Seeds of Immortality

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break, Time for a pure leaf.

What is a seed?

Well, my favorite answer to that question came to me from a wonderful botanist named Carol Baskin, who has been studying seeds for over 40 years.

And she tells her botany 101 students that a seed is a baby plant in a box with its lunch.

Adorable and delicious.

We get to eat a baby plant and its lunch at the same time.

You are a cruel lady, Cynthia Graeber.

It's true.

But these lunch boxes of deliciousness are just what we're talking about today.

We, of course, are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber, as you just said, Nikki.

And yes, I am Nikki, full name Nicola Twilley.

And this episode, we have a story about a very special seed.

A seed you've probably never come across, although it is popular in Asia.

Lotus seeds.

They seem to have this nearly miraculous ability to live, well, forever.

Some seeds have survived for more than a thousand years and then germinated into beautiful flowering plants.

How in the world can they last this long?

And what can we learn from how they do it?

Plus, the most important question,

how do these magical lotus seeds taste?

All that and more on this special episode of Gastropod, a bonus episode in between our usual bi-weekly shows.

To help us out, we have a guest.

Hi guys, my name's Ellen Bennett.

Ellen Bennett is the host of a flavor forecast video series made by McCormick and Company, and McCormick sponsored today's episode.

Their flavor forecast identifies top trends and ingredients to discover the tastes of tomorrow.

Created by a global team of McCormick experts, including chefs, culinary professionals, trend trackers, and food technologists, the flavor forecast inspires culinary exploration and innovation around the world.

The McCormick folks predict that seeds, the ones you might not have tried yet, they're one of the big flavor trends on your horizon.

They think you're soon going to be experimenting with basil seeds and black sesame seeds and lotus seeds, and Ellen is on it.

I'm the co-pilot that goes out there into the world to explore all the unknown nooks and crannies.

And in this case, I'm in deep scuba gear on all things seeds.

So I've got flippers and, you know, goggles on, and I'm exploring seed land.

It's very fun.

So what's so special about seeds?

It's just a baby plant, after all.

It is the baby plant, but what's so key about it is that the mother plant, the parent, has packed a lunch for that baby, meaning there is nutrition in that seed that is there for the baby plant to use when it germinates and begins to grow.

Tor Henson wrote a book called The Triumph of Seeds, How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History.

And Tor says that more than fifty percent of what we eat comes from some form of seed.

So if you think think about it, that means that we get over half the calories in our diet by stealing food from babies.

Which I guess does make me cruel because I still find the idea of eating seeds delightful.

Seeds are one of the plant kingdom's best ideas.

Before seeds, plants used spores to reproduce, but that meant the plants needed to be in or near water to do so.

Seed plants represent a couple of major leaps forward for plant kind.

Leaps that eventually led to pollen and the ability to disperse their babies through the air.

Leading towards the modern seed system that now dominates over 90% of the flora of the planet.

Which means that there are a lot of seeds, a lot of different seeds, roughly a quarter million, in fact.

And the challenge in writing a book about it wasn't in filling up the book, but deciding what few, few things I had the space to include.

Tor says you can look at the huge variety in the size of seeds.

As an example, one of the tiniest seeds is that of an orchid, and it's literally the size of a speck of dust that floats through the air.

And all the way up from there to the largest seed in the world, which is the double coconut that grows only on two islands in the Seychelles Archipelago, isolated out there in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

And the full-size seed of a double coconut can weigh more than 40 pounds.

And a lot of that seedy variety has ended up on our dinner plates at some point or another.

Oh, we've been after these things from the very beginning.

That's because, like we said, seeds have got everything a plant needs to grow.

They're like little baby plants plus all the plant breast milk they need combined.

Yum.

Well, you know, the nutrition in them is quite marvelous in that you compare seed for proteins and fats and other things to, you know, grasses and leaves and they pack a lot of punch.

And it's not just that seeds are good to eat, they also stick around.

They're there for us when the going gets rough.

If you live in a habitat that's prone to drought or other extremes, then the ability to eat something like a seed becomes really important.

In that seeds, because they are built to last, you know, to endure in the soil until the right time for germination, they stick around.

Even when other plant parts may have withered, there are still seeds on offer.

And if you have developed the ability to exploit that resource, it could give you an evolutionary edge when times get hard.

And so, we built civilizations on seeds, civilizations based on wheat or corn or rice.

After all, if you have seeds, you have food that can be stored.

