CHOWDA: A Souper Fascinating Tale
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Imagine that your body becomes liquid and you are suddenly imbued

three magical powers number one the power of rumble still skin you can turn grass into gold and number two the power of eternal youth you can live for hundreds of years barely aging and number three the power of buried treasure

Your humble body can bring riches to entire human societies and now your liquid body begins swirling and whirling and gurgling and burbling. You have become... Chowder! Club Chowder! Let's get some claps! Lulu here.

To let you know, we are bringing you another one of our episodes that we taped in front of a live audience, this time in Boston at City Space with WBUR for their Kids Podcast Playdate Festival. And we're bringing it to you today partly because it's summer and who doesn't love some clam chowder when they're near the ocean, but also because we have a new show.

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and the animals and nature that goes into making pizza. It's going to be a really fun show and you're going to get to eat pizza and it's free. It's totally free. That's coming up in New York City, August 6th and 7th at Little Island. To find out information, just go to littleisland.org. And so yeah, we wanted to let you know in case you're in the city or you could be there. It'll be fun. We'll be singing songs. You can ask questions. I'll be there. Alan will be there. Ana will be there. It'll be a good time. Anyway, okay.

Back to today's episode, which we taped up in Boston about Boston, or as it is technically called, New England. Clam. Chowda. Now it's the time for all of you to sing the theme song with us. You ready? Terrestrials, terrestrials, we are not the worst, we are the best. Yay!

Terrestrials is a show where we uncover the strangeness waiting right here on Earth and sometimes break out into songs. I am your host, Lu, and you're joined as always by my song.

- Gluggedy Glug. - Alan and my producer bud. - I'm allergic to shellfish but happy to be here. - We love you Anna. And today we are going to examine clam chowder. But first I need to level with you. As I said, I was born in Boston. Bostonian, apparently I drive like a Bostonian. I have never actually had clam chowder.

This is not theater. I truly haven't. My parents are here. They can attest it's true. I've never had clam chowder. I don't know. Something about it seems really gross to me. However, one thing that I've learned from working at Terrestrials is that often when you pass something that initially feels a little gross or a little scary, you can find something amazing there. And so as an extremist,

challenge for me and the chowdered dowders. We are going to look closely at clam chowder today to see if it can become amazing and wondrous. And Anna and Alan have put together a concoction of stories and guests. Tell me enough. I will take a bite live on this stage for the first time truly. Really. We'll hope I'm not allergic. First of all, here's what I need your help with. What is in clam chowder? Can anyone shout out some ingredients? Clam!

- I heard clams, do we got clams? - We got clams. - Potato, I heard potato. - Cream. - Cream, dairy, whoa, okay. What was that? - Butter. - Three are, and potato. And we are gonna hear a wild story about each one of those ingredients. That's right, right? That's what you guys are doing together? - That's what we're planning on doing.

At this point, Alan holds up a huge jug of milk. I'm on milk. Okay, you're going to dazzle me with a milk story. All right. Once upon a time in a land very close to here, Hopkinton, Massachusetts, there was a milk cow named Emily. Alan pulls up a picture of a black and white cow in a barn. And if you think about it, making milk is kind of magic.

Now, humans do it too of course, but what's so special about cows is they can make milk out of grass. If we were to eat grass, it would be way too tough to extract many of the nutrients out of it. But cows have a magical power, the power of Rumpelstiltskin to turn grass into gold. You know, the nutritional gold that is milk.

Turns into your butter, turns into your ice cream. Okay, how do they actually do it? Like, we couldn't. How do they do it? Well, the secret is that they actually have four stomachs, or four stomach pouches. And that first stomach in particular, well, it's full of tons of bacteria that munch on the grass and break it down. And then...

It gets sent back up into the mouth to be chewed down before sending it back through the rest of the stomachs. Wait, what happened to milk cow, Emily? So it turned out, Emily, she couldn't make milk. Something about her body was different, which unfortunately on her farm meant she was going to be sent to become a burger. No, I hate this.

We have vegetarians in the audience! I know, I know, I know, I know. Cruel fate. But don't worry because Emily, well, she ran.

All right, can you guys help me out with some radio sound effects? Remember, this is radio. This is being recorded. So we had handed out these wooden clappers. They're called castanets to everyone in the audience. And here Alan starts having everyone clap them to sound like hooves galloping. Emily ran across the barn faster and faster. And when she came to a five-foot fence, she sprang over it. Woo!

