And that's because they are largely a regional delicacy.

Speaker 87 Even though they are now made by Mondelez, the multinational food company that also makes Oreos and Ritz crackers and Sour Patch Kids, they are sold almost exclusively in the Northeast.

Speaker 27 In fact, Grace was introduced to them as a little girl in Brooklyn.

Speaker 90 Malamars were her grandmother's favorite.

Speaker 100 And the funny thing is, growing up, I didn't realize that it was a seasonal thing.

Speaker 95 And that's the other reason Malamars may be hard for you to spot.

Speaker 19 The yellow boxes don't arrive on shelves until right after Labor Day, and they disappear again in March.

Speaker 100 And once I've discovered that, I got as many as I can. I'm obsessed with getting them on sale, and I stackpile them in my pantry.

Speaker 32 Like, are you paying attention to, like, it's about to be Malamar season? Like, do you know when it's coming?

Speaker 100 Oh, yes, I definitely know when it's coming.

Speaker 16 How many do you think you get a season?

Speaker 100 Probably a dozen.

Speaker 110 No.

Speaker 85 You have a dozen in your pantry right now.

Speaker 100 I don't like to tell my daughter everything.

Speaker 11 But Grace is not stockpiling boxes just for her own pleasure.

Speaker 85 My mother's obsession with Malomars definitely grew when she realized her grandchildren enjoyed these.

Speaker 14 They all have come to know as soon as September comes, they will be having a package delivered to their door filled with malomars from their grandmother.

Speaker 100 I'm hoping that they don't share with their roommates.

Speaker 33 And that's because of how hard these boxes are to come by.

Speaker 15 Amassing her annual cash has required some craftiness on Grace's part.

Speaker 27 Because she is far from the only person who is so keen on malomars, they're treated like a precious commodity in some places.

Speaker 19 Her old supermarket on Long Island put strict limits in place.

Speaker 36 Customers could purchase only two boxes at a time.

Speaker 100 So my strategy for that would be to take the tool that I was allowed to get, put them in the car and go back into the store.

Speaker 100 But then I had to find a different checkout cashier so that she didn't recognize me and say, oh, you were already here and you already had your two limit.

Speaker 85 She has been known to go to different grocery stores in the same week if that strategy didn't pan out the way she hoped.

Speaker 31 And this brings us to the mystery at the heart of the Malamar.

Speaker 72 Why on earth is grace required to jump through all these hoops?

Speaker 104 For a cookie, why are Malamars sold like this?

Speaker 91 Why can you only get them for half a year?

Speaker 22 I thought I knew part of the answer.

Speaker 38 My dad's a Malamar fan himself.

Speaker 12 Every year when they first go on sale, he snags a few boxes.

Speaker 47 I have to admit that I don't find them to be particularly special, but we have talked many times over the years about their strange schedule, which does go back more than a century.

Speaker 33 And that's because it's a solution to a problem that has plagued Malamars since they were first invented.

Speaker 88 Malamars were introduced by the National Biscuit Company, later Nabisco, in Hoboken, New Jersey, all the way back in 1913.

Speaker 33 Then, as now, a Malamar was a mound of marshmallow sitting atop a graham cracker bottom and covered in chocolate.

Speaker 19 But something back then was not the same, especially in the summer.

Speaker 107 In the intense heat, food preservation became a problem of increasing gravity. Milk soured, meat spoiled, and vegetables withered.

Speaker 37 And you can only imagine what might have happened to the chocolate in a Malamar.

Speaker 28 And so to avoid the cookies turning into a gooey, dirty mess, Malamars could only be distributed in the cooler months.

Speaker 27 And that schedule has remained in place for the past 112 years.

Speaker 19 It's remained even as the packaging has changed.

Speaker 49 It's remained even as the Peharin company has gone from Nabisco to Kraft to now Mongoles.

Speaker 28 And that whole time, whenever the cookie's various owners have been pressed on its quirky and ancient scheduling, they have insisted this is just what the Malamar requires.

Speaker 69 It is one of the only cookies covered in pure chocolate.

Speaker 111 And because it's real chocolate and such a thin coating of chocolate, Malamars aren't available during the summer months. You can only find them on store shelves between October and April.

Speaker 96 That's a newscast from 2013.

Speaker 93 The then owner Kraft confirmed to another reporter that Malamars had to be baked only during cooler weather because the pure chocolate is susceptible to excessive heat.

Speaker 59 And in the summer, the chocolate would apparently melt and the cocoa butter would leach out, turning the cookie white.

Speaker 32 That does seem like a fate a Malamar should try to avoid.

Speaker 104 And yet a quick perusal of any corner or grocery store reveals tons of chocolate products for sale all year round.

