Branded fruit: How produce got “Honeycrisp-ified"

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Find the Empire Politics Podcast on the MPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Planet Money from MPR. The produce aisle. It is changing. You've noticed this. I'm sure it is now full of superstar fruits and vegetables. You've got the honey crisp apple. You've got the cotton candy grape.

The cuties, mandarin, orange. They stand out. They cost more. They have branding and sometimes trade marks and patentish kinds of protections. To figure out why this change happened. And to perhaps discover the next superstar. I hopped in a car and drove to a spot about 30 miles outside of Trenton.

See, can't you look at how beautiful New Jersey is? It's very nice people. I am in the car with Dan Pashman, host of the very excellent food podcast

“The Sportful. Dan's a friend of the show.”

A proud son of New Jersey and unapologetic booster. Rolling hills, farm, a whole bunch of cows. Huddled together under a tree to stay in the shade. Dan did not bring me here for the cows, though. We're here in the gray state of New Jersey to explore tomatoes, which is something New Jersey is famous for.

Jersey fresh. New Jersey tomatoes. It sounds like a joke when you say it every time. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's not a joke. It is not. In fact, almost a century ago, a scientist at Rutgers University working with the Campbell Soup Company took the already famous New Jersey tomato and developed a new New Jersey tomato

that became like the tomato for like a couple decades. If you were eating a tomato, you were very likely eating a descendant of the plump red, platonic ideal of a tomato that the Rutgers scientist had helped to perfect. That was a slicer style tomato, you know, the big old kind that you slice. A century later, though, Dan has brought me to New Jersey to see a new tomato created at Rutgers this time, though. A smaller tomato, a grape tomato. I have to be honest, as excited as I am to learn more about this new tomato.

I am skeptical of really grape tomatoes. I'm concerned about that. Now, you know, grape tomatoes. A oval pop them in your mouth. Size little guys that show up in veggie trays all the time. And Dan had heard about this up and coming fancy grape tomato called the Scarlet sunrise. He obviously loved it. It was from New Jersey, loved that Rutgers was involved again.

He had, however, failed to mention to me that he thinks that they've chosen the wrong kind of small tomato to invent.

A grape tomato to me is always very hard.

Uh-huh. Because it's like almost all firm hard stuff and very little pulp. Okay. To me that cherry tomato, you bite into it. It pops, you get that rush of sweet, tart, juiciness in your mouth. Ideally in your mouth and not on your mouth.

Really good. Well, I mean, if you're a professional, you put the whole thing in your mouth and close your mouth before you bite. Uh, I would take a cherry tomato over a grape tomato. So when we taste test this thing, are you just going to, like,

“crap all over this tomato because you inherently don't like grape tomatoes?”

I'm open to my mind being changed, maybe I just haven't had a good grape tomato. Okay. All right. Well, now this all assumes we actually get a chance to taste the Scarlet Sun rise. Uh, because I almost drive past the small Rutgers University experimental farm we're here for in my defense.

Not the easiest sign and name to spot while driving. New Jersey, agriculture, equipment station Clifford and Melda Snyder, research and extension farm. It's terrific to the ditch.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone joined now by New Jersey's most important.

Export, agricultural, culturally, uh, the one and only damn passionate. Hello, Dan. Hey, Kenny, you can't put me ahead of Bruce, but I'll take tide with John Bon Jovi. That's fair. Maybe you had a tomato, you will, we will discuss. Because Dan is here to help get to the bottom of this trend that he and I have been calling, like,

the honey crispification of seemingly the entire produce side. Yeah, I mean, like with apples, you got honey crisp and then came cosmic crisp and pink lady. All these fancy versions of fruit that are sold at much higher price points. And now it seems like the old tomato bin is in the midst of a similar kind of explosion. Yeah, and maybe you've noticed a flavor bomb, sugar bombs, sprinkles in the tomato aisle.

Well, today on the show, why this is happening now is a story of changing laws. I would say changing incentives, even. Yeah, and maybe also changes in us and what we want as food consumers. Plus can two Rutgers farmers can vince Dan passionate to fall in love with a new and interesting looking little grape tomato.

