The produce section of most American supermarkets in the 1950s was minimal to a fault, with only a few dozen fruits and vegetables to choose from: perhaps one kind of apple, one kind of lettuce, a yellow onion, a pile of bananas. Today, grocery stores routinely offer hundreds of different fruits and vegetables, many of which would be unrecognizable to time travelers from a half century ago. What changed, and how did Americans learn to embrace spaghetti squash, sugar snap peas, and kiwi fruit? This episode, we tell the story of the woman behind this transformation: Frieda Caplan, the Queen of Kiwi. (Encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hey, we're on the road reporting an exciting new story this week.
So while we're out scrambling around in the dirt and surviving on trail mix, we thought we'd treat you to an encore presentation of one of our favorite episodes.
It's about a woman who revolutionized the variety of fruits and vegetables we're able to find on our plates.
Frieda Kaplan was the queen of the kiwi and plenty of other weird fruits besides.
And we're bringing this encore to you thanks to our friends at American Express.
Enjoy, and we'll be back in just a week with a brand new episode.
Some of my favorite memories are getting on the phone and taking one of these orange, spiky horn melons and trying to describe on the telephone to some guy.
Cause everybody was a guy, you know, some young girl who's, you know, talking about this orange, spiky, cucumber ish thing that you've gotta have.
Orange, spiky, cucumberish thing.
What's going on?
And why does he have to have it?
That exact response is something Karen Kaplan has heard before, many times.
An endless chorus of, what?
What is that?
Why would I want to buy that?
And Karen would tell the person on the other end, who was usually a buyer for a grocery store, that they just had to have the latest cool new fruit or vegetable that their customers had never eaten but were about to fall in love with.
Not an easy sell, to be honest.
Getting Americans to try new fruits and vegetables that theyd never heard of, seen, or tasted before, oftentimes with names they cant even pronounce.
Its an uphill struggle.
So how did Karen do it?