This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode, Ask Gastropod: Bubblegum, Meal Kits, and the Real Truth About Rooibos, first released on June 24, 2025. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

VALARIE: My name is Valarie. I am calling from Richlands, North Carolina. And my question is something my husband and I have debated about for… months. What the heck is bubblegum flavor?

CYNTHIA GRABER: That is a good question. I can immediately call up the flavor in my mind when someone says it, because like most people who grew up in America, I chewed plenty of bubblegum as a kid. But there’s, like, no bubblegum tree—so yeah, what is it?

NICOLA TWILLEY: This business of bubblegum’s true essence is not the only question on Gastropod listeners’ minds these days. The world is full of mysteries, and you are all curious about them. Fortunately, Gastropod is here to investigate. That’s right, you are listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber, and in this installment of our Ask Gastropod series, we’ve selected three of your questions to answer. Bubblegum is obviously one of those. And then Oliver, who’s South African, wanted to know if it’s true that all the rooibos tea in the entire world comes from a particular mountain range in his home country. That seemed pretty farfetched to him.

TWILLEY: And our listener Porter has an important question about meal kits. Are they better for the planet than just buying ingredients at the grocery store, even with all that packaging? Has anyone done those calculations?

GRABER: We have the answers. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science technology and economics. Gastropod is part of the vox media podcast network, in partnership with Eater.

TWILLEY: And a quick heads-up before we get going today: the paperback version of my book, Frostbite, is out on June 24, so if you have been waiting for that soft soft cover, this is your cue to get out there and purchase a copy. It’s won a bunch of awards, The New York Times called it a page turner that was hard to put down, and if you like this show, you’ll love it!

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TWILLEY: This episode’s first mission comes from none other than listener Porter, from New Mexico.

PORTER: I was wondering what you guys can find out about sustainability and meal kits. Meal kits are very convenient, as I can attest to, as my partner and I have been getting them for over a year.

TWILLEY: But what Porter wants to know is, can she have her cake and eat it too? Or are these oh-so-convenient meal kits actually destroying the planet with all their packaging?

PORTER: Meal kit companies like HelloFresh make a lot of sustainability claims, such as reduced carbon emissions and reduced food waste. But I find it hard to believe that such a convenient option would also be the sustainable one.

GRABER: We are going to investigate, but first we have to start at the beginning of meal kits, which turns out to be a couple of decades ago. We called up someone who knows something about them: Brenna Ellison is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University.

ELLISON: I feel like they’ve morphed a lot over time, but I think the first ones really started as, you know, sending you a meal that you put together and prepare, you chop the ingredients, you cook the food.

TWILLEY: The concept of a meal kit apparently first hit the market in 2000, thanks to a London-based company called Leaping Salmon. This was the early days of the internet, and foodies who wanted to throw dinner parties without all the planning and shopping could sign up for these snazzy new meal kits, complete with recipes from Michelin starred chefs. All the ingredients were in the boxes, you just had to chop and stir and saute and serve. Apparently Victoria and David Beckham were early adopters.

GRABER: Meal kits became a little more mainstream when they were introduced in Sweden in 2007. The founder there, a mother of three, named her company something that translates to “Dinner Peace,” meaning that parents didn’t have to worry about the logistics of the meal. And the company became popular enough that it spread throughout a bunch of countries in Europe.

REBECCA BENNETT: But it was pretty small, very niche. The bigger companies—like the HelloFresh, you know, Marley Spoon, Every Plate kind of companies—they’ve been around since sort of the mid 2000-tens.

TWILLEY: This is Rebecca Bennett, she’s a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University, in Melbourne, Australia, in the Global Center for Preventive Health and Nutrition. Like she said, those bigger companies, like HelloFresh, launched in the US in 2012, and the market has only grown since then. There are more than 300 different meal kit companies out there today.

BENNETT: Just to pull up a nice little stat. So in 2018, the worldwide revenue was US $5 billion, but this year it was $14 billion.

GRABER: Brenna and Rebecca both agree that it was COVID that really gave these companies a big boost.

BENNETT: People being home, having time to cook, maybe not wanting to go out to a supermarket, wanting to stay at home, these really convenient options really cemented their position in the market.

GRABER: Rebecca told us that still today, quite a lot of people use meal kits regularly.

BENNETT: So, I just did a study recently, so it was a survey of participants across Australia, the UK, US, Canada, and Mexico. And so we asked them, in the previous seven days, how many of you have used a meal kit or purchased a meal kit? And across the survey, it was actually almost 14 percent. So I think that’s quite a lot, in the previous week, to have used a meal kit. And in the US that was the highest, with 17 percent.

TWILLEY: I think that’s quite a lot too—I mean, it’s one out of every six people in America! So why are all these people using meal kits? Is everyone just loving the convenience? How exactly are they helping?

BENNETT: Yeah, so some work that’s been done by one of my colleagues here at Deacon, Kylie Fraser, she interviewed Australian families to figure out why they like using meal kits. And part of the criteria for participating in the study, you had to be the primary meal provider in your family. So unsurprisingly, all the participants were women.