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It's just a little afternoon when we get to the Rutgers experimental farm. Is that are you Peter Tom? Alright, we found Pete. Pete Nietzsche and Tom Orton. Tom's our entire Rutgers agricultural professor and researcher.

You hit the jackpot on the day, it doesn't get any better than this and early August. Pete helps run this experimental farm. How many acres is it? It's a total of 390 acres. We're not all cultivated.

We can see a few barns here, a greenhouse over there. And in the distance, there it is. The star of the show, a small field of tomato plants. This is exciting, Kenny. Can we just stop and let's behold, reflect that we're looking at a bunch of rows of tomato plants.

Five, six. Are these scarlet sunrise plants zero?

“Like all other scarlet sunrise have been birth from what we see before us?”

Well, they're derived from the same source. Okay. But this is the birthplace. Yes. You're the proud parents over looking your little nursery.

Oh, yeah, that's one way to put it. Yeah, we don't usually look at it that way. Right. Okay, I mean, this this more here for. We're going to go take a look at them now.

We begin a rather muddy trek over to the tomato fields. And, uh, one thing I learned about Dan Pashman, you do not waste a second when you have time with two tomato experts. Especially when there's a tomato related question that has been long at me for years. Random question while we walk.

Are the tomatoes that still have some green vine attached in the supermarket? Actually better or is it just great marketing? I don't know. That's your cover though.

“Well, I think it's more of a marketing thing.”

Well, I guess I don't need to spend more for those anymore. You're off the hook, Dan. Tom and Pete, they are very much part of this centuries-long tradition at Rutgers of scientists who are really nerdy about fruits and veggies and really interested in trying to make better fruits and veggies for farmers.

Right, you know, like a huge part of what public research universities have always done is

try to make things better for the agricultural industries in their states. For Tom and Pete, that specifically means doing things to help farmers in the great state of New Jersey. We're trying to give farmers new tools for them to be more profitable. Trying to make the farmers happy by giving them a plant that grows vigorously has resistance to as many diseases and insects as possible and as easy to manage.

Kenny and I start looking through the tomato plants, moving branches here and there. To see if we could find some perfect scarlet sunrise. We should look for some rye bees, right? Is that the word you guys use? Right, fruit.

Right, fruit. That rye fruit is good. Slow down all the technical mumbo jumbo Kenny. Unfortunately for us, Tom and Pete have timed this crop to be ripe at the end of August for a big public open house at the facility. Clearly thinking about their, you know, New Jersey neighbors and not us taste-making journalists, Dan.

Yeah, that hurt a little bit, Kenny, especially, you know, know my history with the state. But anyway, we dig around hoping for a few early rye bees.

“Oh yeah, Kenny, any luck finding a ripe tomato here?”

I should disclose. I am red green color blind. Why are you in charge of this then? Maybe you should do it. Yeah.

All right. Well, in the meantime, allow us to share some context for the tomato we are on our hands and knees trying to find and eat. Because, you know, Tom and Pete, they are doing plant research in a very different world than the Rutgers scientists were a hundred years ago. Yeah, some huge things have changed that are at least part of the explanation for why our produce aisle has exploded with more and more of these branded superstar fruits and veggies. Yeah, yeah.

So let's quickly run through those changes.

And I think we can argue that the first comes in 1970.

As professional newsmen, we're called upon each day to do various assignments. Now, uh, full disclosure, I couldn't actually find coverage of our first thing that changed food history. Instead, I found these Dallas reporters who said they were given a particularly hard assignment from their boss with your permission.

We wish you a Merry Christmas. We wish you a Merry Christmas.

“So yeah, uh, the event we're talking about did take place Christmas Eve 1970.”

And so, you know, well, well, these guys were singing wish you a Merry Christmas. Somewhere in Washington, D.C. President Richard Nixon was signing into law the Plant Variety Protection Act. Which clearly wasn't that big of a deal at the time. But in reality, it was huge.

