Radiolab - A Little Pompeiian Fish Sauce Goes a Long Way

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, it's Latif. So today we have a brand new episode. I'm very excited to share it with you. It even has a special guest, but I sort of have to level with you about something first. Our parent station, WNYC, is in dire financial straits. We went through a round of layoffs about a year ago, and then just this month we went through a second round. Less money has been coming in and to keep us up and running, the station has to cut costs. It costs a lot of money to make Radiolab. But for good reason, I swear, I see it over and over. I see how that money lets us commit to stories in a way that few other shows do.

Starting point is 00:00:52 For example, in the episode that you are about to hear, I spent an entire day driving back and forth in LA traffic just to get live sardines. But for every story we do, there are like 10 of those little things. And sometimes there's a bigger thing too, that we feel, you know, there's no way to tell this story right without it. And that all is the way we want it.

Starting point is 00:01:14 We want you to get this like seamless, rich, immersive, carefully told and importantly fact-checked story that goes beyond the news, stuff that goes past the conversations that everyone is already having. Now, because of all this money stuff, we have to do that now with less, right? Less resources, less people. That's fine. We're not complaining. We love to do this. We love to make what we make for you. But that means we need your support. And in the last few years, we have come up with a new way for you to support us that is better for us and better for you. The lab. When you become a member of the lab, you give

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Starting point is 00:02:43 And if you get to the end of it, as I said, there's a special guest, which I'm just gonna tell you who it is, because I can't help myself. It's Samin Nasrat, the chef. If you don't know and love her, you should, and you probably will anyway after this. Enjoy. Wait, you're listening?

Starting point is 00:02:59 Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From? WNYC.

Starting point is 00:03:10 See? Hi. What's up, Sara? I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Sara Khare, sitting in for Lulu this week. This is Radiolab. Do you have any idea what we're gonna talk about? No, I was like, this must be

Starting point is 00:03:28 what Christmas morning feels like. Not that I would know. It's like get a present. In this case, it's a story. Yeah. But anyway, yeah, no, I know nothing. Perfect. So today on the show, we have kind of the mother

Starting point is 00:03:44 of all missing persons reports is what it is Okay, it's the story of how about 50,000 people vanished off of the face of the earth And then how almost 2,000 years later one man tried to find them Okay, there we go, okay. This is my speaking voice. Great. So how do you, what should I call you? Steve, Stephen, Professor Tuck, something else all together? Steve, if you call me Professor Tuck, I'm expecting you to make a great appeal.

Starting point is 00:04:19 So, turn, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I also wanted, that's the real reason for this call today. This is for an extension of our paper. 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 last decade is, 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? Yeah, like the city that got covered in ash, people frozen in time.

Starting point is 00:04:50 Yeah. Like an entire population just wiped out in an instant. Right. And that's sort of the popular perception. This entire town is wiped off the face of its planet. Museums, movies, books, the story is always basically the same. The... died instantly of heat exposure. There was no way out. Their tragic deaths have made Pompeii world famous. It's sort of the one thing that everybody knows about Pompeii. Making it one of the most lethal volcanic events in human history. Everybody died.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Instantly. No survivors. Right. 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. Really? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:34 According to Steve, you know, the one thing we all know about Pompeii is actually just an assumption. And through his work, the way I see Pompeii has completely changed. The way I used to see it is kind of like a cartoon tragedy, but then hearing him talk about it, it's become so much more human. Okay. So I had this question, you know, can we say... Okay, so the first thing Steve told me was that something that's always left out of these

Starting point is 00:06:07 popular accounts of Pompeii is just the cold hard math. 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? So just imagine the area completely destroyed by the volcano. Right. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:27 And then how many human remains were discovered? So between all of the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, the villas that have been excavated, about 1200. What? 1200, that's it? Mm-hmm. That's like, what is that?

Starting point is 00:06:42 Like less than 5% of the people? That's tiny. Yeah, of course it could be that 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. A tiny fraction. There's a lot of land there to dig through. Okay, okay, I see. So maybe the other bodies are just buried in these other places that they have in.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Maybe the other bodies are buried in these other places. Maybe but all of them? It seemed unlikely. But still, like the town is right at the base of the volcano. You think people could have gotten out? Well, it's a very complex eruptive event. Okay, okay. Do you want to just walk me through it?

Starting point is 00:07:23 Should we just play it out? All right. Pompeii is a city right along the coast of the Bay of Naples. It's a beautiful location. I sound like a real estate agent, but you know, it's a gorgeous location down there in southern Italy along the coast. If you don't mind volcanoes, it's great.