And with that kind of surplus, then there's a need for systems to protect and distribute and tax and all of the bureaucratic functions that probably inspired writing and social structures and all that good civilization stuff.

All from seeds.

And you're probably wearing seeds right now as you listen to us, your blue jeans or your t-shirt?

Those, of course, are made from the elongated seed coats of a plant in the mallow family that we know as cotton.

But really, seeds are food.

It's almost impossible to have any meal without some sort of seed.

Oh, yeah, sure.

I mean, you just have to think,

anyone listening, just think of what you had for breakfast.

this morning and try to imagine what your breakfast might have been like without seeds in that maybe you got up and and put put the coffee water on, as we did in my household.

Well, forget that, because of course, coffee comes to us from the seed of the coffee tree.

And then maybe, oh, you're going to have a piece of toast.

Well, no, you're not, because the toast, of course, is going to be made from grains, which are the seeds of grasses.

You can forget that.

Maybe you wanted a bagel.

Well, the bagel, the grains, and then the poppy seeds on top, forget it.

The sesame seeds, nope.

Your breakfast starts to dwindle soon.

You can't have granola full of seeds.

You can't have a bowl of cereal.

It's based on seeds.

So it quickly becomes evident when you examine virtually any meal that it would be a much different experience without seeds.

But even with all the seeds we eat every day, there are still so many seeds many of us have never even tried.

And as we learned while making this episode, one of them might just hold the secret of immortality.

This episode is brought to you by McCormick, and it's these undiscovered seeds that McCormick has chosen to highlight in the first installment of their 2019 flavor forecast.

I say undiscovered, but really these seeds are known and loved in lots of parts of the world.

They're just not familiar to most Americans and Europeans.

Ellen Bennett is McCormick's flavor forecast host, and she's been having fun discovering lots of seeds that are totally new to her.

Yes, there are so many seeds out there.

It's kind of mind-boggling.

I particularly love black sesame seeds, not just because they're awesome to use on food, but I think from a design standpoint, what a beautiful seed.

We've been exploring how to use things like lotus seeds and basil seeds.

And, you know, those are things you just kind of didn't hear about every day.

Basil seeds are certainly not on the shelves at my local supermarket.

So what are they?

Well, they're kind of like chia seeds cousin.

And they create that funny gelatinous coating on the outside of them.

And so you can put them in drinks.

People even put them in like dairy drinks.

They have like a really fun texture.

I've had them, and they do have that great jelly-like texture when they swell up in liquid, kind of slippery.

Traditionally, you find basil seeds mostly in drinks.

They're popular in Thailand and Vietnam, but McCormick's flavor experts suggest using them in yogurt dips and puddings and even dressings.

Sesame seeds, well, we all know about the beige-colored ones.

Those get blended up into one of my absolutely favorite pastes, trina or tahini, and then made into chumus or chalva or sprinkled on all sorts of dishes.

But the black ones, that's what got McCormick's flavor folks excited.

It's the same sesame seed, just with the hull left on.

And it gives you this fun color.

You can use it to make this charcoal gray soft serve that tastes like a delicious, delicious tahini milkshake, but looks super cool and not beige at all.

But the seed that really blew our minds, the one we're focusing on this episode, is the lotus seed.

And lotus seeds, I've never had those before.

I mean, first of all, did anybody know that lotus seeds were a thing you could eat?

That's not one that I've tried.

There are seed horizons left to be explored, even for a seed expert.

I hadn't ever even heard of lotus seeds before we started making this special episode.

But in China, and really throughout Asia, lotus seeds are pretty normal.

So we called Jane Shen Miller.

She's Chinese, but more importantly, she's a plant biologist with a lotus seed obsession.

In ancient times, people would say that to eat lotus seed is to have many,

many sons.

You see, the old-fashioned stuff.

Jane had long known about lotus seeds as food because, as Nikki just said, she grew up in China and lotus seeds are popular there.

But Jane didn't focus on lotus seeds as a scientist until the 1980s.

I was on the first delegation from the United States, plant botanists, to go to China.

They invited us.

That was before the normalization of the two countries.

And it was after the ping pong episode with with the Nixon.

For those of you not steeped in your Chinese-American relationship history, a group of ping-pong players were the first Americans to visit communist China back in 1971.

It was still the height of the Cold War, and that ping-pong visit started the ball rolling, so to speak.

They called it ping-pong diplomacy.

And so then a few years later, Jane was in China on sabbatical.

And the Botanical Institute in Beijing gave me seven seeds.