Because before this, it was a lot harder to monetize a new hybrid crop grown plant.

But now, breeders could basically own the rights to all kinds of fruits and vegetables that they couldn't before.

That's big change. Number one. Giant change number two happens 10 years later. And that's the news. Merry Christmas to all.

All right. This one fair. Fair enough. This one did not actually happen on Christmas Eve. It was, however, December 12th, 1980.

It was another undercover new law. Yeah, the buy dole act named after Senator's birch buy and Bob dole. Which gave federally funded researchers the default right to own whatever they create with that federal funding. And public universities, you know, lots of federal funding. Now, they could control and monetize their medical breakthroughs, their developments in computers.

And the new fruits and vegetables they created.

“Which brings us to what I think is probably the most important moment in the produce.”

I'll brand explosion. Of course, that is the 1991 release of the honey crisp apple. Yeah, the honey crisp was kind of the first big breakout produce star that came out of these changes. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and in 1991, they started licensing out honey crisp trees to growers for a one time fee of around a dollar a tree.

And they have now made north of 20 million dollars from it.

A couple decades later, the University of Washington did even better with their cosmic crisp apple. They've made more than 30 million bucks. Yeah, the lesson clearly was that if universities funded the right agricultural breakthrough, that could become a major profit center for the school. Would you say that it's easier now to get support from the university for the kind of research you do,

because it has a potential to bring a return for the school? Well, I'm retired. [laughter] It certainly helps, you know, if it brings in money to support our work and our program, they're going to more likely to support it. Yeah, you know, the agricultural research game has dramatically changed as a system.

For researchers like Pete and Tom, their incentives have maybe changed a little. They do get to share in the revenue from their inventions, something like 35%. But, but Pete told us they're not getting rich inventing the Scarlet Sunrise for Rutgers. In a lot of ways, they are still just like those old Rutgers plant nerds from a hundred years ago, geeking out, tinkering, and just trying to help New Jersey farmers.

That's right. So, all that, that's the context for Pete and Tom, and this fancy New Tomato, they decided to create at Rutgers. And that story, well, Pete says that starts about 14 years ago. We grow tomatoes here for our open house, and I noticed in the field, there was one cherry tomato called ISIS candy. A cherry tomato called the ISIS candy, and it had some pretty good traits.

It was sweet, which we know people like, and they also had this cool color situation.

“Yeah, that, it's like a little red blush on all the other kind of yellow background, that's why we call it a bi-color.”

Bi-color. Yeah, like mostly yellow, then with this elegant, like, streaky gradient into red. So, it tastes great. It looked beautiful, but it had a problem. The ISIS candy also cracks, as a cherry, it was cracked a lot. Yeah, Dan, you're beloved cherry tomatoes, cracking up tomatoes.

Well, you know, and that's why I never had an ISIS candy, I suppose.

I guess that's probably true. That's a big problem for a tomato, no matter how good it tastes or looks. It's got to be transported, and it has to be able to stay fresh. Yes, but, you know, for Pete's and Tom, the light bulb moment was, what if they, you know, they took that bi-color, ISIS candy cherry,

and then crossed it, you know, bread it with a hardier, red, grape tomato. So, in talking to Tom, we got together. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could get some of the sweetness advice candy in there? So, can we get some of the firmness of the red, and combine those traits together, and get something worthwhile for the market?

Tom says that red, yellow, bi-color mix. But that could help their sweet, grape tomatoes chance of success. We figured people could identify it in the marketplace. And therefore, connect the flavor with the appearance. And go and, and there be repeat purchases of specifically this, this product.

So, in a sense, you made a very early branding decision. More or less, yeah, because we wanted to be unique. Right, you know, Pete explained to us that the market has become flooded with red grape tomatoes.

and refrigerated for veggie trays, and that makes them taste bad. Don't refrigerate tomatoes, Kenny. Yes, this is your public service, it's from Dan. You end up with a situation, though, where a consumer, Dan, might taste bad red grape tomatoes and decide that they hate all red grape tomatoes.