Starting point is 00:07:39 It keeps the property values down. Okay, so this is 79 AD. 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. 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. Many of the shops would have taken over part of the sidewalk.

Starting point is 00:08:07 They move the things they're selling out there or the wine bars, 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. In the backdrop of all this, less than 10 miles northwest of the city sat a large green cone-shaped mountain. And on this day, at about one o'clock in the city, sat a large green cone shaped mountain. And on this day, at about one o'clock in the afternoon, if you were taking maybe a midday

Starting point is 00:08:31 break having some 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. 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 Pompeii higher than modern airplanes fly. Oh my god. So high in fact. It takes several hours for that material to rain down fully. So most of it at this point is just hanging out up there in the air. Huh. Which means...

Starting point is 00:09:14 If people looked at that and then said, I think it's time to leave, they would have three, four hours to get out. 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. Yes, but that assumes that people decide it quickly. And the last time this mountain had exploded was 1800 years before. So nobody knew that this was a volcano.

Starting point is 00:09:43 They didn't even have the word volcano in the language. Oh, my god. I mean, you don't really know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought the explosion was the worst of it. Maybe they thought this, you know, the stuff that kind of looks like smoke is just going to blow away. Right.

Starting point is 00:10:02 But even if you were like, OK, I am getting out of here right now, just imagine, maybe you were like, okay, I am getting out of here right now. Just imagine, maybe you were out running around town doing something. Your family's at home. You have to get home first. But the sky is rapidly darkening. The earth is shaking. You're trying to get through the chaos with the earthquake.

Starting point is 00:10:18 Push your way through the people, the animals, the carts. Trying to make it home and gather your family before you go. 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? There's a million ways this could play out. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:10:35 But when archaeologists dug up some of the houses in Pompeii, they discovered a clue. Every house would have at least a small shrine to the household gods. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:11:13 And not only that, all the safes that have been uncovered... There's 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. So in those three hours, you can imagine that people were out of their houses, maybe on

Starting point is 00:11:32 foot or on horseback, dragging carts behind them, just trying to make their way through the crowded chaotic streets. 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. Get a move on people. no time to waste here. But that material, that tall column of debris that's been hanging in the air,

Starting point is 00:11:53 starts to collapse. 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 Pompaday. The ash is filling the air, it's hard to breathe, you can't see anything.

Starting point is 00:12:13 And then this pumice stone starts coming down. And then heavier volcanic glassy stones, and those, they're 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... 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

Starting point is 00:12:42 were the little bronze statues of household gods. Huh. Years later, recovered from their bodies, were the little bronze statues of household gods. Huh. Okay, but Pompeii, it's a coastal city, right? Like, maybe a bunch of people left by sea. 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 assume that I could get farther away more quickly on a ship. And if I don't know what's going on,

Starting point is 00:13:10 the very least I know is that the problem is on land. Well, maybe. Oh, God. So imagine there's a volcano, imagine there's also earthquakes, so there are tsunamis happening here. Oh. And those, they're disastrous. So this sea, this is not a calm sea.

Starting point is 00:13:29 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. They would be trapped. Ah. OK, OK. Maybe not against them. They would be trapped. Ah. Okay, okay. Maybe not by sea then. Maybe not. Anyway, things just get worse from there.

Starting point is 00:13:52 By dusk, the ash and rock have built up so much that it was impossible to leave. Some people took refuge in their houses, but the volcanic material came down and the roofs collapsed. Those who managed to escape the collapsed roofs make their way through the darkness and the heat and the falling missiles and... Took refuge in public buildings

Starting point is 00:14:16 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. Estimates between 300 and 600 degrees. That's Celsius, which is 500 to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that in one case in Herculaneum, they found evidence of gray matter that had been turned to glass.

Starting point is 00:14:43 What? It got so hot that someone's brain turned to glass. What? Yeah. And these gases rolled down the mountain into the city. And they're heavier than air. And they displaced the oxygen starting at the ground and moving up. So the people who are taking refuge in cellars or downstairs in houses are all asphyxiated. There's no way around that. You can't escape that. I looked back. A dense dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading itself over the

Starting point is 00:15:20 country like a cloud. 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 a nephew to the famous naturalist Pliny the Elder. 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." He was a teenager at the time, and he watched Vesuvius erupt from across the Bay of Naples,

Starting point is 00:15:55 a much safer distance than Pompeii. But still, he and his mother barely escaped with their lives. "'We had scarcely sat down when night came upon us, 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. You might hear the shrieks of women,

Starting point is 00:16:18 the screams of children, and the shouts of men, some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied, one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family, some wishing to die from the very fear of dying, 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." Wow. 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.