GRABER: Big sigh. Sad but true for most families.

BENNETT: And what they found was that, for these women using a meal kit, it helped them with their mental load. So instead of having to be thinking about, oh, what am I making tonight for dinner? They know, the meal kit’s sorted it out. I don’t have to go to the grocery store. It’s all in the box. So that was the real driver of use, that feeling of reducing stress, helping with family meal planning, and taking the load off mothers.

TWILLEY: Which Rebecca can personally vouch for.

BENNETT: So I, have been using meal kits on and off since I went back to work, at the start of 2018 after maternity leave. So I felt, when I read Kylie’s study, I was like, oh my gosh, it’s me. [LAUGH]

GRABER: Brenna also uses meal kits and she told us it’s for the same reasons.

ELLISON: Yeah, so I have a three and six-year-old at home. And I’m going to be honest, like meal planning is a mental activity that is just like not [LAUGH] not for me right now. And so I feel it’s really easy to get stuck in a rut with what I plan to cook and what we eat at home. And so this is a way to try to diversify what we eat. And, admittedly, I’m not a very creative vegetarian cook, but I like vegetarian meals. And so I personally really like the vegetarian options. And more international flavors that I just don’t feel that confident cooking on my own.

TWILLEY: Brenna told us she feels that it also helps her not throw out as much food—like if she wants to try a recipe with a new ingredient. She told us about a meal kit that came with harissa, it’s a Middle Eastern, spicy, red pepper-based paste or powder.

ELLISON: I don’t have that at home. And so this gives me exactly what I need versus me maybe going to the store and buying a whole six ounce container. And if I don’t like it, then that container might sit in my pantry for, you know, months on end until I eventually throw it away. Or if you’re making, you know, you want to make hamburgers for two people, it gives you exactly like two buns instead of a package of eight that you might not use otherwise.

GRABER: We took an informal survey ourselves, we asked you listeners if you’ve used meal kits and if so, what you liked about them, and you gave similar answers. They help you out with decision fatigue, they take the stress out of meal planning, they help you learn new techniques in the kitchen or try new ingredients, and you hoped they cut down on food waste.

TWILLEY: But one thing a lot of you who use meal kits said—and it’s what Porter asked about too—is that you were worried that with all the packaging, there was no way these could be good for the environment, even if they do reduce food waste.

GRABER: So let’s break this down and look at food waste first. Does using a meal kit subscription cut down on food waste? Brenna said it did for her, but that’s just her own personal experience. What does the data say?

ELLISON: I, I haven’t seen any research done by like, academia. But I know two of the big meal kit companies have like, commissioned studies of their own. So I think both Blue Apron and HelloFresh have like, hired consultants to come in and do studies with their users. And so they would have people self-report waste when they use the kits. And so, like, from a research standpoint, that’s not our first, preferred way of doing it.

TWILLEY: To really be sure that you’re getting accurate results, you’d want to see an independent study, where researchers are weighing the amounts that are thrown away, for both regular grocery store cooking and meal kit cooking.

GRABER: But, according to Brenna, that hasn’t been done, so we have to go with these less rigorous studies, conducted by the companies themselves.

ELLISON: It’s also better than nothing. And so in general, both studies find—or point towards evidence that like they do reduce waste.

GRABER: But then so what about all the packaging? Does that negate the benefit of reduced food waste?

ELLISON: On the studies that have done lifecycle analyses, they’ve come out saying that the benefits from reducing food waste often can outweigh the cost of the packaging. Because when you put food into a landfill, it emits methane, right? And methane is one of those gases that’s really like increasing the rate of, global warming. Whereas the packaging waste does not quite release as much into the atmosphere.

TWILLEY: A lot of different factors get added up into these life cycle analyses. And they operate based on averages. The average amount of packaging across all food types and meal kit plans, but also the average amount of food Americans waste.

GRABER: Another thing that’s included in the life cycle analyses is driving. So the researchers have concluded that it’s more efficient for a delivery truck that’s already out making the rounds to take these meals to your home, rather than you driving to the grocery store in your car to get the ingredients for your home-cooked meals.

TWILLEY: But what that means is that, if you bike to buy your food—or you order your groceries for a home cooked meal online and they get delivered via an optimized delivery route—or you’re just really good about using up your kale before it goes bad, then your results may differ and a meal kit’s environmental advantages might not outweigh its downsides. It does on average, but it might not for you.

GRABER: Also because Brenna says maybe your drives to the grocery store are more efficient than they assume in the lifecycle analysis.

ELLISON: And I think with those studies, like we kind of have to take ’em with a grain of salt. They’re built on a lot of assumptions, right? And I think some of the things that get left out though is like, a meal kit—I still think a lot of people self included supplement whatever meal kit they get and they still go to the grocery store. So that last mile transport is still happening. I still buy my kids breakfast and we still pack lunches, right? I can’t get all of those things from the meal kit. And so, a lot of the studies have tried to compare getting five meals from a meal kit company and the same five meals from a grocery store, but it might leave out the extra efficiencies you get from a grocery store.

