A Little Pompeiian Fish Sauce Goes a Long Way

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Speaker 1 What's up, Sara?

Speaker 1 I'm Lativ Nasser. I'm Sarakari, sitting in for Lulu this week.
This is Radio Lab.

Speaker 1 Do you have any idea what we're going to talk about? No, I was like, this must be what Christmas morning feels like.

Speaker 1 Not that I would know.

Speaker 1 It's just like get a present. In this case, it's a story.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But anyway, yeah, no, I know nothing. Perfect.
So today on the show, we have kind of the mother of all missing persons reports is what it is. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's the story of how about 50,000 people vanished off of the face of the earth.

Speaker 1 And then how almost 2,000 years later, one man

Speaker 1 tried to find them.

Speaker 1 Okay, there we go. Okay.
This is my speaking voice. Great.
So, how do you,

Speaker 1 what should I call you? Steve, Steven, Professor Tuck, something else all together.

Speaker 1 Steve, if you call me Professor Tuck, I'm expecting you to make a great appeal. So,

Speaker 1 okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I also wanted, that's the real reason for this call to me.
This is for an extension.

Speaker 1 All right, so Steve Tuck is a historian at Miami University, and the moment in history that he has just buried himself in for the decade is,

Speaker 1 I mean, is arguably the most iconic dramatic disaster tragedy story in history. The eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction, particularly of the city of Pompeii.
Have you heard of Pompeii?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like the city that got covered in ash, people frozen in time. Yeah.
Like an entire population just wiped out in an instant. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's sort of the popular perception.

Speaker 3 This entire town is wiped off the face of this planet.

Speaker 1 Museums, movies, books. The story is always basically the same.

Speaker 4 Their tragic deaths have made Pompeii world famous.

Speaker 1 It's sort of the one thing that everybody knows about. Making it one of the most lethal volcanic events in human history.
Everybody died. Instantly.
No survivors. Right.

Speaker 1 However, Steve, being the good historian that he is, always had this thought. Like, we all keep saying that there were no survivors.
But as far as I could tell, no one had ever gone to look for them.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah. According to Steve, you know, the one thing we all know about Pompey is actually just an assumption.

Speaker 1 And through his work,

Speaker 1 the way I see Pompey is completely changed. It's the way I used to see it is like a kind of like a cartoon tragedy.
But then hearing him talk about it, like it, it's become so much more

Speaker 1 human.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So I had this question, you know, can we? Okay, so the first thing Steve told me was that something that's always left out of these popular accounts of Pompeii is just the cold, hard math.

Speaker 1 Pre-eruption of the city of Pompeii, the nearby city of Herculaneum and the surrounding countryside had a combined population of maybe 50,000 people. That's 50,000 people in the red zone, right?

Speaker 1 So just imagine the area completely destroyed by the volcano. Right.
Okay. And then how many human remains were discovered?

Speaker 1 So between all of the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, the villas that have been excavated, about 1,200. What?

Speaker 1 1,200? That's it?

Speaker 1 That's like, what is that? Like less than 5% of the people? That's tiny. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Of course, it could be that, you know, the rest of the bodies are actually there, but just haven't been found or dug up yet. How much of the red zone has been excavated? Oh, a tiny fraction.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 1 A tiny fraction.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of land there to dig through. Okay, okay, I see.
So maybe all of their bodies are just buried buried in these other places that they haven't.

Speaker 1 Maybe the other bodies are buried in these other places. Maybe, but all of them? It seemed unlikely.
But still, like,

Speaker 1 the town is right at the base of the volcano.

Speaker 1 You think people could have gotten out? Well, it's a very complex eruptive event. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Do you want to just walk me through it? Should we just play it out? All right. Pompeii is a city right along the coast of the Bay of Naples.

Speaker 1 It's a beautiful location. I sound like a real estate agent, but

Speaker 1 it's a gorgeous location down there in southern Italy along the coast. If you don't mind volcanoes, it's great.
It keeps the property values down. Okay, so this is 79 AD.

Speaker 1 On August 24th in the morning, there were earthquakes, but these were a common occurrence. So no one really paid attention to them.
Probably just felt like a normal day. Right.

