Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
Speaker 1: and I'm Holly Friday. We did our third installment of
Speaker 1: six Impossible episodes Mother Goose Rhymes today. These are so fun.
Speaker 1: I enjoy them. I think we may be nearing the
Speaker 1: end of them, just because I felt like with this
Speaker 1: one there were fewer poems to talk about that we
Speaker 1: had not already talked about, that there is some sort
Speaker 1: of purported historical explanation to talk about, and also I
Speaker 1: felt like the purported historical explanations being offered there was
Speaker 1: like even less back up than in earlier It just
Speaker 1: feels like we may be coming to a natural end
Speaker 1: of this particular series. One question that people have asked
Speaker 1: the last couple times we've done this or slash suggestion
Speaker 1: is that we do one that is about like, not
Speaker 1: English language nursery rhymes, And in particular, wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: nice to have one that was like, not even about
Speaker 1: languages from Europe nursery rhymes. And while I agree that
Speaker 1: is a cool idea, the thing that makes these episodes
Speaker 1: possible is having been so steeped in all of these
Speaker 1: poems since before I could read that I they are
Speaker 1: there in my mind immediately, And that is not trying
Speaker 1: to like number one, find nursery rhymes to talk about
Speaker 1: for a language that we don't speak, and then to
Speaker 1: be able to get to the possible cultural context of
Speaker 1: them for a culture we're not part of. Like that
Speaker 1: is just so far from our experience and knowledge that
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't think it's really gonna work out
Speaker 1: for this show. Yeah, I feel like that's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you get a grant for and you go
Speaker 1: take six or eight months to do. Yeah that would yeah,
Speaker 1: which should be amazing, but like not really plausible on
Speaker 1: a right weekly episode show. Yeah yeah, we uh, people
Speaker 1: know this if they listen to us all the time.
Speaker 1: We do two new episodes of the show each week,
Speaker 1: with each of us writing one, which means we can't
Speaker 1: take six months to research something or totally get the
Speaker 1: foundational knowledge for something that is like so far outside
Speaker 1: of our experience, which is a frustration sometimes, Like sometimes
Speaker 1: I wish I could just like magically have all of
Speaker 1: the knowledge to talk about something that's totally outside the
Speaker 1: realm of anything we have ever covered before. But that
Speaker 1: can be just not feasible in the time it's allowed,
Speaker 1: which is why sometimes we have authors on the show
Speaker 1: who have different knowledge and experience than we do. Yes,
Speaker 1: but then that requires preparation a whole different other way us.
Speaker 1: Two things came up in this research that caused me
Speaker 1: to question whether maybe I had accidentally fallen into some
Speaker 1: kind of alternate universe in sort of like a Berenstein
Speaker 1: Bear's situation. Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook, Yes, I have one
Speaker 1: hundred percent for sure called it Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook
Speaker 1: in previous episodes, and I thought that was the name
Speaker 1: of it. I thought it was Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook.
Speaker 1: And the first time I saw Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook
Speaker 1: when doing research for this, I was like, is that right?
Speaker 1: And then not only is it right, like there's nowhere
Speaker 1: that it's written as Tom Thumb's and I'm just like
Speaker 1: I I it was solidified in my brain as Tom
Speaker 1: Thumb's Pretty Songbook, not Tommy Thumbs. The other thing is
Speaker 1: Tommy Thumbs sounds like a character that got written out
Speaker 1: of Goodfellas kind of Tommy Thumbs. He got pretty songs.
Speaker 1: The other thing is I have read some of ts
Speaker 1: Eliot's work. I studied some of it in college in
Speaker 1: literature classes. I have always associated ts Eliot with British poetry.
Speaker 1: Hello me too, because he did I mean, he moved
Speaker 1: to the UK, became a British citizenship, renounced his US
Speaker 1: citizenship all the time. Like I had never really studied
Speaker 1: his biography in any way, but like always in my
Speaker 1: head he's been a British poet. No. Uh. When I
Speaker 1: got to the part about how he learned here we go,
Speaker 1: here we go around the mulberry bush, uh, and that
Speaker 1: for him it was a prickly pair apparently, and that
Speaker 1: he had grown up in Saint Louis, Missouri, I was like,
Speaker 1: that cannot be right. And then I looked it up
Speaker 1: and yes, T. S. Eliot grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Speaker 1: And I was just like, am I am I having
Speaker 1: a break with I've fallen into the wasteland? Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: it's is there a glitch in the matrix? What is happening?