GRABER: Ultimately, it’s not clear that meal kits are substantially better for the environment—or substantially worse. But Brenna said that for most Americans, the environmental benefits seem to outweigh the costs.

TWILLEY: Okay, that’s the environmental implications. But what about the *health* benefits? How good are these meal kits for us?

BENNETT: I know even the major players, they’ve really had a big focus on health.
So now there’s a lot more vegetarian options, you can choose, like, low carb options. You can choose gut healthy options. Like, there’s lots of different ways they’re trying to appeal to health-conscious consumers to try and persuade them, I guess, that this is the way to go.

GRABER: And do the meals live up to this promise?

TWILLEY: So one of the things that’s interesting is: a meal kit is supposed to be like a home cooked meal. And Rebecca told us that’s the pinnacle, when it comes to healthy eating.

BENNETT: Well, we know that food that’s prepared at home is just better for you in pretty much every way than food that you buy. It’s lower in fat, higher in vegetables, higher in fiber. So we know that cooking at home is really the gold standard. That’s the way to go, home cooked meals from scratch.

GRABER: And so if you’re looking at meal kits from a nutritional standpoint, do they offer the same thing?

BENNETT: So there’s been actually quite a lot of work looking into this, particularly in Australia. I think there’s about half a dozen studies that have, you know, analyzed the meal kits. And, I think overall what they’ve found is that they do provide good servings of vegetables. So sort of between the two to two and a half serves per person per meal. Which is quite reasonable if you’re going for, you know, your seven serves a day. But then. In other things, they do fall down a little bit. Often the sodium content is quite high. Often, the fat content is quite high. So it’s kind of a mixed bag.

TWILLEY: But then again, maybe the meal kit isn’t replacing a home cooked meal.

BENNETT: Maybe that’s not how people are using them. Maybe the better comparison is meal kit versus takeaway. Or meal kit versus, like, a frozen lasagna or something. That’s maybe a better comparison. And so if you stack them up against those kinds of meals, they do perform quite well.

GRABER: But so if the ultimate goal is home cooking, if that’s the gold standard, then meal kits offer another benefit: Rebecca said meal kits actually help people learn their way around the stove.

BENNETT: I think what these have found, though, in their nutritional analysis, is they do teach people how to cook. And so if you are not confident in the kitchen, this is like a good stepping stone.

TWILLEY: Several Gastropod listeners confirmed this data point from your own personal experiences: a few of you said that meal kits have, for example, taught you the transformative potential of adding lemon and lime zest, and also helped your kids gain confidence in the kitchen. Brenna’s gone on the exact same meal-kit-to-home-chef journey herself. Like she said, she has meal kits to thank for her newfound love affair with harissa, which turns out to be the perfect addition to roasted chickpeas.

ELLISON: And so like, I actually ordered my first like, container of harissa powder and I’m like, excited to try it on my own, but I would’ve never done that otherwise. So that’s kind of built confidence in that way.

GRABER: One of the things that makes it hard to really understand the impact of meal kits—both for the environment and for our lives—is that they’re kind of new, at least in academic terms.

BENNETT: Even though we say meal kits have been around for 10 years, research moves [LAUGHING] very slowly. So for us, you know, it takes sort of maybe even two, two plus years to have an idea and to see it all the way through. So some of these things we’re still catching up.

TWILLEY: And, just to make things more challenging for researchers, people don’t keep their meal kit subscriptions going forever. More than half cancel within the first six months, and about 90 percent cancel within a year. You listeners confirmed this: you told us they got expensive, some of you said you got tired of the ingredients and flavors they offered, some of you were just in a different phase of your life and ready to move on.

GRABER: Plus the market keeps changing. Today, there are grocery stores offering meal kits. Restaurants offer meal kits. And meal kit companies have a bunch of different options, for all kinds of dietary restrictions, and all levels of cooking. Some meal kits are really just prepared meals.

TWILLEY: Which is sometimes exactly the zero effort answer you’re looking for.

ELLISON: Sometimes I think, like, you hit busy weeks and you’re like, oh, I still don’t want to cook. Like, I would say for me, that’s just the personal barrier, is still not being all that excited to cook, even though someone did the planning for me.

GRABER: At the end of the day, whatever the research says, the point is: does it work for you, for now? And if it does, great.

TWILLEY: And it turns out you probably don’t need to stress *too* too much about that packaging, so that’s good. Save your mental energy for our next conundrum: is it really possible that all the rooibos tea in the world comes from one mountain range in South Africa? We’ve got that story, after the break.

[BREAK]

OLIVER: My name is Oliver. I’m from Cape Town in South Africa. I live in Switzerland now. But I’m calling from France. [LAUGH]

GRABER: Listening and calling in from all around the world, love it! But Oliver’s question had to do with his home country.

OLIVER: How can it be that… rooibos tea is so popular in the world, but apparently it’s only grown in a very small part—small part in South Africa? So I was wondering. Can it be that this small little region produces then, like, enough rooibos for the whole world? Or is something fishy going on here?