Speaker 1 If I were to walk down the street in Pompeii, the main drag, what would I have seen? You would have seen a long street with two lanes flanked by sidewalks.

Speaker 1 Many of the shops would have taken over part of the sidewalk. They move the things they're selling out there or the wine bars.

Speaker 1 People take over the sidewalk and part of the street as they're all crowded out there. And it's a very densely populated, very lively place.

Speaker 1 In the backdrop of all this, less than 10 miles northwest of the city sat a large green cone-shaped mountain.

Speaker 1 And on this day, At about one o'clock in the afternoon, if you were taking maybe a midday break, having some fish, fish some wine with friends at a sidewalk cafe and happened to glance up at this mountain you'd have seen the top of it just explode

Speaker 1 it's just pulverized and blown straight into the air this massive dark column of rock and gas rising up about 20 miles into the atmosphere towering over pompei higher than modern airplanes fly my god so high in fact it takes several hours for that material to rain down fully.

Speaker 1 So most of it at this point is just

Speaker 1 hanging out up there in the air.

Speaker 1 Huh.

Speaker 1 Which means if people looked at that and then said, I think it's time to leave, they would have three, four hours to get out.

Speaker 1 Wait, I always thought that people got covered in ash instantly, like frozen in the middle of taking a bite at dinner or something. I mean, three, four hours sounds like a lot of time to leave.

Speaker 1 Yes, But that assumes that people decided quickly. And the last time this mountain had exploded was 1800 years before.

Speaker 1 So nobody knew that this was a volcano. They didn't even have the word volcano in the language.
Oh my God.

Speaker 1 I mean, you don't really know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought the explosion was the worst of it.

Speaker 1 Maybe they thought this, you know, the stuff that kind of looks like smoke is just going to blow away. Right.
But even if if you were like, okay, I am getting out of here right now.

Speaker 1 Just imagine, maybe you were out running around town doing something. Your family's at home.
You'd have to get home first. But the sky is rapidly darkening.
The earth is shaking.

Speaker 1 You're trying to get through the chaos with the earthquake. Push your way through the people, the animals, the carts.
Trying to make it home and gather your family before you go.

Speaker 1 When you finally reach your house, maybe someone's missing. Maybe you have a sick relative who can't move so easily.
You have no idea how much time you have. Who knows?

Speaker 1 There's a million ways this could play out yeah but when archaeologists dug up some of the houses in pompeii they discovered a clue

Speaker 1 every house would have at least a small shrine to the household gods

Speaker 1 A little hollowed out alcove in the wall where they keep these little statues. They're mostly bronze figurines between six and nine inches tall.

Speaker 1 And the members of the household would pray at the shrine to protect the home and the family and when archaeologists uncovered these homes they noticed all the household shrines are empty all these little statues are gone oh and not only that all the safes that have been uncovered their strong boxes of money those are empty too all of these things are gone from the houses wait what does that mean Well, it means that people were trying to just grab whatever was grabbable and get out of there.

Speaker 1 So in those three hours, you can imagine that people were out of their houses, maybe on foot or on horseback, dragging carts behind them, just trying to make their way through the crowded, chaotic streets.

Speaker 1 And the volcano, remember, is to the north. So you kind of can assume most people are trying to go south, towards the southern city gates.
Got to move on, people. No time to waste here.

Speaker 1 But that material, that tall column of debris that's been hanging in the air,

Speaker 1 starts to collapse.

Speaker 1 And because of the prevailing winds coming from the northwest, it collapses towards the south, pushed over like a Jenga Tower. Directly on top of the city of Pompeii.

Speaker 1 The ash is filling the air, it's hard to breathe, you can't see anything.

Speaker 1 And then this pumice stone starts coming down

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 heavier volcanic glassy stones and those are like missiles. So all this stuff kind of rains down.
The streets fill up, become impossible to move through. And a lot of those people who did try to flee.

Speaker 1 If you map the human remains that have been discovered the vast majority of them are clustered around the gates they got caught in a traffic jam and years later recovered from their bodies were the little bronze statues of household gods

Speaker 1 huh

Speaker 1 okay but pompeii it's a coastal city right like maybe a bunch of people left by sea

Speaker 1 Because, I mean, if it was me, I would try to get on a boat. Why would you try to get on a boat? I would would assume that I could get farther away more quickly on a ship.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And if I don't know what's going on, the very least I know is that the problem is on lead. Well, maybe.
Oh, God. So imagine there's a volcano.
Imagine there's also earthquakes.