Speaker 6 None the worse for wear.

Speaker 23 And that's not some brand new human capability.

Speaker 112 Modern dairies now, by the use of refrigerated and iced trucks, transport the products to the surrounding territory speedily and efficiently.

Speaker 28 The refrigerated truck was invented all the way back in 1938 by a guy named Frederick McKinley-Jones, a black engineer who whipped one together in just a few weeks and then co-founded a refrigerated truck business that by the 1950s had perishable food shuttling across the country year-round.

Speaker 57 It may have taken a few more decades to perfect chocolate that wouldn't melt on hot store shelves, but thousands of other chocolate products seem to have figured it out.

Speaker 113 This is the most powerful nation on earth. Can't we figure out a way to refrigerate Malamars properly?

Speaker 56 A 2004 episode of Conan featured a whole rant challenging the company line on the seasonality of Malamars.

Speaker 110 I should be able to eat Malamar cookies anytime I want, even in the summer.

Speaker 74 So what gives?

Speaker 59 Are Malamars just some kind of purist holdout? Chocolate Chocolate traditionalists who don't want anything to do with preservatives and newfangled non-melting technologies?

Speaker 1 I needed to figure out how this cookie really crumbled.

Speaker 90 And so I reached out to Carolyn Supager, a brand manager at Mondelez who oversees Malamars, among other cookies.

Speaker 109 Honeymade graham crackers, Nilla Wafers, Fig Newtons.

Speaker 109 So it's a big cookie job.

Speaker 19 Were you familiar with Malamars from your childhood?

Speaker 109 I was not. I was actually, I grew up in Idaho, so I i had never even heard of malamars before i took this job and i the first time i had them was today really

Speaker 109 yes yeah that's incredible well since this job i started it in february and as you know it's a seasonal item so i haven't really even had a chance to try them until now what did you think

Speaker 109 i loved them

Speaker 12 After her review, we did get down to the business at hand.

Speaker 24 Why are Malomars sold this way?

Speaker 109 Part of the reason why it's only available in the fall is it's actually real chocolate as opposed to some other products out there.

Speaker 109 So traditionally, we couldn't ship it in the summer because the real chocolate would melt. So we had to wait until like those leaves were falling to start shipping it out.

Speaker 25 So, okay, yes, the melting was genuinely the reason we couldn't have Malamars year-round.

Speaker 67 But what I really needed to know from Caroline was, is that still true in 2025?

Speaker 109 No, we have the technology to be able to ship the products full year around.

Speaker 32 So if Malamars can be sold year-round, why aren't they?

Speaker 27 Why is this cookie being sold like it's 1914?

Speaker 19 Caroline says part of the answer actually does have to do with the Malamars chocolate, though not how melty it is.

Speaker 34 It's about how it's manufactured.

Speaker 109 So there's a biscuit at the bottom, and then there's marshmallow on top, and then it's the technical term we use is it's enrobed in chocolate.

Speaker 35 Picture little naked Malamars, just a graham cracker and a puff of white marshmallow, and imagine they are waiting in the Malamar factory to get dressed, enrobed in chocolate.

Speaker 109 And then just like the enrobing process, it's just you like literally dunk it. It's a very manual factory.

Speaker 109 So there's just a lot of people who are always like there as opposed to some other factories that have a lot of machines.

Speaker 32 But the very manual Mondelez factory in Toronto where the Malamars get enrobed has to dress other cookies

Speaker 109 We share the manufacturing location with our other brands. So there's Oreo enrobed that runs on that line, pinwheels run on that line.

Speaker 109 So we also have to balance how much we can really run at one time.

Speaker 88 So, I mean, what you're saying is like because Malamars are made in a factory that has like enrobing capabilities, when Malamars are not in production, you are using those enrobing capabilities on a whole bunch of other cookies.

Speaker 88 And if you were running Malamars all year, you couldn't do that.

Speaker 109 100%.

Speaker 109 So Malamars we run mostly in July and August. We run 80% of all of the volume in July and August.

Speaker 53 In the summer. Yep, exactly.

Speaker 56 See, they're not really worried about melting. And they don't want to bump other cookies, like chocolate-covered Oreos, from access to the company's enerbing facilities.

Speaker 23 But presumably, they could and would rearrange their production schedule if it made financial sense to churn out Malamars year-round.

Speaker 55 So there's something else too, maybe the biggest factor of all.

Speaker 12 And it's that selling these cookies six months of the year, selling these cookies that are handed down from generation to generation, that have been sold this way for over 100 years.

Speaker 19 That's part of what makes Malamars so desirable in the first place.