They said these are old, and I wasn't working with fruits or seeds, so I wasn't interested.

I put it in the drawer for 10 years, and then one day I thought, well, they say these are old.

I said, Okay, I just tried to germinate.

At this point, Jane was back at UCLA, where she's still a professor.

She managed to germinate those seven lotus seeds, and she and her colleagues then dated them to figure out how old they were.

The results were shocking.

One of them was dated to be 1,300 years old, plus and minus.

Others are 400, 600, 700.

Jane's little seedlings, they might have been several hundred years old, but they really didn't look it.

And they are perfectly healthy.

I'm not a lotus farmer, so I'm not good at raising them.

But when I gave these old things to China in Wuhan Botanical Garden, oh, the flowers blooming nicely, a second generation, third generation.

At the time, Jane's lotus seeds that she germinated, these were the oldest seeds that had ever germinated.

As it happens, Jane is not the only person to have had this experience where they planted a random lotus seed, they'd been given as a gift, and it germinated, and then they realized the seed was really old.

The same thing happened to Mark Griffiths.

He's a horticulturalist and the author of The Lotus Quest, In Search of the Sacred Flower.

He was given his old lotus seeds as a thank you gift by a Japanese botanist.

Mark planted these seeds and they bloomed.

And then two years later, he was having dinner with the Japanese botanist who'd given him the seeds and she just casually told him they were over a thousand years old.

Obviously, Mark was shocked.

This is not normal for a seed.

Seeds normally only stay good for a couple of years.

Six max.

Only one other plant seed, one, has germinated that was even older than Jane's lotus seeds.

It was a 2,000-year-old seed from a date palm that was found at an archaeology site in Israel.

That's not really representative in that its conditions, the conditions in which it had been preserved was sort of freakishly perfect, you know.

It was absolutely dry and all sorts of other things.

Mark found his ancient lotus seeds so intriguing, he wrote a book about the lotus.

Jane's a scientist, so her ancient lotus seed started a scientific quest.

Jane went back to China time after time to the same place where her seeds had originally been found.

This was in northeast China, in Liaoning province.

It had once been a lake, but it had dried out after a huge earthquake.

And now farmers can till what was once the lake bottom.

Every time I went there, they would sell me the seeds.

So I will buy every one of them, whether they are old or they are modern.

And I have a collection.

In her collection, Jane has about 100 lotus seeds that are really old.

And over the years, she's been stress testing them to see how tough they really are.

We have tried cooking the seed 85 degrees Celsius for one hour.

Then we tested germination, 100% germination.

This is almost cooking.

85 degrees for one hour, it would be soft.

But these little things, after a few days, they all sprouted.

These old lotus seeds turn out to be super seeds.

They live forever.

They can repair themselves after being boiled.

What's their secret?

Why a life can live for a thousand years.

Jane thinks lotus seeds have something incredibly special up their sleeves, and she wants to figure out what it is.

So there are a lot of tricks in this genome that could repair damage.

How they do it.

We need to know more about it.

I want to give these seeds to whoever would like to do research because it has so many intricate survival, it's a survival kit.

Part of the motivation behind Jane's campaign to get other scientists to research the lotus seed is because she can't do it all herself.

She doesn't study DNA and she knows a lot of the lotus seed secrets might be stored in there.

Every time I go to a meeting of my plant biologists, I try to get someone to do the sequencing.

And finally, I found a professor from the University of Illinois, Professor Ray Ming.

He said, well, one day we were on the bus going to the meeting.

I told him about the story.

So he said he would do the sequencing.

So now we have the sequence, the genome of this plant.

Jane and Ray and their colleagues published the full lotus genome in 2013.

They have the data, but they don't know what it means yet.

And I hope to get some more scientists to be interested.

No one has yet figured out the lotus seed's secret recipe for immortality, but we do know one of the tricks in its toolkit.

So there is one chemical in particular that most plants produce, which is which is about repairing damaged tissue.

And it's present in a lot of seeds, and over time, it decreases as the seed loses its viability.

In the lotus seed, it never decreases.

It keeps on pumping this stuff out and rebuilding itself and rebuilding itself.

So it's really very mysterious.

There's nothing else quite like it in the plant kingdom.

So why in the world would a lotus plant go to all that trouble to keep its seeds alive for that long?

Jane told us that part of it is the lotus plant isn't using its seeds like a normal plant would to make babies.

Normal propagation, reproduction of lotus

is by asexual.