Speaker 1 So there are tsunamis happening here. Oh.

Speaker 1 And those.

Speaker 1 They're disastrous. So this sea, this is not a calm sea.

Speaker 1 And unless somebody left early or timed it perfectly so that they could flow out of the Bay of Naples with those waves going out, once those waves come back in, there's no sailing against them.

Speaker 1 They would be trapped.

Speaker 1 Ah,

Speaker 1 okay, okay. Maybe not by sea then.
Maybe not. Anyway,

Speaker 1 things just get worse from there. By dusk, the ash and rock have built up so much that it was impossible to leave.

Speaker 1 Some people took refuge in their houses, but the volcanic material came down and the roofs collapsed.

Speaker 1 Those who managed to escape the collapsed roofs make their way through the darkness and the heat and the falling missiles and

Speaker 1 took refuge in public buildings and in low areas like cellars. And it was around this time that the second phase of the eruption began with these pulses of super hot volcanic gas.

Speaker 1 Estimates between 300 and 600 degrees. That's Celsius, which is 500 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 1 So hot that in one case in Herculaneum. They found evidence of gray matter that had been turned to glass.
What? It got so hot that someone's brain turned to glass.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And these gases roll down the mountain into the city.
And they're heavier than air. And they displace the oxygen starting at the ground and moving up.

Speaker 1 So the people who who are taking refuge in cellars or downstairs in houses are all asphyxiated. There's no way around that.
You can't escape that.

Speaker 4 I looked back. A dense, dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading itself over the country like a cloud.

Speaker 1 The closest we can get to actually imagining what it would be like in Pompeii at that time comes from the letters of Pliny the Younger, an aristocrat, an author, a lawyer, also also a nephew to the famous naturalist Pliny the Elder.

Speaker 4 Let us turn out of the high road, I said, while we can still see, for fear that, should we fall in the road, we should be pressed to death in the dark by the crowds that are following us.

Speaker 1 He was a teenager at the time, and he watched Vesuvius erupt from across the Bay of Naples, a much safer distance than Pompeii. But still, he and his mother barely escaped with their lives.

Speaker 4 Not such as we have when the sky is cloudy or when there is no moon, but that of a room when it is shut up and all the lights put out.

Speaker 4 You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men.

Speaker 4 Some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied.

Speaker 4 One lamenting his own fate, another

Speaker 4 that of his family. Some wishing to die from the very fear of dying.

Speaker 4 Some lifting their hands to the gods. But the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final, endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 1 You know, I know Stephen Tuck set out to like find people who survived, but all I'm hearing is the six million ways that they could have died.

Speaker 1 Which is what makes even more impressive what Stephen Tuck found after the break.

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Speaker 1 Latif, Sarah, Radio Lab. Back from break.

Speaker 1 Okay, so before the break, we met Professor Stephen Tuck, who is on a mission to try to find survivors from Pompeii, but who then told us how totally and hopelessly devastating the eruption of Vesuvius actually was.

Speaker 1 Right. I mean, it's the apocalypse, basically.
It's the apocalypse. Yeah.
But we also learned that there were these windows, these moments where it might have been possible to escape.

Speaker 1 Okay, so then what? Then, so where do you go? What's your next step? So, my next step was trying to figure out how to find people, and I decided the way forward was Roman names. So, the Roman names.

Speaker 1 Family names in the ancient Roman Empire were very tied to place. And so, Steve's plan was to look for Pompeian names that kind of newly popped up in other cities after the eruption.
Okay.

Speaker 1 That's his kind of strategy, which is, I think, like a pretty good strategy. Wait, but then how do you find the Pompeian, like, are there old Pompeian phone books or letters or I don't know?

Speaker 1 How do you like even find them? No, not really. Nothing like that.

Speaker 1 But the special thing about Pompeii is that unlike old ruins that have, you know, been weathered for 2,000 years, this city was basically preserved in ash. And so you can find names everywhere.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes. They're in the usual places, carved into stone.
You know, epitaphs, tombstones. There were names carved above the doors of people's homes, like a name on the bailbox kind of thing.
Right.

