Behold, garlic!
What do you know about garlic?
That it's...a strongly scented vegetable?
That it's...best used to flavor your spaghetti sauce?
Well, then... it's time for you to meet garlic again.
In ancient times, garlic was celebrated as a source of great strength.
Greek Olympians ate garlic before competing.
Roman soldiers ate it before battle.
Builders of the Egyptian pyramids lived on bread and garlic.
During World War II, when penicillin was scarce,
garlic paste was applied to soldier's wounds to prevent infections.
And still today, garlic is known to stimulate the immune system
and fight disease.
It's basically a super food, and in country like the US
more people are eating garlic now than ever before, but - How Does It Grow?
What we call the garlic head, is really the bulb of the garlic plant.
It grows below the earth,
and it's like an underground storage container for nutrients.
So, if there's a drought or cold temperatures,
the garlic plant can still survive on these reserves.
Most of the world's garlic now comes from China,
where cheap labor makes garlic a cheap product.
In the US, California grows the most garlic,
and here in Gilroy, America's garlic capital,
Christopher Ranch is the country's biggest producer.
The Christopher family has been growing garlic since the 1950s.
On 3000 acres, they grow 70 million pounds of garlic each year.
The garlic we eat is not just the crop, it's also used as the seed.
The farm uses a cracking machine to break the bulbs into individual cloves.
A mechanical planter scatters the cloves in bands across the field;
roots begin to grow down into the soil from the base of the bulb
and leaves grow at the top.
(Bill): Officially, there are two types of garlic:
there's the hardnecks garlic and there's a softnecks.
Here in California we grow the softnecks garlic.
(Nicole): Hardnecks have long, curly flower stalks called scapes,
that can also be eaten.
Softnecks, on the other hand, don't grow scapes.
(Bill): At a hardneck you're going to see a stick right in the center...
(Nicole): I see...
(Bill): So here you have cloves throughout which gives you a little bit more garlic.
Garlic farmers don't have to worry too much
about insects eating their crop.
The sulfur compounds in garlic that gives it its pungent smell,
work like a natural pesticide.
What farmers do have to watch out for
is fungus and diseases in the soil like, white rot.
Once it infects a field, garlic can never be grown there again.
Garlic can be eaten fresh, straight out of the ground,
but it's rarely sold that way.
Most garlic goes through a process called "curing",
where farmers dry it out,
so that they can store it for longer periods of time.
And they start drying it while still in the ground;
they stop watering it and let the leaves go dry and brown.
They know when it's ready to be harvested by counting the skins around the garlic.
Each skin corresponds to a leave on the plant.
(Bill): If you counted probably 5-6 skins, that's how we know this bulb is ready.
A mechanical digger loosens the roots,
then the garlic plants are pulled by hand
and laid to dry in the sun for almost two weeks.
(Bill): It's very important when they put it out to dry
that they cover the bulbs with the leaves from the next group.
Just protects it from the sun.
Coz when garlic is very green, it can be sunburned.
And if it's sunburned, then the cloves will turn into these little moldy things,
and would not be good to eat.
To complete the curing process,
workers pick up the garlic one by one,
cut the roots and leaves off,
and put the garlic bulb in open wooden bins to dry for another two weeks.
Finally, the garlic is ready.
At Christopher Ranch, the garlic is packaged both as whole heads
and also, as skinless cloves.
My tip for really supercharging your immune system
is to try eating garlic raw,
or (what) I'd like to do is crush a clove of garlic,
smear it on a piece of toast,
a little olive oil, a little slice of tomato...
it's like the most delicious medicine you'll ever eat.
Hey, it's the snack that built the pyramids!