You use the roots underground and you propagate the roots for new crops.

Basically, the plant uses its roots to clone itself and grow new lotuses.

Now, under disaster, the roots could be damaged by earthquake, fire, and when that population is gone, the fruits buried in the soil keep themselves well.

They age for all this time.

for a thousand years and they still can sprout.

This is really the plant world's ultimate insurance policy.

The plant doesn't even need seeds because it can reproduce without them.

Lotus seeds rarely germinate in nature.

But the plant still makes them just in case something terrible happens a hundred years or more down the line.

Talk about long-term thinking.

We may not know exactly what chemicals in the lotus seeds repair damage and keep them living forever, but the seeds have long been used in traditional medicine, and scientists are now studying them for compounds that might help create new drugs.

In fact, humans are already benefiting from some of the lotus plant's special powers.

Lotus has inspired nanotechnology.

It has the hydrophobic effect on the leaf.

The water runs off.

Clean the leaf surface.

Lotus leaves have these tiny nanoscale wax crystals on the leaf surface that repel dust, dirt, and water so the leaves stay clean and clear for photosynthesis.

And scientists have learned how to mimic those properties.

And so a paint called a lotosand was developed, self-cleaning of buildings.

300,000 buildings being painted in Europe.

NASA has actually tested a lotus leaf-inspired coating on planes planes to reduce the buildup of dead bugs, which is a real problem.

It creates a lot of drag.

They found that the lotus-inspired coating reduced bug counts by 40%,

which helped save a good amount of fuel.

Genuinely amazing, but what's also amazing is what the lotus flower looks like when it rises up through the mud.

Mark says, in the West, we've traditionally rhapsodized about roses, the beautiful scent, the gorgeous petals.

But roses are nothing, in his opinion, compared to the lotus.

The largest lotus plants can grow up to about five feet above the water.

When their flowers pop open, they can be nearly two feet across, and they're white and fuchsia and pink and just gorgeous.

That pop when they bloom, you can hear it.

And Mark says that waiting for the lotus flowers to pop open at dawn is a spectator sport in Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

The flowers close up again at dusk, which is when their perfume is strongest, and as they close, they trap all the beetles and flies that pollinate them.

The bugs spend the night inside the flower, frolicking in its pollen, before being released again at dawn.

The lotus plant is more than a spectator sport for people who see it, though.

Throughout history and around the world, the lotus has come to represent purity and reincarnation.

And Mark and Jane say it's easy to understand why.

It grew in filthy places, it grew in swamps, it grew in mud,

and it had all these, you know, performed all these tricks.

So you not only have you got this exquisite flower that's emerging from the mud, but its foliage was pretty remarkable too and was completely untainted by the mud.

The philosopher, yeah, 1600 years ago, mentioning a plant that rises high above the mucky muck, untainted.

A virtuous purity that we all need to emulate, especially those high rising high up in the society.

So lotus is a plant that has been used by the Buddhist religion as a sign of purity, is a sacred flowers for that religion.

Wherever the lotus plant grew across Asia, people were fascinated by it.

It became something they painted, something they used as a sacred emblem or symbol.

The Buddha is said to have sat on a lotus flower.

In India, where it's actually the national flower, the lotus is associated with a number of Hindu gods.

And of course, as well as marveling at its beauty and aspiring to its purity, people throughout history have also enjoyed the lotus plant's tastiness.

Well, everything is edible.

You can cut up the leaves into shreds and deep-fry with garlic.

It's so good.

And the roots you cut up is crispy for salad or for dessert

with dates and things.

Everything is edible, even

the flower bud, even

the stamen, which is the male part of the flower, the stalk, every part is edible so in china they say this plant is has a full body of treasures you might have tasted thin pieces of sliced lotus in chinese restaurants in the u.s they're kind of crunchy and they have all these big holes in them and of course people eat the seeds too if you go to china during the harvest time you'll see this ladies using a toothpick They poke through the lotus, the middle of the lotus seed, and they will poke out the embryo, which is a green-colored thing.

This green embryo is used as a tea.

If you cannot sleep, you make a cup.

What's left after the ladies poke the embryo out is the lotus seeds lunchbox.

It's full of energy for the growing plant, and it tastes, well, kind of starchy and a little nutty.

And in the market here, you can buy dry lotus seed, and then people will go and cook it up.

You can cook them with meat as well, these things, in a stew, like using carrots or something, potatoes.

But Mark says the tiny embryo has an entirely different flavor.