Speaker 1 Or on objects. Seal rings that people had with their names on them.
But also,

Speaker 1 you can read names that were just written or scratched lightly on a wall. Graffiti and painted announcements.
People signed all that with their family names. Oh, nice.

Speaker 1 There were even receipts written on walls. Loan records from banks.
Filled with names. You know, so-and-so agrees to borrow this much money and we'll repay it at this rate of interest.

Speaker 1 And then nine witnesses have to sign off on those. Wow.
And probably a lot of those loans did not, there was no volcano clause in there. I guess a lot of sales.

Speaker 1 I think a lot of those loans did not get repaid, yeah. Right.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so what he does is he basically takes every

Speaker 1 single

Speaker 1 name

Speaker 1 he can find

Speaker 1 that has ever been excavated anywhere in this region pompeus is also a family name puts him in a big database does this for pompeii and herculaneum so i have a huge number of names and he's like okay

Speaker 1 these are the people i'm looking for

Speaker 1 and so he puts up a map on the wall of his office a very nice map that i made of the region and of the roads the roman roads at the time all the roads that led away from pompeii and herculaneum and he's like okay i'm gonna go through the neighboring towns and communities there's thousands of communities one by one to see if he can find any of these names popping up after the eruption.

Speaker 1 Okay. I started with the close cities.
No survivors. Nobody in Sorrento or Salernum.
He looked at the town of Valia. It's right on the coast.
Everything you might want. Nobody of Valia either.

Speaker 1 He looked on the islands. I thought some people might have gone to the islands of Copri or Ischia.
But no. Nothing.

Speaker 1 And like you could just imagine his finger like running down the map, following the road, crossing off this town, crossing off that town.

Speaker 1 The whole Sorentine Peninsula, which makes up the bottom half of the Bay of Naples, and it's outside the blast zone, nobody in any of those communities. He tries moving inland, away from the coast.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're close. There's roads.
There's connections to Pompeii in some of these communities. But were any Pompeians there? No.
No. City after city, just nobody.

Speaker 1 It just keeps getting bleaker and bleaker.

Speaker 1 But then he thinks, okay, the town that would make the most sense is this one south of the Bay of Naples called Pestum. And Pestum is a beautiful Roman port city.

Speaker 1 It's on the west coast, like Pompeii, like Herculaneum. It checked all my boxes.
He's like, this is the place. It's everything that Pompeii is, but just outside the blast zone.

Speaker 1 He checks all the names in that town. And I found

Speaker 1 nobody. No.

Speaker 1 None of the Pompeii names. Nobody from Pompeii, nobody from Herculaneum, nobody from any of the villas.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. There's just nobody.
Oh.

Speaker 1 And as time went on, as I spent weeks or months doing research with no results, you know, I thought, okay, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, maybe everyone did die.

Speaker 1 Wow. Now I'm like so sad at this.
Okay, just wait, just wait. Okay.
Because this whole time, Steve had been mostly looking in communities south of Pompeii.

Speaker 1 You know, Vesuvius is on the north side of the city. So he assumed that people in Pompeii.

Speaker 1 They look at the eruption and they flee south which makes sense but when that eruptive column collapsed the one that 20 miles into the sky when that collapsed it collapsed to the southeast so it's possible that if anyone tried to flee that way they would have been killed by that collapse

Speaker 1 in any case steve runs out of south so he looks north

Speaker 1 towards this big city cuteoli which is north of vesuvius it's the major harbor city for um ancient italy and it's the largest community outside of Rome.

Speaker 1 And as he starts to go through all the names in this city, he comes across a clue in the shape of a bottle.

Speaker 1 Are you ready? Yeah, I think so. A bottle that used to hold something called garum or garum.
The word garum, it just like tickles my soul. This is Sameene Nostrat.
I'm a cook and a nerd.

Speaker 1 Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and Ancient Rome Enthusiast. I'm a nerd cook.
And she graciously agreed to help us make some garum. But I've always kind of wanted to make a pot.
Sardines.

Speaker 1 Stinky stuff. Why are we doing this?