Speaker 1: So yeah, both of those two things. I just had
Speaker 1: a weird existential hall. It's tom Tommy Thumb's Pretty Songbook
Speaker 1: and T. S. Eliot was not raised in the UK. Once,
Speaker 1: I love it. I had a moment when I was
Speaker 1: first reading You're outline where I was right out of
Speaker 1: the gate, I was like, wait, there's some I mean,
Speaker 1: I remember hearing the Cannon story about Humpty Dumpty. Uh huh,
Speaker 1: but I was like, yeah, but everybody knows it's an egg,
Speaker 1: Like it never occurred to me that it could not
Speaker 1: have been an egg, might have not been an egg. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was like, that's what broke my little brain. Uh what.
Speaker 1: I don't remember which which bit of research it was
Speaker 1: that I was reading, but they were talking about Humpty Dumpty,
Speaker 1: and they were talking about how this only really makes
Speaker 1: sense as a riddle if there's a reason for an
Speaker 1: egg to be on a wall in the first place,
Speaker 1: like why is the egg on the wall? And I
Speaker 1: was like as, And then I was trying to think
Speaker 1: through various riddles that I know, and like whether there
Speaker 1: are weird details like that that could really be considered
Speaker 1: some kind of a strange red herring. But yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: that chicken had a couple of drinks. Yeah. I Also,
Speaker 1: I think I have always sort of imagined Humpty Dumpty
Speaker 1: in my head as like an egg but with arms
Speaker 1: and legs and a crown on his head is an egg? Yeah,
Speaker 1: crown optional for me, but her person. Yeah. The end
Speaker 1: got around on the same pape as that. My brain
Speaker 1: also made a very silly association, and then I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: somebody study that. Which is that? Towards the end, when
Speaker 1: we were talking about the opies, kind of noting that
Speaker 1: there are these very similar person waiting for a thing,
Speaker 1: I was like, somebody write a paper about how this
Speaker 1: relates to Samuel Beckett's waiting for GOODO, please, somebody write
Speaker 1: that paper? Please? That sounds yeah? Do it? I mean
Speaker 1: I love me some Beckett, so yeah, and did. My
Speaker 1: senior project in college was about Samuel Beckett. But I
Speaker 1: had never I actually Gido is probably the least studied
Speaker 1: of his pieces for me. Yeah, but I just loved
Speaker 1: the idea of it suddenly being a really weird extrapolation
Speaker 1: of a nursery run and how that could be a
Speaker 1: completely different interpretation of what that is. Yeah. That sounds interesting, though,
Speaker 1: somebody else do it. I'm lazy. I have seeded the
Speaker 1: plant and now it can grow in someone else's brain. Yeah.
Speaker 1: My my senior thesis in literature was about the poetry
Speaker 1: of Audrey and Rich and Muriel Rockeiser and with like
Speaker 1: just a weird Now, in hindsight many years later, focus
Speaker 1: on sort of a pop psychology. But it was a
Speaker 1: whole weird thing. It did not make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's one of the weird things that I
Speaker 1: occasional occasionally will look back on it and go, Huh,
Speaker 1: how did I come up with this weird thing that
Speaker 1: I did for two poets whose worked that I really loved.
Speaker 1: It took a really strange angle. Anyway, That's more than
Speaker 1: anyone needed to know about my bachelor's degree. We talked
Speaker 1: about the Chicken of Tomorrow contest this week, as well
Speaker 1: as a lot of background about chickens in general. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this gave me many flashbacks because my parents used to
Speaker 1: raise chickens when I was a kid. We did not
Speaker 1: raise chickens ourselves, but we had neighbors who raised chickens.
Speaker 1: We had chickens. A lot of chickens. I don't mean
Speaker 1: like we had four chickens. I mean we had hundreds
Speaker 1: of chickens. Oh wow, that's a lot. It was a lot.
Speaker 1: We had a little like mini farm situation going on.