TWILLEY: Ooh, here we go! We love a good food crime investigation here at Gastropod.

GRABER: We do indeed. But we were also interested in answering this question because when it came down to it, neither of us really knew anything about rooibos tea. I mean, we’d both tasted it, but we hadn’t really thought about it beyond that. But for Oliver, it *is* tea.

OLIVER: Yeah, so growing up, it was like the default tea that I had. I didn’t recognize other teas as teas. [LAUGH] And, I still need to think a bit about like, whether green tea and black tea is considered tea in my world.

TWILLEY: Yeah that is not where I’m at when it comes to tea. Honestly, at least outside of South Africa, lots of people are not familiar with rooibos at all. Including, at least originally, our rooibos expert, Boris Gorelik.

GORELIK: I came across the name. Of the tea. Rooibos tea. Which sounded strange to me. And I, I’d never tried it.

TWILLEY: Boris is a senior research fellow with the Institute for African Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. But he also, somewhat randomly, is the author of The Story of Rooibos. He decided to try rooibos tea when he visited South Africa to do research on the history of Russian immigration there, he liked it, and he fell down the rooibos rabbit hole.

GRABER: So as you’ve probably figured out by now, rooibos is an herbal tea, after you brew it it’s a dark reddish maroon color, it’s a little floral, a little earthy, a little intense. And as Boris said, the rooibos plant itself is native to South Africa.

GORELIK: It grows in an area that’s about, 200 kilometers northwards of Cape Town. It’s, semi desert. And there’s a long mountain range called Cederberg. Very beautiful mountains. And in South Africa, what that area is famous for is first in springtime tourists flock there. They love it because it’s full of flowers. Now that’s where the flowers are in bloom. And it’s like a huge, huge multicolored carpet.

TWILLEY: This area encompasses something called the fynbos biome. It’s one of the six floral kingdoms in the world. In other words, this area is home to its own unique evolutionary family of flowering plants found nowhere else on the planet. It’s a region the size of Portugal, but it’s more biodiverse than the whole of Europe.

GORELIK: And the second reason people go there is for rock paintings. ‘Cause the indigenous people of that area, the Khoisan people, they lived there for thousands and thousands of years. And you can still find their paintings.

GRABER: Boris says the area is still relatively rural. It’s only a few hours drive from Cape Town, but up in the mountains there, it’s a totally different world.

TWILLEY: And the rooibos bush is one of the many native fynbos plants that grow there. It is a bush but it looks sort of grassy, and that’s because, like a lot of the plants in the region, its leaves are needle shaped.

GORELIK: They’re very narrow, like spiny, spiny, leaves. And they’re so narrow, because it’s a semi desert. You see? And these, these narrow, needle-like leaves, they help the plant to, to, to keep moisture.

GRABER: It’s unclear whether the indigenous Khoi or San people drank rooibos tea, but they certainly knew and used the plant.

GORELIK: There, there is some ev—archeological evidence that several, several thousand years ago, people, people used the rooibos plant for in some way in their caves. But. What they used it for, nobody knows. When I spoke to people, they told me that their parents and grandparents used rooibos not only for drinking, but for instance as cosmetics. So women would mix rooibos with fats, and use it as rouge on their cheeks, for instance. And then of course there was some medicinal healing properties attributed to rooibos. Mostly unconfirmed, of course.

TWILLEY: English and Irish immigrants started to settle in this region in larger numbers in the early 1800s. And as per the stereotype, we are indeed fond of a cup of tea—but we like black tea, like from Asia.

GORELIK: But Asian tea was quite expensive. So people looked for substitutes, for ersatz teas. And that’s where the indigenous knowledge came in handy, because, people knew—local people, the indigenous people knew, how plants tasted and what plants could be suitable for these purposes.

GRABER: And so with some help from the locals, the settlers started brewing cups of rooibos. As we said, it’s dark with a slightly earthy flavor, so they could pretend to themselves that they were drinking black tea, even though they didn’t get the caffeine hit.

TWILLEY: Boris told us that people in the early 1800s would gather the leaves in the wild, then they’d put a pot of rooibos on and just let it basically stew all day, getting stronger and stronger.

GRABER: But the tea wasn’t really known at all outside of the region.

GORELIK: Because it only grew—the, the bushes only grew in big numbers around the Cederberg area. And the Cederberg area was very far—well, in, in, in, in those, in those days, that was very far. So it was a remote, isolated area. In the mid 19th century, you had to travel for two weeks from Cape Town to Clanwilliam, which is the village, the main village there.

GRABER: So it was hard for the tea’s popularity to expand beyond that one particular area of South Africa. But that started to change when Benjamin Ginsburg showed up in town.

GORELIK: Benjamin Ginsburg was a Jew from the Russian Empire.

TWILLEY: His family emigrated to South Africa in the late 1800s.