Speaker 1 Okay, what is garum? Why is it a clue? What does it have to do with Pompeii and bottles? Great questions. And why are you all of a sudden cooking with Samim? Okay, I promise I'm going to get to that.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay, okay, so...

Speaker 1 When Steve was collecting Pompeian names, there was one he came across more than any other, which was this guy named Aulus Umbricius Scarus.

Speaker 1 Aulus Umbricius Scarus is the garum king of Pompeii. He is the king of the fish sauce manufacturers.
He had workshops all over Pompeii where they would bottle this condiment. These are crunchy.

Speaker 1 Made from fresh sardines.

Speaker 1 Chopped into pieces. Your cutting board looks like you have

Speaker 1 butchered a person. Place fish guts in a vase, mushing up fish heads, fish blood, fish scales.
You put a ton of salt on there. That was pretty easy.

Speaker 1 And then you leave this whole jar in the sun stirring multiple times a day

Speaker 1 to rot.

Speaker 1 And over time, the fish and salt ooze out this brown liquid. And because most ancient Romans ate pretty plain food, bread or some kind of grain and simple vegetables.

Speaker 1 Garum, and this guy Aulus Umbricius Scaris' garum in particular. It's salty and fishy.
You only need like a few drops, man. People would just buy it by the bottle and put it on everything.

Speaker 1 I think it was truly like the condiment on the table at all times. And when archaeologists began to dig up Pompeii, these bottles were found all over the place.

Speaker 1 Can you describe the bottle and the label?

Speaker 1 So the bottles are very plain terracotta bottles. They've got a very narrow neck and a rounded body and then a narrow round foot at the bottom.

Speaker 1 But then across that sort of globular body was handwritten in ink. Some of it's black, some of it's red, the labeling.

Speaker 1 And the labeling formula was always the flower of garum, which is a little hyperbolic. The flower of Garum of Scarus.
The flower of Garum of Scarus. All these bottles had these words.

Speaker 1 This is like Mike's hot honey, but like... It's exactly Mike's hot honey.
It's like the Heinz ketchup of antiquity.

Speaker 1 And actually, this is, so far as we know, the first example of like a product with brand labeling in history. Whoa.

Speaker 1 This fish sauce. In history? Yeah.
And these garum bottles. They were a favorite outside of Pompeii as well.
They're found as far away as southern France. Huh.
It's like an empire. It is, it is, yeah.

Speaker 1 But, of course, August 24th, 79 AD,

Speaker 1 along with the rest of Pompeii, Aulus Umbricius Carus' home and all his garum workshops are buried in ash and stone.

Speaker 1 And just like that, the production line for this famous fish sauce stopped dead. No more bottles shipped to southern France.
You couldn't find it in Naples and Rome.

Speaker 1 No fish sauce bottles anywhere to be found post-79 AD. It was just one more casualty of Vesuvius.

Speaker 1 But then, as Steve is digging around in documents from Puteoli, looking for Pompeian names, he discovers that about 20 years after the eruption, there's a new product on the market in the town of Puteoli.

Speaker 1 Okay. bottles exactly like the bottles that scarus had used at pompeii and this one has weirdly similar branding the same labeling formula in black or red ink it says the flower of garum

Speaker 1 of putiolanis

Speaker 1 putiolanis what what what's putiolanis putiolanis just means the guy from puttioli the man from putioli Hmm, so it's like a guy from Poutioli that's making this stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it sounds like a rip-off, like somebody that's capitalizing on this brand that people used to love and is hearkening back to that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it could be, right? Could be that someone's ripping off this guy's branding. Yeah.
No. No? No.

Speaker 1 Because as Steve continues to dig for names, he comes across an epitaph. A group epitaph.
And

Speaker 1 guess what family he finds? Oh my God, the

Speaker 1 umbriciuses. That's right.
Survivors. Wow.
And it's like, yes, there's somebody. There's somebody someplace.
Wow. So that Aulus Umbricius Scarus guy.

Speaker 1 He doesn't seem to have made it out, but his family did. And one of the young men probably Scarus's grandson is named Kuteolanus.
Like they named him after their new hometown.

Speaker 1 And he grows up to become the Garum king of Kuteoli. Succession of the fish sauce kingdom.
The new heir, yeah.