Speaker 1: And I will tell you what might be the most
Speaker 1: disturbing fact about me, okay, which is that on chicken
Speaker 1: slaughtering day, I would drag my little holly hobby table
Speaker 1: and chair set out to just outside the chicken yard
Speaker 1: and I would do Howard Cosell play by play of
Speaker 1: the whole event. I I kind of loved this. Some
Speaker 1: of it was really grizzly, and I was at the
Speaker 1: time pretty comfortable with this stuff. But as I've gotten older,
Speaker 1: I'm too I'm soft. I couldn't well and I do
Speaker 1: that again. One of the things as I was researching this,
Speaker 1: While a lot of what I was focused on was
Speaker 1: like the what actually happened with this contest, and like
Speaker 1: the historical context for the contest, of course, there were
Speaker 1: many things that I also read as part of this
Speaker 1: that were more written from an animal rights perspective more recently,
Speaker 1: that were about, in one way or another, the state
Speaker 1: of chicken farming today. And one of the arguments that
Speaker 1: I saw somebody make was that if a person wants
Speaker 1: to eat animal meat in any way, they should be
Speaker 1: required to like participate in the raising and slaughtering process
Speaker 1: to see what it's actually like. And you're your anecdote
Speaker 1: just reminded me of that. Yeah, I mean, I know
Speaker 1: what it's actually like. I know, every time we say
Speaker 1: we love animals on the show, someone writes to us
Speaker 1: to say, but you're not vegan and you might be
Speaker 1: a monster, And I'm like, but I have participated, and
Speaker 1: I have seen humane farms versus any we Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: I have also done trips to industrial slaughterhouses and they're
Speaker 1: horrifying and haunt me, right, which is why I try
Speaker 1: to always source anything I eat from not that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: most of the meat that we eat in our household
Speaker 1: we are getting directly from a farmer. We have a
Speaker 1: meat share. It was specifically a poultry share for a
Speaker 1: couple of years, and then the farmer that we were
Speaker 1: working with decided they needed to kind of retool what
Speaker 1: they were, like how their chicken process was working, and
Speaker 1: they had a couple of unfortunate that time. This is
Speaker 1: a sad story. You might want to like skip ahead
Speaker 1: maybe thirty seconds if you're going to be really bummed
Speaker 1: out by a sad story about chickens. During that time,
Speaker 1: in the early pandemic months when there was just a
Speaker 1: total backlog at the postal service and mail was delayed
Speaker 1: by our really long time. They had whole shipments of
Speaker 1: chickens that didn't arrive on time and were dead when
Speaker 1: they got there. Yeah, and of course that was like
Speaker 1: upsetting and horrifying to everybody involved. But we know that
Speaker 1: this farmer is working with all of their animals in
Speaker 1: like a respectful way. In addition to feeling like we
Speaker 1: are getting, we're supporting a farmer who is taking these
Speaker 1: steps and who is you know, trying to be thoughtful
Speaker 1: and compassionate and how they raise them care for these animals.
Speaker 1: The variety of the eggs that we get from them
Speaker 1: delights me because there are It's not like from the
Speaker 1: grocery store most of the time where you open the
Speaker 1: box and it's like a dozen identical eggs. They are
Speaker 1: different colors and different sizes and different. I love them.
Speaker 1: It's great. So anyway, I know that for a lot
Speaker 1: of folks like that is not enough and they do
Speaker 1: not want to eat any animal product at all, and
Speaker 1: I respect that decision. At my house, it is more
Speaker 1: we try to get all of our meat from like
Speaker 1: sources that are working as humanly as possible, and also
Speaker 1: to eat less meat, like the majority of my meals
Speaker 1: don't actually include any meat. So meat is mostly a
Speaker 1: dinner food at my house for me and not the
Speaker 1: rest of the meals food. Yeah. I mean, I will
Speaker 1: say this too. As meatless options have become more varied
Speaker 1: and more delectable, like, it's so much easier to cut
Speaker 1: back on. Yeah. I remember a time when one of
Speaker 1: my dearest friends was traveling with me to theme parks
Speaker 1: I love very much and was vegetarian, and at one
Speaker 1: point she looked at me and said, I cannot eat
Speaker 1: another roasted vegetable flat bread. Yeah. And now that is
Speaker 1: not really a problem because everywhere has something yummy and
Speaker 1: delicious that is a true, actual, like right right entree
Speaker 1: option that is not just a I don't know what
Speaker 1: can we throw together that does not include these thyas.