GORELIK: So Benjamin Ginsburg was about about 15 when he reached South Africa and they settled in the rooibos growing area. Apparently they had no money. They were quite poor. They set up a trading post on the main road leading from Clamwilliam to Cape Town. They had a general store there. And that’s where he, Benjamin, learned about rooibos. And apparently being more business-minded than his father, he saw an opportunity there. And he became one of the earliest traders in rooibos.

GRABER: He came up with a genteel-sounding brand for his tea, Eleven O’Clock. Like, time to take your tea and biscuits.

TWILLEY: This delightful little morning break is traditionally called elevenses in British English. In Benjamin’s version, the tea was rooibos and the biscuits were a South African rusk, which is apparently like a buttermilk biscotti.

OLIVER: Buttermilk rusks are like, really hard, kind of bready things that you need to dip into something to make them edible. But once they are dipped, they are delightful.

GRABER: And Oliver says that rooibos is great for rusk dipping—at 11am or at any hour of the day.

OLIVER: It’s the perfect tea for me, ’cause you can’t steep it too much. It never gets too strong. And it’s really lovely with, like, honey or with ginger. And the best camping breakfast you’ll ever have, at least in my world, will be rooibos tea and buttermilk rusks.

TWILLEY: Back when Benjamin was getting started, this wholehearted appreciation for rooibos was still a minority view. But regardless Benjamin went all in.

GORELIK: By the mid 1920s, he became the biggest buyer of rooibos. Which still wasn’t cultivated. There was no cultivated variety at the time. So he bought from people living in the mountains, and people who collected rooibos tea in the wild.

GRABER: But there were a couple of issues with collecting rooibos tea in the wild. One, the quality wasn’t super consistent. And two, it was causing some environmental problems.

GORELIK: Pickers and farmers. They wanted to encourage growth of rooibos. They started burning, making fires. In that area. Because, because it stimulated the growth of wild rooibos plants.

TWILLEY: And all that fire led to soil erosion. Benjamin had a friend, a medical doctor named Peter Nortier, and Peter was becoming increasingly worried about the impact of harvesting rooibos tea on the local environment.

GRABER: So Peter, Benjamin, and a couple of their friends got together to try to develop a domesticated rooibos bush that consistently produced quality tea and that grew well without fire. The only challenge was collecting seeds to use to breed new rooibos bushes.

TWILLEY: First problem, the wild plants are scattered sparsely across the landscape, they are few and far between. And then the seeds themselves are absolutely minuscule.

GRABER: So these four guys hired farm workers to go search for seeds. The farm workers had to lie down on their stomachs next to the rooibos plants and just scour the ground for tiny, tiny seeds.

GORELIK: And how many seeds can you collect within the day? I don’t know. Ten, maybe? Five or ten.

TWILLEY: Which made the whole project pretty slow going. But then a couple of farm workers noticed an ant carrying a rooibos seed.

GORELIK: So they followed the, the ant to the ant hill, and they realized that ants were, storing the seeds there. They looked into the anthill and then they saw plenty of rooibos seeds. They could actually use a spoon and a matchbox and they could fill that matchbox—instantly, you know, within, within minutes.

GRABER: Suddenly Peter had a lot of seeds, and pretty soon he’d come up with a plant that didn’t need fire to regenerate and provided great tea leaves. The new domesticated rooibos bushes didn’t live as long as the wild ones, but the other advantages were more important.

TWILLEY: The timing was also great, because slowly but surely, more South Africans were getting into drinking rooibos.

GORELIK: The demand grew first during the Second World War, because it was very hard to import Asian tea from, I dunno—from India or Sri Lanka during, during the second World War.

GRABER: So once again, people turned to rooibos as a stand-in. That said, even at this point, rooibos still wasn’t super popular in South Africa. Certainly not as popular as the Ginsburg clan wanted it to be. So Benjamin’s son Charles, or Chaz as he went by, he took matters into his own hands.

GORELIK: Chaz Ginsburg was the man who really made rooibos into a drink that was familiar to. The whole of South Africa. To the entire country. And it was thanks to him that the demand grew so much that he needed to establish plantations.

TWILLEY: Chaz ran ads in the country’s movie theaters, and got his family’s Eleven O’Clock tea stocked in grocery stores across the country. He even formed a rooibos control board to make sure everything sold as rooibos was good quality. But most South Africans still saw rooibos as a second class substitute, not as good as real black tea.

GRABER: Until Annekie Theron and her sleepless baby came along.

VOICEOVER: The name Annique Theron has been synonymous with rooibos tea for more than 40 years. She’s widely credited for discovering the exceptional healing properties of the indigenous plant, and having made rooibos one of South Africa’s most recognizable exports the world over.

GRABER: It all started back in 1968. Annique was living in South Africa with a baby who was colicky and who just would not sleep. Annique told the story in an interview.

ANNIQUE THERON: She cried from the third day. And, you know, right through her the next 14 months, we had a terrible time with her.

GORELIK: And usually Annique Theron would give her warm milk. Or a warm milk substitute. So that would, that would soothe her, that would calm her down for, at least for a while.