Speaker 109 I think a lot of the fad and the excitement is that they aren't available year-round.

Speaker 15 Malamars are scarce.

Speaker 93 And so when they do come around after Labor Day, it's an event.

Speaker 109 An event customers are eager to promote all by themselves i have been on the hunt for these cookies for weeks i was in the grocery store yesterday and i saw the malamars and i got really excited because it's like it's malamar season they're back and i'm hopped up on the malamars do you ever eat the malamars john what was that you've never had a malamar it's a seasonal cookie we have that talkability where we don't actually do a ton of marketing we're just this tried and true product that comes back every year at the same time always after labor day and it's really the word of mouth marketing Some retailers actually cut a spot on their shelf for Malamars.

Speaker 109 They plan for that space to be open just for us to be on shelf. Like ShopRite has this in mind.

Speaker 88 Like everybody's in it together about like the seasonality of Malamars.

Speaker 109 100%.

Speaker 109 So I think that the fad would, I think, kind of die in the interest and people wouldn't be looking for them as much in the fall.

Speaker 24 The funny thing about all of this is that Malamars, by not changing their sales strategy for a century, has ended up with the most cutting-edge way to sell anything right now.

Speaker 102 Organic, viral marketing built around scarcity.

Speaker 29 This is how sneaker drops work.

Speaker 82 It's Monday morning, so here's all the sneakers dropping this week.

Speaker 108 Just like every other release week, we're talking about just how limited are the Air Jordan 4 rare airs.

Speaker 71 Check out these kicks that were just delivered to my house.

Speaker 49 They're one of 100.

Speaker 88 It does seem like a very newfangled way to sell an old cookie.

Speaker 58 Right.

Speaker 109 And we were the trendsetters.

Speaker 19 And for Malamars, it's still working.

Speaker 109 We actually sell like $13 million worth of the product just from September to like February, March when they become unavailable, which is sometimes the size of our other cookie brands that are sold full year around.

Speaker 27 13 million is about the same amount that Pinwheels make.

Speaker 19 Pinwheels are another chocolate-covered marshmallow cookie similar to Malamars.

Speaker 30 They're on shelves the entire year.

Speaker 22 And despite being always available, they don't get nearly the attention Malomars do.

Speaker 27 So the answer to the mystery of why people like Grace Dewey can't buy Malomars all year is the company figures she would probably love them a whole lot less if she could.

Speaker 35 And they might be right.

Speaker 100 That is part of the fun, most definitely part of the fun. You can't get them every day,

Speaker 100 so it's very special when they do come out. You know, at my age, one month after another just repeats.

Speaker 100 But as soon as I see that ad that it goes on sale, I know it's fall and it's Malamar season and I have to start collecting.

Speaker 100 And it's a little sad too when the warm weather starts coming and there's none to be had.

Speaker 16 By the end of the season, like you can tell me the truth, it's okay.

Speaker 11 But like by March, are you like, I'm sick of this cookie?

Speaker 100 I never get sick of them.

Speaker 27 This is Decodering.

Speaker 87 I'm Willa Paskin.

Speaker 28 If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, please subscribe now from the Decodering show page on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify.

Speaker 43 Or you can visit slate.com slash decodering plus to get access wherever you listen.

Speaker 59 Slate Plus members get access to all of Slate's great audio content, including shows like Slate Money, which just had a very entertaining episode about what I find to be a surprisingly cozy and fascinating crime.

Speaker 54 The Louvre heist.

Speaker 86 It's just so autumn-coated for some reason.

Speaker 25 Slate Plus members also get access to our bonus episodes, including the one that we have this week about another seasonal mystery.

Speaker 55 People complain about the holiday season starting earlier than ever every year.

Speaker 1 But is that really true?

Speaker 95 Is that a recent phenomenon?

Speaker 81 Or does it just feel feel that way?

Speaker 82 I found something as far back as 1883. The Washington, D.C.
Evening Star says, the holiday season of trade seems to begin earlier every year.

Speaker 82 Which sounds very much like the sort of thing people would say now.

Speaker 72 This episode was produced by Katie Shepard.

Speaker 34 Decodering is produced by Katie, me, Max Friedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer.

Speaker 12 Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Speaker 93 We'd like to thank Brian Gallagher, Tom Arnold, Sylvie Russo, and Lauren Robinson.

Speaker 66 I also want to direct you to Don Martin's new reported audiobook, all about loneliness.

Speaker 36 It's called Where Did Everybody Go?

Speaker 5 if you're looking for something chewy to listen to.

Speaker 27 And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to code, please email us at decodering at slate.com or call us on our phone number at 347-460-7281.

Speaker 11 We love hearing from you guys and we will see you in two weeks.

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