She kept running over roads, through the snowy fields, deep into the nearby Massachusetts forest until she came across a wild herd of deer. And wouldn't you know it, the deer took her in. No. Are you serious? Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, deer, even though they look at first glance like...

pretty different from a cow. They're actually really similar. They both have hooves. Clack, clack. Just like cows. They also have four stomach pouches just like cows. And they make milk just like cows. And they're both luminescent.

Ruminants! Ruminants! This was wild. A kid from the audience shouted that both deer and cows are also ruminants, which is this fancy word scientists use to describe animals who chew their burped food up over and over. This guy knows what it's all about.

And around here, Alan pulls up a painting of Emily the cow living out in the wild. She's in a snowy woods with a herd of deer encircling her. So Emily, her extended family of ruminants took her in. You mean her extended family of ruminants and uncle? Not for that bad joke. Yeah.

Yes, Lulu, I do. For 40 days. Did someone just leave? For 40 days, Emily actually lived among this wild herd of deers. 40 days. Wow. Eating, chewing cubs, sleeping with the deers. Imagine going on a winter woods walk, hearing the light crackle of some deer and seeing a cow frolicking with them.

Though they look different on the outside and seem to live such different lives, they were similar enough to become a kind of family. For over a month, Emily hid out in the forest in the warmth and safety of the herd. Until, as Alan explained, Emily started to grow weak.

It's not exactly her ideal climate in the middle of wintertime. She couldn't find enough to eat. It was all buried under the snow. Eventually, she became so weak that some humans were actually able to catch her. No!

So then they took her to the HF, the hamburger factory? Hamburger factory? The hamburger factory? Did they? They did not take her to the hamburger factory, actually, because by this time, Emily had actually kind of become a local celebrity. Ew. Everyone was following her escape on the news every night. There were all these people cheering her on, and this really cool spiritual center full of vegetarians actually offered to take her in. Woo!

Isn't that cool? It's a place called the Peace Abbey. It's also in Massachusetts. And that's where Emily finished out her days. Wandering these gorgeous gardens surrounded by human friends who wanted nothing more than her sweet company. And after she died eight years later, they put up a life-size bronze statue in Emily's honor.

Okay, I'm not faking it. I'm legit a goose fawn right now. It's not cold in here. Okay, that is quite a story. I am fawn-ing over it. Dear fawn, dear fawn. Oh, dear. I'll stop. Okay. No, but seriously, you have a runaway cow. That's right. The powers of rumble still skin and a cross-species friendship. Isn't that delightful? Okay. Milk is amazing. I think milk should go in the pot. Yes? Yes!

Okay, so now we've brought a huge metal pot out onto the stage and behind Alan the screen says, Dunk that milk! Dunk that milk. Which he does. He drops the jug of milk into the pot. In the pot. Now we got a what? What we got next? We got a story about a tape. Okay, now Anna holds up a dirty, bumpy little potato in her hand.

Hold on to your seats, everybody, because I have a story about a potato that saved a life. Then she threw it over to me, and I caught it. Spud, dud, this little thing? Yeah, a hero of sorts in a dirt cape. Though it looks bleak.

Strange, like a rock. It's actually jam-packed with nutrition. Potassium, vitamin C, iron, carbohydrates. It contains so many essential nutrients that in desperate times you could technically live off of just potatoes. Wait, so basically you are here to tell this room full of children we can all just eat french fries and

it's healthy every day that's so fast not french fries a full potato you boil it you eat it skin on you skin on okay that's where the essential nutrients are so and i'm not saying he'd be healthy okay but you would survive okay and the reason we know this is because of a single frenchman oh in the 1700s yeah his name was antoine augustine parmentier and he was a pharmacist

but he was also a soldier. He went to war for France and one day he was captured by the enemy. He was placed in prison and he was given only one thing to eat. Do you know what that thing was? Potatoes! Potatoes, exactly right. Now Antoine, he was a scientist. He had medical training. He was thinking, I'm gonna die. I'm just getting this disgusting thing every single day. I need fruit, I need meat, I need my croissants.

But guess what? Day after day, year after year, for three years, Antoine only ate potatoes and he survived. That's incredible. Yeah, that's a photo of him. There's a painting of him that hangs in Versailles to this day. Versailles is a very fancy...

Mr. Potato Head! Mr. Potato Head! Mr. Potato Head is a little potato guy

Okay, so after your French potato guy got out of prison alive, he started evangelizing about potatoes. Going to everyone and saying, these little berry treasures are incredible. We should all be eating them all the time. Um...

It is wild to think that this like tiny little bland root is kind of like perfectly calibrated to support humans with its vitamins and like support whole societies in times of need. Exactly. That is cool. It is very cool. At this point, I look back at the potato and I swear to you, it looks different. It almost glows with all the riches it hides.