Hate is a strong word, Kenny, but yeah, like maybe this is my issue.

Maybe I just never tried a good one, and it makes sense to me that if Tom and Pete are going

to create a good grape tomato for New Jersey farmers to grow and sell, it would be helpful for it to look different from all those other ones to avoid confusion. So, Tom and Pete, they get to work, step one. You might remember this from your old Punnett squares days and biology class.

“You cross pollinate the two tomato plants, and then you have to wait like six months,”

and you see what kinds of tomatoes grow. And they're all kind of look the same, because they're all half, twice as Canadian, half to some of those. Seminous, he's talking about the specific red grape tomato they chose to use. Yeah, and when you're going through the process like this, it takes a long time.

You don't fix the problems on the first generation of hybrid plants. It's the next generations after that.

The traits start to sort out.

So, you have some that will have like the red color and the good flavor. So, they select the plants that are closer to what they want. Breathe again, repeat. This is a slow process to grow a new generation of plants. You need a whole growing season.

Tom and Pete had access to a greenhouse, so they could squeeze two growing seasons in per year. But still slow.

“So, you get this big imagery of different plants that you go through and look for what you want,”

which is this color with the flavor and plant architecture and resistance to, you know, insects and diseases and things. That's also taking it into consideration as you're going. Did you taste them also along the way? Oh, yeah.

And if you taste one that's like the greatest tomato you've ever eaten, or you're like, "Oh, spit the seeds out. We need to save these seeds." Well, you don't really take it that seriously because, you know, the chances that you picked one fruit that, you know, that, "Oh, this is the one that's got all the crown jewels in it are pretty low."

After 12 generations of growing, so six years of breeding and selecting, they felt like they had nailed it. A tomato that was sweet and colorful, like the ISIS candy, but sized like the very popular and hardier grape tomato. It was time for the agricultural industrial complex to step in.

Yeah, universities have teams built to handle staff inventions, new medicines, semi-conductors, like those tomatoes need trademarking and other intellectual property protections. They also need marketing plans. In 2019, Tom and Pete reached out to Rutgers Office for Research to say, "They were ready to hand off their baby.

How did you feel?" Making that call. Well, just thank God, we got somewhere.

“Well, I think that's really one of the most gratifying parts of being an inventor”

and including a plant breeder is to have an idea that, you know, it seems kind of hair brand because we're looking at this ISIS candy back in 2011 and thinking, "Well, that's unique, but it boy has an awful lot of problems." So, yeah, it's a great feeling to see that the principles that you learned in the plant breeding and apply the skills that they actually do work.

Ultimately, it was the Rutgers business folks who named Pete and Tom's tomato. The Scarlet Sunrise. Colored Sunrise. Scarlet, like Rutgers, the Scarlet Knights. Amazing.

But also, after the break, how many new kinds of tomatoes do we need? Dan, too many, too many fancy tomatoes. Well, Kenny, we talked to an expert who can help us with our supermarket saturation questions. And yes, we was importantly, Grape Tomato Skeptic Dan finally gets his first taste of the Scarlet Sunrise. Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air.

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Follow Trump's terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so we've seen an explosion of branded fruits and veggies and we've talked about how the incentives that universities have to create new products have changed over the years. But it is more than just to that. And to understand what else has changed, we called up Miguel Gomez of Cornell University.

I am an economist especially I've seen on a specialty crops, supply chains from genetics to consumers in fresh produce in particular. Do you have a favorite vegetable fruit? Artichokes. Hey!

“Oh, that's a curve bar. Are you buying fresh artichokes and then like peeling them and taking them apart by hand?”

Absolutely. And putting them to steam and then doing them with butter and then eating them. I don't know. Artichokes are an awful lot of work for me.

But anyway, first order business, a gut check with the professor.

We aren't imagining that our grocery stores explode with all the superstar branded produce, right? You are absolutely right. If you look at any fresh produce category, there is a race for differentiation in the fresh product category. The market is going toward this crazy amount of new options in each product category. Yes, we're right, Dan, of course.