TWILLEY: But one day she didn’t have the milk warmed up, but she did have a pot of freshly made rooibos, so, to warm up the milk, she added a little bit of the hot tea

THERON: With nothing short of astounding results. Without bringing up her milk, my baby—well, she’s a big girl now—proceeded to sleep solidly for three hours. Something she had never done before.

GRABER: And this apparently wasn’t just a fluke, Annique kept giving the baby some rooibos and the baby actually finally slept. Annique felt like it was kind of a miracle.

GORELIK: So she told the rooibos control board of, of her discovery. She said, I discovered these properties of rooibos. Does anybody know of these properties? Has anybody researched them?

TWILLEY: Annique’s quote unquote miracle was like a gift from heaven to the rooibos control board too, and they quickly set scientists to work. Boris says that they published some papers in the 70s showing rooibos does have antispasmodic properties in the gut.

GRABER: We are definitely not saying that rooibos cures colic and puts all babies to sleep, nor are any scientists. As Nicky said, there is research about rooibos helping to calm gut spasms, but that’s all science thus far has concluded. It could have been the rooibos that helped Annique’s baby, or it could have been just a baby outgrowing a problem.

TWILLEY: But either way, Chaz Ginsberg and the rooibos control board marketed the living crap out of this story.

GRABER: And marketers didn’t just tell Annique’s story, they also then claimed that rooibos could help your nose stop running, and make your skin glow, and cure dandruff.

VOICEOVER: Rooibos: who would’ve thought that it concealed such beneficial remedies for so many ills for so long.

GORELIK: And it became huge. The story became huge in South Africa, and then they tried to use it for exports, to promote rooibos exports.

GRABER: But exports were still pretty slow, because starting in the ‘60s, there were economic sanctions against South Africa and its apartheid government. In 1994 that government fell, and in 1995 the sanctions were lifted, so that at least opened the international market to rooibos.

TWILLEY: Still, most non-South Africans had never heard of the stuff. That started to change in the late 1990s, when the writer Alexander McCall Smith came out with the first in the The Number One Ladies Detective Agency series.

GORELIK: And his best known creation was Mma Ramotswe, a fictional detective from Botswana. Who likes to drink rooibos. And she gives rooibos tea to her clients when they come to he, and they’re all excited, or frightened. She’ll give them robos, rooibos calms them down, and then they start to think rationally. And then you can, you know—she can interview them and, get the information that she needed.

MMA. RAMOTSWE: Here! Look, I will make us a cup of bush tea. There is no problem so great it cannot be solved by a cup of bush tea!

GORELIK: And she—Mma Ramotswe also drinks tea, rooibos tea herself, because it also helps her to think clearly about the problems that her clients bring to her.

GRABER: And then, as often happens, what helped make rooibos slightly more of a household name at least in America were of course celebrities. Charlize Theron was into it, Woody Harrelson was a fan. Dr. Oz said it would help people lose weight.

TWILLEY: Specifically, seven pounds per year which lord only knows where he came up with that number

DR. OZ: Food in South Africa is so multicultural it’s called Rainbow Cuisine. Internationally famous fare, that’s embellished with indigenous ingredients. But it’s what South African women drink that they can’t wait to share with the rest of the world.

GRABER: In case we’re not being clear enough, this whole thing Dr. Oz is promoting, that rooibos will help you lose weight, it’s a load of hooey.

TWILLEY: But many people love to drink a nice hot cup of hooey. And there was enough demand for rooibos that in 2005, the mega-tea company Celestial Seasonings added it to their lineup of herbal teas.

GRABER: Today, rooibos is relatively well known among all the herbal tea options out there. It’s pretty popular in Germany, there’s a decent sized market in Japan. Plenty of Americans occasionally drink a cup of rooibos.

TWILLEY: Which obviously does raise the question—the question Oliver actually asked us—does all this rooibos still just come from the Cedarburg mountains in South Africa? Or is something fishy going on after all?

GRABER: Boris told us that all that rooibos is in fact legit! It does only come from that region. People have tried to grow it commercially outside South Africa, but the rooibos plant just didn’t take.

GORELIK: Rooibos is quite demanding. Because it needs wet winters, and very hot arid summers. And it needs a particular kind of soil, loamy soil. And it grows at comparatively high, altitudes.

TWILLEY: So when I heard this, I was like, wow, why is this stuff not like gold dust? If it only grows in this one place, then surely there’s a limited supply? But Boris told me not to panic.

GORELIK: There’s still plenty of land in the traditional rooibos growing area where they can expand rooibos cultivation. So rooibos exports from South Africa are, are sufficient.

GRABER: In this story of how interest in rooibos helped it break out of its small region in South Africa to make it big on the world stage—we made it sound like there’s a massive demand for rooibos in and out of South Africa. But the demand actually isn’t that big. That mountainous region in South Africa is growing enough rooibos for 6 billion cups of tea a year, which is plenty for all the rooibos drinkers in the world today. To put that into context, all around the world, people drink about 6 billion cups of black tea per day!