So, okay, the humble ingredient that can support entire societies in times of need, the French guy, potato flours. Potato goes in the pot. With that, Anna holds her potato over the big metal pot and dunks it in. So now our pot contains potatoes. It contains milk. When we come back, we will be encountering the third crucial ingredient of clam chowder. That's right. A live animal will be making a cameo.

Or should I say, a clamio. Terrestrials is back on with the Chowder Show. Okay, so now put your hands together for a very special appearance for a real live clam. All right! And carrying that clam is a real life sign. Hi, everybody! Hello!

Okay, so at this point, scientist Rachel Hutchinson and I get settled in this giant blow-up clam chair. Are you going to join me in the clam chair? Yeah, I am. And we learn a little bit about her work with clams and other shellfish. And I also work for Woods Hole Oceanographic Sea Grant. And then she introduces us... I'm with you, a clam. Can you hold it up so everyone can see? ...to her clam friend. Now, it's really alive in there?

It is really alive. Does this clam have a name? Not yet. Could we name it right now? Oh, yeah, suggestion. What? Wait, yeah, I saw your hand. What do you got? Chowder. It's like kind of mean. We're going to do one real quick. I heard a lot of people said clammy. We got Bob and we got chowder. So if you want chowder, let's hear it. If you want Bob, let's hear it. And if you want clammy...

I think it was Bob? Was it Bob? I think it might have been Bob. All right, so Bob. And you are here to sort of like sell me on clams or should I say shell me on? Absolutely. Clams, clams. Okay, really quick, like how did you get into, of all animals, that you could get into clams? So these guys are our filter feeders. They're filtering out all the nutrients and phytoplankton in the water.

Some of these guys can filter up to like 40 gallons of water a day. Whoa. Cleaning our water bodies. Wow. And so I always wanted to know how to keep our waterways and our saltwater healthy. And it kind of comes down to these little things that look like rocks. Wow. They siphon in the water. They have stomachs and intestines just like us. Wow. Do they have little hearts? They have little hearts. His little heart is beating. And is that how do they eat?

Is there also like a little tongue or? They have so they have a little siphon off the other end. Wait she just showed it! And they all have there's like a teensy teensy little hole that I've truly never noticed. Okay. They stick their little siphon out and they pump in the water and it goes past their gills and past their stomach. Neat. Okay so any other like cool clam facts? They're one of the oldest animals.

on Earth that we've ever found. Huh. How old are we talking? We're not talking like 100 years old, are we? We're talking like 400 to 500 years old. Half a millennium? Pretty old. We don't even know how old the oldest clam could be. How did they break this kind of limit to life? I think they found that like...

Animals that grow slow, animals that are in cold areas, animals that protect themselves and don't have a lot of predators and are safe from, you know, everything else that's around them have a little bit of a longer expectancy. So exactly what I'm ribbing on them, being like, looking like a boring rock, this is the key to their longevity. They live a sheltered life. Oh, thank you.

To move us swiftly past that bad joke, Rachel then pulls up a photo of empty clamshells open, their insides all purple and shiny, and tells us that they used to be used as a kind of

of money. Historically, when the native tribes were here, they would value these clams not just for the food, but for also a lot of the clams, if you've ever seen them, they might have that real nice purple on the inside of the shell. They used it for jewelry, they used it for trading, they used it for exchanging for goods. And

People carefully carved these shells into beads, which have been found nearly a thousand miles from the coast, deep into the landlocked Midwest, showing the trail of just how far the shells of these little ocean dwellers traveled. It was valued, right? It was a value system. That's so neat, and that is so beautiful. Okay, well, I'm feeling like...

Clams can outlive everyone in this room, right? Everyone in this room. Older than Boston. Yep. There are some clams alive today with their hearts beating that were alive during the times of like knights and castles and stuff. Yep. Okay, clam has the power. Should we dunk that clam? Clam! Would you like to do it? Sure. Okay. So I think I need to try clam chowder for the first time. But first, we need to make it, right? And to make the chowder...

Alan has prepared a brand new song. All right. Let's pump that volume. Our first verse here is all about our first ingredient in clam chowder. Think of Emily, baby. Milk. Howdy, how, cow. With a mystical power. Turning grass into milk for clam chowder. Howdy, how, cow. With a mystical power.

Great job! For first is all done. We're moving on to number two, the humble spud. Praise the potato! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The Dirtball with the flavor to save ya. Praise the potato. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The Dirtball with the flavor to save ya. Alright. That line will get so stuck in your head. Excellent. Last ingredient, the star of our show, the clam. Bam!