But, okay, why is this happening? Well, part of the story has to do with growers trying to escape. This classic economic pitfall known as the commodity trap. Yeah, so like if you grow soybeans for human consumption, for example, you're growing a commodity crop.

To an everyday consumer, a soybean is a soybean.

“And so the only way for you to compete with the other soybean growers is by selling your soybeans at a lower price.”

And that sets up this race to the bottom, and it's a really tough way to make a living. Sure, but to escape that trap, you need to find a way to differentiate your product. Make your thing special somehow, and then, ideally, you can charge more for it. And Miguel told us there are a number of ways to differentiate. A one end of the spectrum, take a boring old commodity vegetable, and be really clever about how you package it.

Here is my favorite is one, love beats. Love beats is like a brand of the vegetable beats. Some thing that is Asakomoliti, as you can find out our beats, love beats. Yeah, the love beats company sells beats. They are packaged, they're well-branded.

They're often pickled or splashed with balsamic. So, you know, slightly more than just like raw commodity beats, but also, they are still just beats to be clear. They are excellent quality, they are nicely packaged, the size is uniform, they are not huge. Are those beats proprietary? No, the genetics have no proprietary.

Right, there's no special patented genetics here. Love beats is just carefully selecting beats, often dressing them up, branding them really well. And as a result, they have taken a commodity vegetable and can charge more. They figured out a way to put lipstick on a beat. So, that's one side of how you differentiate the commodity crop, good branding.

Miguel says on the other side, there's intellectual property. Create a vegetable or fruit that is actually genetically different and better. And then you get legal protection for that plant. That is, of course, the root, the scarlet sunrise tomato folks have taken, but we were curious.

“Is there perhaps a limit to all this new produce creation?”

Like, especially when we think of like the poster children for all of this, the apples. So, we talked about how influential the honey crisp was and there's so many kinds of apples now. How close are we to market saturation with all these varieties of apples? That's that's not difficult. We don't have hard data to show that, but in my humble opinion, I think we are past that result.

Yeah, Miguel says people don't seem to be eating like more apples in total. So, if you were to invent a new apple, you're just going to be jockeying for space in that already crowded apple display. And, you know, if you are a new inventor and you try to jump in there, it's just going to be harder to get a consumer to try your new fancy apple. You know, there is a lot we call the cost of searching for consumers. You know, when you have too many options, it becomes a burden to consumers to choose.

I tried to buy almond butter a few weeks ago and I almost had a panic attack and that's actually. Yeah, exactly, I'm allergic to almond butter. I'm allergic to the number of almond butter. Yes, exactly. However, Miguel thinks that tomato space in the grocery store has plenty of room for new varieties.

Because, you know, producers can push fancy varieties all they want.

He's more interested in the demand side of all this. I am convinced that at the end of the day, the foods that you see in restaurants in the store are in response to what consumers want.

“And I think that the consumer is the bigger driver of these of these change at the end.”

Yeah. So I think when we think of the commodities trap, we think of this as a producer push. But you feel like with a lot of these pieces of produce. This is coming from some fancification of our of our palettes, our demands. Like, there's a, there's space for food podcasts like Dan's now because we're all learning how to eat and we're learning how to differentiate. Absolutely. Yes. Of course, there is also a feedback loop between supply and demand here.

Growers can only escape the commodity trap if we are willing to buy into whatever they're selling a fancier thing at a higher price. And if we are willing to buy in, then more growers can try and escape the commodity trap and on and on and on. Are these guys? I really, it's true. I can't tell if they're green.

And let's see in much, you know, again, we plant them late so that we ripen up for open house.

Meanwhile, back at the old Rutgers experimental farm, we've been searching for a solid 30 minutes and still haven't found an actual proper right-be scarlet sunrise in the field. Luckily, though, Tom has a backup plan. Yeah, so you guys can have these. They came out of my home garden. Oh, wow. All right.

“And I planted them a little bit earlier, but Tom is holding one of those little green pint baskets full of these gorgeous little yellow tomatoes with that tell tale blush of red.”

