What is plastic, and how did a shortage of billiard balls accidentally give birth to the material that would feed the modern world? Why did a Belgian chemist rummaging through coal tar waste end up transforming the way humanity eats? And how does the unlikely journey from Victorian ivory substitutes to the clamshell of strawberries on your kitchen counter open a window onto the great forces of industrial history; from total war to the supermarket revolution?
Join John and Patrick as they tell the extraordinary story of plastic's conquest of fresh produce, and the civilization it quietly built around us, in an age that made abundance the new normal...
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