TWILLEY: In other words, Rooibos drinkers are still a niche market. And, like Boris says, there’s still room to grow more rooibos in the Cederberg mountain region—although scientists are beginning to warn that as the plantations expand there is some evidence that some of the region’s unique biodiversity is being threatened.

GRABER: Still, if you like rooibos, you should enjoy it. Maybe not as your only herbal tea, maybe not every day. There is an entire world of herbal teas out there, lots of them are delicious, there’s no particular health reason to drink rooibos over any other herbal tea, so enjoy them all!

TWILLEY: And now, with two mysteries solved, we’re coming full circle, like a bubble. That’s right, it’s time to get back to Valarie and her question about bubblegum flavor, coming right up after this break.

[BREAK]

TWILLEY: In case you need a reminder, here’s Valarie’s conundrum.

VALARIE: What the heck is bubblegum flavor? Like, when did this become the flavor of bubblegum? And is it—are there standard bubble gum flavors everywhere? And are they the same? Has it always been like this? It’s become a weird fixation.

GRABER: Let’s start with the first question: what the heck is it? Why can I imagine what it tastes like when I bite down, but I can’t exactly describe it?

GRAFF: I would say that’s because bubble gum is what we would call a fantasy flavor. Yeah. You’re not going to go be able to pick a bubble gum off of a tree. It’s definitely like, made up.

TWILLEY: This is Gwendolyn Graff, and she is a real life bubblegum scientist who works in bubblegum R&D. Yes kids, that is a job you can have when you grow up.

GRABER: Fantasy flavor is also a real thing. For instance, you can’t find blue raspberries in the world, but blue raspberry flavor is in jolly rancher candies, and popsicles…

TWILLEY: But even though bubblegum is a fantasy flavor, it is based on real flavors.

GRAFF: I would most likely describe it as orange plus cherry. I think if you got two jelly bellies and you put orange and a cherry together, you would mix them together and you would say it’s bubble gum flavor.

GRABER: Mystery solved! It’s like math: cherry plus orange plus a lot of sweetener equals— bubblegum! But since it’s a fantasy flavor, once upon a time it didn’t exist. So who is the Einstein who came up with this new universal equation?

TWILLEY: To answer that, we need to go back to the invention of bubblegum itself, which is a story we told in our chewing gum episode a couple of years ago. So bubblegum was invented in 1928 by a guy called Walter Deemer who, believe it or not, was an accountant. He worked at this chewing gum company and coming up with a gum that was more elastic and less sticky, so you could blow a bubble—that was his side hustle.

GRAFF: But actually the first time he made bubble gum, he actually made it like a mint flavor. He put some like mint oils, ’cause at the time that’s what they like, did with gum.

GRABER: It caught on, and blowing bubbles quickly became popular with kids, but the mint flavor wasn’t a big hit. Gwendolyn told us nobody knows exactly when someone at the company mixed some fruit flavors together for their new bubble-y gum.

GRAFF: I’m assuming just because it became associated with a kid’s product, they started going towards the fruit flavors. ‘Cause when you look at gum as a whole, you know, mints tend to be in the adult flavors and kid flavors tend to be in the fruits. You can see exceptions to those, but that’s mostly how it goes.

TWILLEY: However they landed on this sweet orange and cherry mix, it became the standard bubblegum flavor.

GRABER: And as time went on people started using bubblegum flavoring for things that aren’t bubblegum.

SINGER: Hubba bubba me—Hubba bubba you—Hubba Bubba bubble gum soda is new!

KIDS SINGING: Hubba bubba!

GIRL: He’s so cool!

SINGER: Bubble gum soda! Hubba bubba bubble gum soda!

TWILLEY: I literally saw bubblegum flavor soda on the shelf at a supermarket last week. And I did not feel even remotely tempted to try it. But I am clearly not the target market.

GRAFF: I’ve seen lots of things. I mean, lots of obviously candies and lollipops and stuff that’s, right, in the confection. But even like, I remember one year, I think 7-11 did like a bubblegum flavored slushie, you know what I mean? You get drinks and… obviously ice cream.

TWILLEY: And for grownups who still love kid flavors, you can get bubblegum energy drinks and bubblegum vodka.

GRABER: I am also not the target audience for this, I think it sounds pretty gross. And another thing that at least our listener Valarie’s son thinks is disgusting is bubblegum-flavored medicine.

VALARIE: They will add it as a flavor to help it go down more easily. But it makes—it, it’s terrible. It makes it even worse. And so now, anything bubblegum flavor is disgusting to him. He thinks I’m trying to drug him. Every time I give him a jelly belly that’s, you know, bubblegum flavor.

TWILLEY: Clearly a spoonful of bubblegum does not necessarily help the medicine go down. But Valarie wanted to know: are all bubblegum flavors the same?

GRABER: Gwendolyn told us even within the world of bubblegum flavor there are nuances—shades of pink, let’s say.

GRAFF: When I was a kid we had like, Bazooka? And—Bazooka it was a gum that we blew. And that one has a slight little mint in it, like a slight little bit of wintergreen in it. So it can kind of vary.