That's the plan. Put it in the pot and sing it again. Clam, bam, that's the plan. Put it in the pot and sing it again. Clam, bam, that's the plan. Put it in the pot and sing it again. Clam, bam, that's the plan. Put it in the pot. Three, two, one, we go.

From the brain of the...

Good job, everyone. Okay, I can't put it off anymore. Where is the Chowda Bearer? Turns out there are two Chowda Bearers. Hi, I'm Oscar, and this chowder doesn't smell very good. Hi, my name is Lily. Their names are Oscar and Remy. They are eight and five. And as they talk...

about how they don't really like the smell of the chowder. I sort of agree, but I keep staring at it because I promised Anna and Alan and Rachel that if they wowed me with what's inside that white, gurgling brew, I would take a bite. And they did wow me. And so, there was only one thing left to do. This is real stuff. Okay, okay. Can I get a clam clap? Let's just do it. Don't overthink it. Here we go.

Take a spoonful and gulp it down. Oh, you just stole the clam. It's really good. I told you it was good. I'm so proud of you. Now, I guess really all there is left to say. Excuse me, I have a question. Me too. Me three. Me four. The Badgers. Audience members with badgering questions for our expert.

My first name is Augustus and my age is seven. Is it true that clams start out female and then turn male?

Oh, well that's true with oysters, but not actually with clams. Wow! My first name is Stella and I'm eight. Where do the clams get their shell from? That's a great question! So the shell is made from calcium carbonate, which is actually floating around dissolved in the ocean. And so the clams take the calcium carbonate out of the ocean and they build their shell. Wait, so their bodies are built out of their world?

That's right. That's so cool. My name is Ayelet. I'm 17 years old. Yes, still okay. You said that clams can live for a really long time, but how long have they been on the earth? That's a great question. Thank you.

I don't know the answer to that one, but I think that's probably, they're probably one of those first organisms in the ocean. Turns out Rachel was right. We looked it up. They have been around for over 500 million years, making them some of the oldest creatures on the planet after stuff like sea sponges, ancient jellies, anemones, sea worms. I have Oscar and six. And Eeyore.

Do clams have ears? Ooh, great question. So clams don't have ears like us where they can hear, but they can feel vibrations around. So have you ever walked on the beach at low tide and seen clams squirting? That's how they know? Because they can feel us. I'm Clara, and I'm 11. And so whenever I go clamming, what I do is I throw a rock onto the beach, and then this little water comes out if clams are there. So why do they do that, and what is that water?

Like substance. Ah, so that's great. So we just said the clams could hear the vibration, right? And so that's them closing their shell and squirting all the excess water back out so that their shells close tightly and they kind of keep themselves protected.

My name is Oliver and I'm 11 years old. My question is how do clams survive out of the water? So they often come out of the water for hours and hours. And as long as they've closed up their shell, they're going to be alive and...

And clam will actually stay out of the water for a couple days. Wow. And oysters for a little longer than that. And so that's why when you buy them and you bring them home, they're still alive in your refrigerator until you cook them. So yet another way in which they outperform us. They do it for days. The lights are dimming. Well, thank you guys all. You have not the pressure. I have to. You can go. Right.

All right. That'll do it for today. Special thanks to the WBUR City Space for letting us clack clams in there for an hour. You can find a live recording of this show if you want to watch it all and see all the stuff on YouTube. Just search for Terrestrials, the mega awesome, super huge, wicked fun podcast play date. And there's also a link in the show notes here. Thanks also to Rachel Hutchinson from the Cape Cod Cooperation Extension for being our expert. And we'll see you next time.

And to Oscar and Remy, our chowder bearers, who both have birthdays right around now as this is being released. Happy birthday. You're the best, Trails. And finally, if you liked this, if you want to see Alan sing songs live and eat pizza and have a great time with the whole Terrestrials gang, come out to our next live show, which is August 6th and 7th in New York City at Little Island. Just go to littleisland.org.

to find out more. Tickets are free. It'll be a great time. And even if you can't make it, we still want you to interact with us. We are currently hard at work on a batch of new episodes that are going to drop in the fall and we want your Badgers questions.

For the expert, we want to hear what they are. We want to try to get you answers. So to see what the topics are and to submit a question, just go on over to terrestrialspodcast.org. Hit submit a question and then you'll have a chance to get your voice or your question on the show. Thank you so much for listening. See you in a couple spins of this dirty old planet of ours. Happy summer. Bye.