Speaker 1 And now that he's looking in towns north of Vesuvius, Steve starts finding survivors all over the place. Six people in the little city of Nucaria.
A person in Aquinum. Two people in Beneventum.

Speaker 1 A little cluster of five or six people. Over here.
A couple dozen. Over there.
Three families that moved to this small community in the mountains. There were three merchant families.

Speaker 1 They all made it out to Puteoli. Two families who owned private banks.
Both settle at Cumi. He found rich people, poor people.
Some of them had been well off at Pompeii and desperately poor later on.

Speaker 1 There's one story of a woman

Speaker 1 who marries a gladiator called Aquarius. He's a water-themed gladiator.
Whoa. Yeah.
He even finds this whole neighborhood in the city of Naples. Built just for the people from Herculaneum.

Speaker 1 Like it's like Chinatown or something, but it's like little Herculaneum.

Speaker 1 The map he made just filled in with all this life.

Speaker 1 These people suffered tragedies. They became refugees.

Speaker 1 They fled. They move into these new communities.
You know, they name their kids after their new communities. They make religious dedications.
They run for public office. They establish businesses.

Speaker 1 They really just pick up. I love that.
Yeah. Okay.
So all in all, how many people did he find? Well, it took him 10 years to come through the names in 48 communities. Okay.

Speaker 1 And I found survivors in 12 of the 48. So in total.
A couple hundred named individuals. Okay.
Which, I mean, wow, people even survived. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But then I, sorry, not to

Speaker 1 first year bubble,

Speaker 1 but that leaves, what, like 48,000 people that are still unaccounted for? That's right.

Speaker 1 But what he sort of slowly started to realize is like, well, let's say my house gets destroyed in, I don't know, a volcanic eruption today. I'm going to go move in to my parents' basement.

Speaker 1 I'm going to where my relatives are, right? Like, I'm going to where there's a couch I can crash on, where there's a roof I can stay under. You know, you go where they have to take you in, right?

Speaker 1 Like, that's probably most people's first impulse, right? Is to find family, find relatives somewhere else. And so, those people are invisible in the inscriptions

Speaker 1 because they're the same family name. They don't change

Speaker 1 the profile of a community.

Speaker 1 Right. You know, it's not a new family name moving into a community.

Speaker 1 And I think that's where the vast majority of the people went. Now, what he believes is most people got out.
The majority of people survived.

Speaker 1 and almost always with their families. Wow.

Speaker 1 I do find it just so tantalizing. Like, it makes you just want to know the rest of the story.
Like, what happened to those people? How did they get out? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I would love to know some of these details of what happened between the eruption and people resettling somewhere.

Speaker 1 You know, what routes did they take?

Speaker 1 What occurred? You know, what traumas did they undergo, you know, on the way out? Yeah, it must have been just a terrifying experience. And we simply don't know.

Speaker 1 But we know people went back to their families.

Speaker 1 You know, they went through the dark shouting their names at each other, as Pliny tells us in his letter.

Speaker 1 And they connected up, and only then did they flee.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I find it quite moving.

Speaker 1 So that's, yeah, that's the story. What do you, what do you make of that? You know, so my family's Pakistani.

Speaker 1 Like, I grew up in the U.S. My parents grew up in Pakistan.
My grandparents grew up in India. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like, you know, the partition of India was like this giant traumatic thing that like, I don't think my family really even has its arms around like all the ways in which it impacted us but like there's so much that gets lost in a big traumatic move like that and i feel so cut off from even just like the lives that my grandparents had in india that like i would kill for anything like who they were hanging out with and what they were doing and where you know any crumb is like gold.

Speaker 1 Like yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, and that's, that's basically why I ended up making that fish sauce with Sameen.
Yeah. I mean, really what we're doing is we're time traveling.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's what I think is so magical about food. Again, chef, Sameen, Nasrat.

Speaker 1 I mean, even in the span of your own life, you eat stuff and you travel back to like the first time you had it or stuff. Yeah, meaningful time you had it.

Speaker 1 And so this is another way that we get to go have a sensory experience that people were having. you know, 2,000 years ago.
That time we almost died from a volcano. Exactly.

Speaker 1 But, but it's true true that I can't

Speaker 1 like, I can't stop imagining you. It's just one day out of the blue, no warning, boom, you lose your home.
Not just your home, you lose your entire hometown. You can never go back to it.