These are the scarlet sunrise. These, these are actually a breeding line. They were, they were from Scarlet sunrise. It's a derivative. Because they're a scarlet. Like, or tasting out there. So the flavor and the fruit type. Yeah, all right. Fine. Technically, these are descendants of the scarlet sunrise.

And I guess once there's a trademark and legal plant protection, the distinctions like cousin of breeding line may matter technically.

But for our purposes, Tom is presenting us with actually ripe scarlet sunrise tomatoes.

Now, before we try this tomato, we ask Tom and Pete to each pop one. And it's like, we want to see what people who taste and evaluate hundreds of tomatoes each year are looking for. All right. Well, that was a little bit low in acidity, but high and sugar, good texture. You know, I would give that a favorable score, maybe four out of five, something like that.

Yeah, it's got a good pop in the mouth. And it's got a good combination of sugar and acid. So, you know, if it doesn't have any acid, it's bland. Right, it's a sickly sweet, you know, I love them. They are so scientific tasting tomatoes. They are earning their destination as plant nerds. Yes, yeah.

But it was interesting to watch this because like, this is the process of developing a new tomato. Like, in some ways, it's super scientific. In some ways, it's just like two guys in a field eating tomatoes. You like this, but yeah, right, right. This one's good. Do it like this, you know. And it's like that over and over across breed tastes the results discuss repeat repeat repeat.

But, you know, okay, great. They are tasting dispassionately objectively. By this point, the only taste test that matters to me is whether or not this scarlet sunrise tomato could convert notorious grape tomato hater dan passionate. I prefer the term grape tomato skeptic, but anyway, there was only one way to find out. We each grab a scarlet sunrise and pop them in.

All right, right. Oh, my gosh. That's really good. That is a full course tomato meal right there. There's a lot in a little package.

Yeah. And, you know, I told you, Kenny, that I was skeptical of grape tomatoes. Yes.

“And the reason why I have often not liked grape tomatoes, I think they're too hard.”

You want to balance between the sort of the firmness and the soft juiciness of the pulp. You don't want to be mushy, but you also don't want it to be hard as a rock. This, I think solves that. This is not too hard. It's got a bit of a meatiness that's very pleasant, which a good tomato should have.

It's a little bit meaty, but it's still sort of yields to the bite. It's soft and tender, and it's got that sweetness and acidity. That's why he does a food podcast. You know, Dan, I have to say what you mentioned to this story idea. This, like, honey crispification of our produce, I had noticed that suddenly,

it was feeling like I was walking through the produce island. It was like being assaulted by colorful hipster Instagram ads or something. But I don't know. I mean, I do like a lot of this fancy produce. I'm not eager to go back to a world of only red delicious apples.

Oh my god, heaven forbid. Yes. I guess I'm benefiting from it.

But I guess it is also true that there are tombs and peats behind some of these, like, very slick, plastic, commercially-looking inventions. And in those cases, in that case, at least they are trying to give growers of New Jersey for Tom and Pete away out of the old commodities trap. Currently, Scarlet Sunrise is more of a specialty to NATO being sold by a small seed company.

As it exists now, it may never have big mass commercial distribution.

Because the current iteration is pretty expensive to grow.

“But honestly, Tom and Pete's goal of helping New Jersey farmers here,”

this ended up going well beyond just inventing another tasty tomato for them to sell. Yeah, that's right, Kenny, because during this whole development process, they made a different discovery that could really change things for tomato growers far beyond New Jersey. Yeah, as they worked on the Scarlet Sunrise, they noticed that one of their experimental tomato plants was really small, like half the size of a normal plant, but was still yielding a similar quality of tomato fruit.

Yeah, as soon as we saw that, Pete saw the one that you see out in the field now. As soon as you see that, you get excited because, you know, that plant is just going to be a much cheaper to grow. And what surprised us was that, as excited as we were to find and eat and talk about the Scarlet Sunrise, Tom and Pete were clearly way more excited about this. Yeah, because the cost of growing grape tomatoes is one of the biggest deterrence.

