Why does it take between 150,000 and 200,000 flowers — and up to 470 hours of human labour — to produce a single kilogram of saffron, and why has the plateau of La Mancha been the place where that labour happens for over a thousand years? What did the Moors actually bring to Spain, and why does every Spanish cook who reaches for the azafrán, the arroz, or the aceite speak a culinary history that maps directly onto what happened in those Andalusian fields between 711 and 1492? And what is the specific, irreversible tragedy of expelling the people who know how to maintain an irrigation system?
Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Spain and the Arab Agricultural Revolution — the acequias, the Morisco expulsion, and the red-gold threads still harvested at dawn in La Mancha by the same method the Moors left behind…
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