Speaker 1 You can never walk down the streets you walked on as a kid. And then 20 years later,

Speaker 1 you're resettled in a totally new place, totally new life.

Speaker 1 And you're grocery shopping, and you see on the shelf the flower of Garam, and you buy it, and you take it home, you open the bottle,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 you taste it.

Speaker 1 Okay, all right, okay, let's open it on three. Okay, one, two, three.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow, oh, wow, this is smelling stronger than it was.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I went real deep. I went nose into the jar.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Oh, boy. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. Okay.
You ready? I'm ready. I'm ready.
I'm ready. Okay.
I'm putting some on my tongue right now.

Speaker 1 Oh. Oh, it's very, I mean, it's very salty.
It's not really that gross. It just tastes gross.
I don't know. It just tastes salty.
It tastes a little like umami.

Speaker 1 It's like a, you know, like sometimes you're playing in the water as a kid at the beach and a huge wave wave comes, and then and then like it knocks you over, and you're like losing your breath, and like you have to swallow some water, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you're like, oh, and then you're like, why?

Speaker 1 Like, and then it's like the top of your mouth, kind of, yeah, yeah, and it was kind of seaweedy water or something,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 This episode was reported by me, Luftif Nasser, with help from Annie McEwen and Akedi Foster Keys. It was produced by Annie McEwen.
My culinary shenanigans with Sameen were recorded by Adam Howell.

Speaker 1 Voice acting by Brendan Dalton. Original music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom.
Hosting help from Sarakari. Fact-checked by Emily Krieger.
Edited by Pat Walters.

Speaker 1 And I doubt anyone's going to want to try it, but we're going to link to the recipe for Garum.

Speaker 1 And I also have a giant jar jar of it in my house that I'm trying to get rid of.

Speaker 1 Before we go,

Speaker 1 before we sign off here, real quick at the end, I just wanted to shout out a podcast I've loved for many, many years.

Speaker 1 And it feels right to promote it at the end of this particular episode of ours because it is a podcast about history, about science, but more than anything, about food. It's called Gastropod.

Speaker 1 It's so charming, but also encyclopedic about food history. So for example, I just had the question, has Gastropod done an episode about Garum?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 of course they have.

Speaker 1 It's in their episode about the history of ketchup, which I probably shouldn't have, but I just took 45 minutes out of the middle of my workday to re-listen to it and it was so good.

Speaker 1 Did you know, for example, that way before anyone ever thought to put a tomato in ketchup, it was a fermented fish sauce?

Speaker 1 Whatever condiment or snack or dessert or ingredient that you love, there's probably a gastropod about it.

Speaker 1 One of my favorite all-time episodes of theirs, Better Believe It's Butter, is about the margarine wars.

Speaker 1 Don't just take my word for it. The New York Times, Wired, TED Talks, all of them have chosen Gastropod as one of their favorite podcasts.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so subscribe to Gastropod, wherever you get your podcasts. That's it for us.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 Guys, I'm shaking the fish sauce. Who wants to help me?

Speaker 1 Okay, so no one's helping me shake this fish sauce. Shake it, shake it, shake it.
It's gonna give you your mother.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure. Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it.
Do you want to shake it with me? Why not? Oh, come on, no. It's not gross.
Come here.

Speaker 1 Okay, look. I'm taking a little smile.

Speaker 1 Bo.

Speaker 1 Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont, and here are the staff credits.

Speaker 1 Radio Lab was created by Jad Ebum Rod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.
Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Speaker 1 Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 1 Harry Fertuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Guterres, Sindhu Nianu Sumbum Dum, Matt Gilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 1 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 5 Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio.

Speaker 5 Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 5 Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Speaker 1 Radio Lab is supported by the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit transforming America's love of nature into action for our forests.

Speaker 1 Did you know that national forests provide clean drinking water to one in three Americans? And when forests struggle, so do we.

Speaker 1 The National Forest Foundation creates lasting impact by restoring forests and watersheds, strengthening wildfire resilience, and expanding recreation access for all.

Speaker 1 Last year, they planted 5.3 million trees and led over 300 projects to protect nature and communities nationwide. Learn more at nationalforests.org/slash radiolab.