Speaker 1: I think I've told this story on the show before,
Speaker 1: but I'm going to tell it again. I know there
Speaker 1: are cuisines all over the world that are rich in
Speaker 1: plant based options, like I'm aware of this, but growing
Speaker 1: up in northwest North Carolina in the nineteen eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: there were not a lot of options, and so when
Speaker 1: I stopped eating meat in high school, there were like
Speaker 1: there were Chinese restaurants that we could go to that
Speaker 1: had like a vegetable it was just like vegetables and
Speaker 1: a sauce with rice that was an option. But there
Speaker 1: was this one restaurant called Rainbow News and Cafe, which
Speaker 1: was a restaurant slash bookstore, and they had, as I recall,
Speaker 1: two vegetarian options on the menu, and that was a big,
Speaker 1: big deal, Like it was the only like specifically vegetarian
Speaker 1: thing on any restaurant in the area that I knew of.
Speaker 1: One of the things was a vegetarian chili, which would
Speaker 1: have been more accurately described as a vegetable stew. It
Speaker 1: bore no resemblance to chili of any sort. And then
Speaker 1: the other thing was a barbecue tofu sandwich, which was
Speaker 1: like a bun with the fixens that you would expect
Speaker 1: on a burger, with just a slab of tofu that
Speaker 1: had been sort of slathered in barbecue sauce. You would
Speaker 1: bide into it, and like the barbecue sauce, plus the
Speaker 1: tofu slab was really slippery, so the tofu would just
Speaker 1: shoot out the other end. I loved that bookstore restaurant
Speaker 1: so much, I really really did. In hindsight, that was
Speaker 1: a terrible sandwich but it gave you an option, which
Speaker 1: is probably why it felt amazing. Yes, there was also
Speaker 1: my standard of caesar salad and french fries from McDonald's,
Speaker 1: not understanding that caesar salad dressing had anchovies in it,
Speaker 1: and not knowing that at that time McDonald's was using
Speaker 1: beef flavoring beef french fries. I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: still the case, because I remember when like that became news,
Speaker 1: there was beef beef flavor in the McDonald's French fries
Speaker 1: and vegetarians were horrified. So anyway, I'm so glad there
Speaker 1: are so many more options now, and so many more
Speaker 1: options at the regular grocery store. I know there's a
Speaker 1: lot to think about in terms of like foods like quinoa,
Speaker 1: and how the communities that have raised quinoa are being
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways disadvantaged by like the popularity
Speaker 1: of foods like quinoa among Americans. Like that's the whole
Speaker 1: other thing. But it's really hard the ethics of food
Speaker 1: and what you consume and what you're comfortable with one.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's very individual in terms of
Speaker 1: where anybody's gonna sit. But also it there are so
Speaker 1: many layers right where it's like, okay, but like this
Speaker 1: solution solves this problem, but oh wait, it has its
Speaker 1: own mess of yuckiness and problem that we haven't thought
Speaker 1: about yet. But if we fix that, then another thing.
Speaker 1: It's like whack a mole of trying to do the
Speaker 1: right thing and it's hard. Yeah, there's also just the converse,
Speaker 1: the totally converse part of like, like, indigenous peoples that
Speaker 1: live in the very far North have historically had a
Speaker 1: very like meat based diet, and I've seen a lot
Speaker 1: of people talking about being like judged and vilified for
Speaker 1: continuing to eat foods that are part of their traditional
Speaker 1: food ways. And it's like, there's but I can't just
Speaker 1: like grow a bunch of wheat here the ground is frozen.
Speaker 1: Like there's there's a lot to think about, and a
Speaker 1: lot of times I think people try to offer very
Speaker 1: easy solutions, and those very easy solutions have a lot
Speaker 1: of complexities that are not but are not really evident
Speaker 1: until you really start thinking about stuff. I didn't know
Speaker 1: until researching this that broiler chick like commercially farmed broiler chickens,
Speaker 1: these hybrids that have been developed today, they are so
Speaker 1: big and they grow so fast, and they convert their
Speaker 1: feed into meat so efficiently that they just they can't
Speaker 1: live outside of this environment, and they probably wouldn't live
Speaker 1: long beyond their slaughter date because of the way their
Speaker 1: bodies develop. I didn't know any of that at all,
Speaker 1: and that was more surprising to me than the fact
Speaker 1: that a grocery store and the USDA teamed up to
Speaker 1: have a contest, which was the thing that sparked my
Speaker 1: attention in the first place. Whatever's coming up for you
Speaker 1: this weekend, I hope it's great. Hope it's great. Whatever
Speaker 1: you're gonna eat this weekend, I hope that's great. If
Speaker 1: you would like to send us a note or a
Speaker 1: history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and we'll be back
Speaker 1: with a Saturday classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday.
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