Starting point is 00:17:15 Which is what makes even more impressive what Stephen Tuck found after the break. Luthif. Sara. Radiolab. Back the break. Latif? Sara? Radiolab. Back from break. Okay, so before the break, we met Professor Stephen Tuck, who is on a mission to try to

Starting point is 00:17:33 find survivors from Pompeii, but who then told us how totally and hopelessly devastating the eruption of Vesuvius actually was. Right. I mean, it's the apocalypse, basically. It's the apocalypse. But we also learned that there were these windows, these moments where it might have been possible to escape. Okay, so then what? 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. 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

Starting point is 00:18:15 up in other cities after the eruption. OK. That's his kind of strategy, which is I think like a pretty good strategy. Then how do you find the Pompeii? And like, are there old Pompeii in phone books or letters or I don't know, how do you like even find them? No, not really. Nothing like that.

Starting point is 00:18:34 But the special thing about Pompeii is that unlike old ruins that have, you know, been weathered for 2000 years, this city was was basically preserved in ash. And so you can find names everywhere. 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 belt box kind of thing. Right. Or on objects. Seal rings that people had with their names on them. But also, fortunately, you can read names that were just written or scratched

Starting point is 00:19:05 lightly on a wall. Graffiti and painted announcements. People signed all that with their family names. Oh, nice. 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. 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 those probably didn't get repaid. Yeah, I think a lot of those loans did not get repaid, yeah. Right. Anyway, so what he does is he basically takes every-

Starting point is 00:19:36 The Caecilius family. Single. The Cornelius family. Name. The Vibidia family. He can find- Secundus. That has ever been excavated anywhere in this region

Starting point is 00:19:46 Pompeius is also a family name puts them in a big database does this for Pompeii and Herculaneum So I have a huge number of names and he's like, okay, these are the people I'm looking for and So he puts up a map on the wall of his office A very nice map that I made of the region and 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 going to 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.

Starting point is 00:20:18 Okay. I started with the close cities. No survivors. Nobody in Sorrento or Solernum. He looked at the town of Velia. It's right on the coast. Everything you might want. Nobody in Sorrento or Solernum. He looked at the town of Velia. It's right on the coast. Everything you might want. Nobody in Velia either.

Starting point is 00:20:28 He looked on the islands. I thought some people might have gone to the islands of Capri or Ischia. But no. Nothing. And like you could just imagine his finger like running down the map, following the road, crossing off this town, crossing off that town. The whole Sorrentine Peninsula,

Starting point is 00:20:41 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. Yeah, they're close. There's roads. There's connections to Pompeii in some of these communities. But were any Pompeians there?

Starting point is 00:20:56 No. City after city. Just nobody. It just keeps getting bleaker and bleaker. But then he thinks, okay, the town that would make the most sense is this one south of the Bay of Naples called Pastum. And Pastum is a beautiful Roman port city. It's on the west coast, like Pompeii, like Herculaneum. It checked all my boxes. He's like, this is the place.

Starting point is 00:21:24 It's everything that Pompeii is is but just outside the blast zone. He checks all the names in that town and I found Nobody no None of the Pompeii nobody from Pompeii nobody from herculaneum nobody from any of the villas nothing nothing nothing nothing. There's just nobody And his 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. Wow. Now I'm like so sad about this.

Starting point is 00:21:58 Okay, just wait, just wait. Okay. Because this whole time, Steve had been mostly looking in communities south of Pompeii. You know Vesuvius is on the north side of the city. So he assumed that people in Pompeii... They look at the eruption and they flee south. Which makes sense, but... When that eruptive column collapsed, the one that was 20 miles into the sky,

Starting point is 00:22:20 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. In any case, Steve runs out of south, so he looks north towards this big city. Cotele, which is north of Vesuvius. It's the major harbor city for ancient Italy, and it's the largest community outside of Rome.

Starting point is 00:22:45 And as he starts to go through all the names in the city he comes across a clue in the shape of a bottle. 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 Samin Nasrat. I'm a cook and a nerd.

Starting point is 00:23:04 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. I've always kind of wanted to make a pot of Sardines. Stinky stuff. What are you doing this? 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 Samin? Um, okay, I promise I'm gonna get to that.

