If I had to choose one thing it is actually possible for my dad to love more than my mother or us kids, it would be garlic.

My father adores garlic. He cherishes it. He has garlic magnets, garlic t-shirts, garlic cookbooks, and garlic chewing gum. He has attended garlic festivals (and yes, I have been dragged along). There is no way that we are in any way related to any vampires, because if we were, they would be dead from the fumes that radiate from our house in a half-mile radius come dinner time. When my twin brother and I were born, my dad, the son of a photographer and a photo hobbyist himself, posed our unresisting, swaddled infant bodies for portraits to send to the eagerly expectant crowd of family and friends who had been watching my poor, tiny mother swell to roughly double her size. And to break up the soft, off-white background (and to differentiate us, I’m guessing, because newborns all look kind of the same) he curled some pink ribbon and some blue ribbon and placed it next to us where a normal parent would perhaps place a stuffed animal. Only since my dad is not a normal parent, guess what he tied it to?

That’s right. A bunch of garlic.

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It seems weird to me to think that not to long ago, there were no such things as peanuts.

I don’t mean that they didn’t exist, of course. I just mean that, until 1921 when Teddy Roosevelt made George Washington Carver’s work famous, people in America thought they were a pretty useless weed. And it took even longer for people to not only figure out they weren’t, but to make peanut stuff: peanut butter, peanut butter cookies, peanut oil, and most importantly, peanut sauce.

Now, strangely enough, peanut sauce seems to be a staple in Thai cuisine, which is confusing to me. Especially since peanuts were brought over to China in the 1600’s as a crop. This conflicts greatly with my elementary school history education, since weren’t we supposed to be mystified by this little legume’s delicious properties? So why would we bring a weed to China? And how did it then move down and become so popular in Indonesia and Thailand?

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