It requires a lot of picking by hand, a lot of labor.

The standard tall plants have tomatoes from top to bottom that ripen it different rates.

So you get to send pickers through your field several times over weeks. The more compact plants have a shorter ripening window. So fewer trips through the field's plus, more compact plants means, like you just save money on ties and stakes and stuff. Tom actually estimates this could save growers somewhere between 25 and 50%. Yeah, they're excited because this is the kind of innovation that doesn't just help farmers a little.

Like it could completely change the economics of tomato growing for those farmers.

“I think this is something that, you know, it can have a much bigger impact, you know, worldwide.”

It could, like I said, I want to overstate it right now, but we're, we don't, we haven't seen anything like this on the market. What I hear you saying is that this tomato could change the world. Like I said, I don't want to overstate it. Who knows, Kenny? Maybe someday you and I will tell our grandkids that we met the men who won the Nobel Peace Prize for Tomatoes. Why isn't there a Nobel Peace Prize for Tomatoes specifically?

By the time we're grandfather's maybe there will be. Yeah.

Dan Pashman, what a joy to work with you.

Do you want to just share with folks what you've got going on over at the Spark full? Yeah, Kenny, we've got a couple of recent episodes. People can check out one was about a woman attempting to pass the hardest beer test in the world. That is one of my favorite episodes you've got. Not just to involve beer.

We also do one recently about a rare condition called Prater Willis Syndrome. The causes extreme insatiable hunger. We talked to a family dealing with this. They have to lock food away. There's a lot more to it.

We've got a lot of spots to this episode, so I hope folks will check it out. All right, that's where you find your podcasts, the Spark full. And if you enjoyed what you heard today, we have an extended version of our interview with Agricultural Economist Miguel Gomez. We talked to him about the heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. We Dan, you and I tried to speculate what the next superstar product category could be.

Is it avocados? Is it mangoes? Where's it coming?

“And you know, can all of us get rich if we guess it?”

Probably not. So that's going to be over on the NPR plus feed. If you're already subscriber, you'll see that episode show up this Monday. And if you're not, it's not too late. You can subscribe.

It's one of the best ways to help us and show your support. And man mentioned that those NPR plusers, they do get 20% off at the NPR shop where you can now buy the planet money game. Sell me a Sasquatch. We've been documenting this project. It is a game secretly inspired by Nobel Prize winning economics.

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Today's episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed. It was edited by Keith Romer, fact chick by Seattle Wattas. And engineered by scene of La Frado and Jimmy Keely. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark.

I don't know anything about what he did.

Uh, you, Kenny. I want to thank you. Oh, Dan. Thanks. You know, I will say.

“So, uh, only that one specific kind of tomato can be the Scarlet Sunrise.”

And, uh, so all these other cousins and descendants, they had named those plants. Yeah, right, Dan? That's right. That's right. People have ideas.

Yeah. Lord knows we had a few.

And pitched them all to Tom and Pete.

Scarlet, I assume, has to be in the name because of the Rutgers affiliation. We do like that. Yeah.

“I think probably spawn of Scarlet Sunrise is too long.”

How about Scarlet Dawn? Ooh. There you go. I like that. Scarlet Dust.

That sounds a little dark.

I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Dan Pashman. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. How about, uh, two Scarlet to Sunrise.

Like, fast in the furious right. Right. Right. Oh, we can go all day. That's fine.

“Well, I think if you guys can send your, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban has stared into the belly of the beast of America's health care system. I mean, it's so bad. You can go through a long list of really quality hospitals. And they don't know their costs. So, can Medicare for all be a solution?

We take a hard look at the cost of the program along with US health care itself. Find this and hear more stories from the indicator from Planet Money on the NPR app. Tanya, I can keep it the best interview that I've done seriously. Oh, that's a great question. I'm thinking I want to think about that question for the rest of my life.

Oh, good question. This is Tanya Mosley, cohost a fresh air. And the questions are only the half of it. Listen to fresh air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.