Starting point is 00:23:30 Okay. Okay, okay, so when Steve was collecting Pompeii in names, there was one he came across more than any other, which was this guy named Aulus Umbricius Scaris. Ooh. Aulus Umbricius Scaris 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.

Starting point is 00:23:54 These are crunchy. Made from fresh sardines. Yeah, I think you wanna expose guts. Chopped into pieces. Your cutting board looks like you have covered in blood. Butchered a person. Place fish guts in a vase.

Starting point is 00:24:03 Mushing up fish heads, fish blood, fish scales. You put a ton of salt on there. That was pretty easy. And then you leave this whole jar in the sun. Stirring multiple times a day. Tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-tick-a-t brown liquid. And because most ancient Romans ate pretty plain food. Bread or some kind of grain and simple vegetables. Garum, and this guy, Aulus Umbrichius Scarus, is garum in particular. It's salty and fishy. You only need like few drops, man.

Starting point is 00:24:35 People would just buy it by the bottle and put it on everything. 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. Can you describe the bottle and the label? 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. But then across that sort of globular body

Starting point is 00:25:03 was handwritten in ink. some of it's black, some of it's red, the labeling. And the labeling formula was always the flower of garum, which is a little hyperbolic, the flower of garum of scaris. The flower of garum of scaris. All these bottles had these words. This is like Mike's hot Honey, but like Pompeii. It's exactly Mike's Hot Honey.

Starting point is 00:25:27 It's like the Heinz ketchup of antiquity. And actually, this is, so far as we know, the first example of like a product with brand labeling in history. Whoa. This fish sauce. In history? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:43 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. But, of course, August 24th, 79 AD, along with the rest of Pompeii, Alasum Brichios

Starting point is 00:25:59 Scaris' home and all his garum workshops are buried in ash and stone. 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. No fish sauce bottles anywhere to be found post 79 AD. It was just one more casualty of Vesuvius. Hmm. But then, as Steve is digging around in documents from Putioli looking for Pompeian names,

Starting point is 00:26:34 he discovers that... About 20 years after the eruption. There's a new product on the market in the town of Putioli. Okay. Bottles, exactly like the bottles that Scaris had used at Pompeii. And this one has weirdly similar branding. It's the same labeling formula.

Starting point is 00:26:53 In black or red ink. It says, the flower of Garum of Putiolanus. Putiolanus? What's Putiolanus? Putiolanus just means the guy from Putioli. The man from Putioli. Hmm,olanus just means the guy from Putioli. The man from Putioli. Hmm. So it's like a guy from Putioli that's making this stuff.

Starting point is 00:27:10 Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a ripoff. Like somebody that's capitalizing on this brand that people used to love and is harkening back to that. Yeah. So it could be, right? Could be that someone's ripping off this guy's branding. Yeah. No. No? He's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he's The Umbriciuses! Umbric- 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,

Starting point is 00:27:54 he doesn't seem to have made it out, but his family did. And one of the young men, probably Scarus' grandson, is named Puteolanus. Like they named him after their new hometown. And he grows up to become the Garum king of Puteoli. Succession of the Fishsauce kingdom. The new heir, yeah. And now that he's looking in towns north of Vesuvius, Steve starts finding survivors all

Starting point is 00:28:16 over the place. Six people in the little city of Nucaria. A person in Aquinum. Two people in Beneventum. 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. They all made it out to Puteoli. Two families who owned private banks.

Starting point is 00:28:35 Both settled at Cumi. He found rich people, poor people. Some of them had been well off at Pompeii and desperately poor later on. There's one story of a woman. She makes it out also to Puteoli. Who marries a gladiator. Called Aquarius. He's a water-themed gladiator.

Starting point is 00:28:50 Whoa. Yeah. He even finds this whole neighborhood in the city of Naples. Built just for the people from Herculaneum. Like it's like Chinatown or something, but it's like little Herculaneum. The map he made just filled in with all this life.

Starting point is 00:29:05 These people suffered tragedies. They became refugees. They fled. They moved into these new communities. They named their kids after their new communities. They make religious dedications. They run for public office. They establish businesses.

Starting point is 00:29:20 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 comb through the names in 48 communities. Okay. And I found survivors in 12 of the 48. So in total...

Starting point is 00:29:36 A couple hundred named individuals. Okay. Which, I mean, wow, people even survived. Yeah. But then, sorry, not to burst your bubble, No, not at all. but that leaves what, like 48,000 people that are still unaccounted for?

Starting point is 00:29:52 That's right. 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 gonna go move in to my parents' basement. I'm going to where my relatives are, right? I'm going to where there's a couch I can crash on, where there's a roof I can stay under.