Yeah, then you have this sudden burst of green and because of the because of the ascorpic acid content, you know, also this is it's very kind of it's fizzy.

It's a kind of very bright flavor.

It's a beautiful thing.

Jane actually had some lotus seeds for us to try.

They weren't from China.

A student of hers had picked them up and they were from Vietnam.

They'd had the embryo taken out and they'd been cooked in a sugar syrup.

This is supposed to be the candy.

You want to taste one?

Well,

it's sugary.

It's not

something I used to know of a fresh one.

And this is little coarse as if, you know, the starch part.

And it's

sweet.

I like it.

It tastes a little like marzipan.

Yeah, not that in sugar.

Yeah, that's it.

Jane was disappointed, but I thought they were pretty good, actually.

I love marzipan, and this was like a soft macadamia-like marzipan ball.

They eat lotus seeds of sweets in India, too, particularly in the north, where most of the lotus seeds are produced.

In India, lotus seeds are called makana.

In most of the north India, they use it in sweets, they use it as a snack, they use it in curries, and they use it to make roti or chapati out of it.

So it's like very versatile.

This is Shruti Jella.

She grew up in southern India where lotus plants aren't as common, but her husband grew up in the north.

And on one of my trips to his hometown, my mother-in-law had made some snacks for us and I just tried them and fell in love with them.

And I was like, oh my god, I was just not able to stop eating them.

Shruti didn't want to give up her new favorite food even after she moved to America, so she decided to cook up these roasted puffed lotus seeds herself.

She said the texture and flavor, they combine to produce something quite delicious.

The texture is kind of like Cheetos, and it just has that inherent nuttiness.

Shruti recently launched a company called Lotus Pops to help us all fall in love with puffed lotus seeds the same way she did.

She started off selling in farmers markets in California and now she sells her lotus pops in flavors like salt, pepper, and turmeric and sweet chili in a few grocery stores.

My hope is that

everybody who snacks should know about lotus seeds.

Shruti is not the only person trying to bring the joys of puffed lotus snacks to the American people.

Amit Bojraj grew up in Bombay not eating makana but his wife loved them and made them all the time.

It was at that phase in my life I would say where I was just coming out of business school and makana was very much part of our household kind of snack

and I said hey this this is a very interesting ingredient.

And because Amit was just finishing up business school he got the idea that lotus seeds, makana, would make a great business.

His company is called Super Lotus.

Super Lotus launched last spring and Amit sold out of product on day one.

Right now he's gearing up for a huge production run at a facility in India.

He has high hopes for the lotus seed going mainstream.

Considering the market trends in the U.S.

right now where people are open to trying new ingredients, like if you go to any snack aisle today, you will see so many ingredients on the snack aisle.

Amit told us that even in India, lotus seeds are becoming especially trendy.

A Bollywood celebrity named Karina Kapoor Khan and some of her fellow stars have been seen regularly snacking on Makana.

I felt this was a great opportunity to introduce lotus seeds to the market.

Lotus seeds are still not on the shelves of most American supermarkets, but if Amit and Shruti have their way, they will be soon.

Meanwhile, you can often find them at Asian supermarkets, and they're really worth trying.

Although, Mark Griffiths has his qualms.

One does feel rather wicked eating the embryos of the sleeve, you know, these things that could actually, if they were left intact, go on for another thousand years cheerfully.

I hear you, Mark, but they still sound really tasty to me.

I'm looking forward to trying these puffed lotus seeds.

And Ellen Bennett, host of the McCormick Flavor Forecast Videos, she says there are even more seeds ahead to try, seeds I maybe haven't even heard of yet.

Always be on the hunt for new exciting adventures in seedland and beyond.

Thanks so much to McCormick and Company, the sponsor of this special episode.

Their flavor forecast identifies top trends and ingredients to discover the tastes of tomorrow.

Created by a global team of McCormick experts, including chefs, culinary professionals, trend trackers, and food technologists, the flavor forecast inspires culinary exploration and innovation around the world.

We have a link on our website.

Thanks also this episode to our experts.

Tor Hansen, whose book The Triumph of Seeds is a Delight, Jane Shenmiller at UCLA, Mark Griffiths, author of The Lotus Quest, and Shruti Jella and Ahmed Bojraj.

We have links on our website, gastropod.com.

We'll be back next week with our regularly scheduled episode.

We go to a lab in New York City to find out if there's a way that what you eat can help prevent Alzheimer's.