GRABER: But even if these flavors vary slightly from brand to brand, they’re still recognizable as bubblegum, and they’re still popular today.

GRAFF: I’d say if you’re strictly talking about bubble gum, bubble gum is probably like the- probably the biggest bubblegum flavor.

TWILLEY: But not all gum that you can blow bubbles with is bubblegum flavor, if that makes sense. Bubblegum comes in plenty of other flavors

GRAFF: Usually the first fruit that’s the most common is strawberry. And then it tends to kind of go back and forth between grape and watermelon as the, as the second and third.

GRABER: Gwendolyn told us that other countries have popular flavors that are a little unusual to us here in the US.

GRAFF: I happen to be here now in the UK right now, but, their really popular flavor is blackcurrant.

TWILLEY: It is indeed, we love blackcurrant everything. Our purple Skittles and other sweets are all blackcurrant flavored, not grape. But Gwendolyn thinks it tastes a little bit like dirty socks.

GRAFF: And so—like, it’s funny, ’cause like, as a developer in the States, you’re like, ugh! I’m not really a fan of this flavor. But, you just have to get acquainted with what it should taste like, and then make sure that you’re replicating it.

GRABER: We were wondering if Gwendolyn could replicate any flavor in bubblegum form, and Gwendolyn said actually yeah.

TWILLEY: Her own career is testament to that. She has come up with a lot of new bubblegum flavors in her time.

GRAFF: If I had to give you a number, it would be in the hundreds. Definitely.

GRABER: Some of those flavors were seasonal ones.

GRAFF: We like had summer frenzy flavors where we’d put new flavors out. We did like a new product every couple weeks ’cause kids just like to try new things, new things, new things.

TWILLEY: These were limited time specials like pink lemonade and triple play tropical. So far, so relatively normal. But in the safety of the R&D lab, Gwendolyn and her colleagues got up to some real Willy Wonka stuff.

GRAFF: I’ve tried lots of things. We’ve tried drink flavors, we’ve tried herb flavors, we’ve tried vegetable flavors, we’ve tried meat flavors, we’ve tried pizza flavors, we’ve tried cheese flavors. There was some funny ones, like— somebody was like, can we do a beef jerky? Oh my goodness. Do you know how weird a beef jerky gum is? Like, you keep wanting to swallow it. Like, it’s so weird. And like I put a lot of salt and pepper in it. And it did taste like beef jerky, but it kind of just messed with your mind. So yeah. And there are, there are some flavors that have, yeah, been pretty terrible. Oh, mayonnaise flavor, liquid filled mayonnaise flavor. Yeah.

GRABER: I’m going to stick with the classic, myself. Now, I was a pretty big fan of blowing bubbles when I was a kid, but one thing I could never do was blow a double bubble. Gwendolyn can and she gave us a master class.

GRAFF: In order to blow a good bubble, you need to have a lot of gum, and you need to chew out all the sugar, first of all. Because, the sugar, if you think about a bubble, it’s like a film and if you had sugar crystals in it, they’re like poking holes in the film, so you’ve got to dissolve all the sugar out. So you have to kind of, chew it until it’s not so sweet anymore. Or really, the way to test it is to put your tongue up on the top of your mouth and run it and make sure it’s not bumpy at all. And then you do that, you put it up on the top of your mouth with your tongue, and you flatten it to like a pancake. And then you’re going to turn your pancake and invert it here, and you’re going to put it behind your teeth.

TWILLEY: Gwendolyn makes it sound so simple! Which is good, because I have never ever blown a bubble in my life. I need the baby steps.

GRAFF: Then you’re going to put your tongue just through it just a little to make like a—you know how sometimes when you blow a balloon, you’ve got to like, kind of loosen it first? You know, you kind of blow it and then you kind of really blow it.

GRABER: I do, I’ve done it with a balloon, and I’ve done it with plenty of bubblegum. But here’s where it gets interesting. She says you don’t have to blow a huge bubble, just a decent-sized one.

GRAFF: Then you close it off, you pinch it off with your, with your lips. And then you go again. You put your tongue back through the hole and you blow another bubble inside that bubble.

TWILLEY: I was already in awe. But Gwendolyn is not done.

GRAFF: I can usually do a triple bubble as well if I have a good one.

GRABER: I’ll leave that one to Gwendolyn. But keep your questions coming, because Ask Gastropod will be back with a new installment later this year!

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TWILLEY: Don’t forget to sign up to be a Gastropod special supporter if you’d like a South African rusk recipe to go with your rooibos, and definitely don’t forgot to pick up a paperback copy of Frostbite, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

GRABER: Thanks this episode to our listeners, Valarie, Oliver, and Porter, and to our guests who answered their questions: Rebecca Bennett, Brenna Ellison, Boris Gorelick, and Gwendolyn Graff. We have links to their books and research at our website, gastropod.com.

TWILLEY: And thanks as always to our awesome producer, Claudia Geib. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, till then!