Starting point is 00:30:10 You go where they have to take you in, right? 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 because they're the same family name. They don't change the profile of a community. It's not a new family name moving into a community. And I think that's where the vast majority of the people went.

Starting point is 00:30:36 Now, what he believes is most people got out. The majority of people survived. And almost always with their families. Wow. 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 I would love to know some of these details of what happened between the eruption and people resettling somewhere. You know, what routes did they take? What occurred? You know, what traumas did they undergo on the way out? It must have been just a terrifying experience

Starting point is 00:31:17 and we simply don't know. But we know people went back to their families. You know, they went through the dark shouting their names at each other as Pliny tells us in his letter. And they connected up and only then did they flee. I don't know, I find it quite moving, yeah, that's the story. What do you, what do you make of that? You know, so my family's Pakistani. Like I grew up in the US, my parents grew up in Pakistan.

Starting point is 00:32:03 My grandparents grew up in India. Yeah. 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 his 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 what you know, any crumb is like gold like yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:40 Yeah. I mean, I mean, and that's, that's basically why I ended up making that fish sauce with Samin Yeah, I mean really what we're doing is we're time traveling Yeah, I mean, that's what I think is so magical about food again chef Samin Nasrath 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 Yeah, that's right. time you had it and so this is another way that we get to go have a sensory experience that people were having, you know, 2000 years ago. That time we almost died from a volcano. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:33:12 But it's true that I can't, like I can't stop imagining 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. You can never walk down the streets you walked on as a kid. And then 20 years later, you're resettled in a totally new place, totally new life, and you're grocery shopping and you see on the shelf the flower of garum and you buy it and you take it home you open the bottle and you taste it. The Okay. All right. Okay. Let's open it on three. Okay. One, two, three. Oh it was. Ha ha! Blech! Blech! Okay.

Starting point is 00:34:47 I went real deep. I went nose into the jar. Okay. Whoo! Oh boy. Okay. Okay, you ready? I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready.

Starting point is 00:34:57 Okay, I'm putting some on my tongue right now. Okay. Oh. Oh, it's very, I mean it's very salty. It's not really that gross. It's not that gross. It just tastes like salty. No, no, no, it just tastes salty mean, it's very salty. It's not really that gross. It's not gross No, no, just taste salty. It's a little like umami It's like a you know, like sometimes you're playing in the water as a kid at the beach and a huge wave comes

Starting point is 00:35:13 That's right 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 they're like why like and then it's like the top of your mouth Yeah, and it yeah, and you're like, oh, and they're like why like and then it's like the top of your mouth kind of yeah And it was kind of seaweaty water This episode was reported by me Lutf Nasser with help from Annie McEwen and Aketi Foster Keyes. It was produced by Annie McEwen. My culinary shenanigans with Samin were recorded by Adam Howell, voice acting by Brendan Dalton,

Starting point is 00:35:56 original music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom, hosting help from Sara Khare, fact checked by Emily Krieger, edited by Pat Walters. And I doubt anyone's gonna want to try it, but we're gonna link to the recipe for Garum. And I also have a giant jar of it in my house that I'm trying to get rid of. Before we go, 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. 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. It's so charming, but also encyclopedic about food

Starting point is 00:36:39 history. So for example, I just had the question, has gastropod done an episode about garum? And of course they have. 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. Did you know, for example, that way before anyone ever thought to put a tomato in ketchup, it was a fermented fish sauce. Whatever condiment or snack or dessert or ingredient

Starting point is 00:37:08 that you love, there's probably a gastropod about it. One of my favorite all time episodes of theirs, Better Believe It's Butter is about the margarine wars. 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. Yeah, So subscribe to Gastropod wherever you get your podcasts. That's it for us. Thank you so much for listening.

Starting point is 00:37:32 Guys, I'm shaking the fish sauce. Who wants to help me? Okay. So no one's helping me shake this fish sauce. Shake it, shake it, shake it. Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it. It's getting heavier. I'm gonna get a greaker. I'm not sure. Shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it, shake it. Do you wanna shake it with me? Why not? Oh, come on now. It's not gross, come here. Okay, look.

Starting point is 00:37:53 I'm taking a little smile. Oh. Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont, and here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Ebomrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design.

Starting point is 00:38:19 Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nianusambamdam, Matt Guilty, Annie McEwan, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khare, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Gaianne Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Radiolab - A Little Pompeiian Fish Sauce Goes a Long Way

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