The Forge Arc Bundle

Curious Harvest: Eighty Strange, True, and Half-True Stories Hidden in the World's Pantry

(Print available soon on Amazon)

An emperor spent his final years chasing a mushroom that promised immortality. He never got it. A Roman fortune the size of an empire vanished because one plant simply ran out. A cheese from Sardinia is legally banned across the entire European Union — and Sardinians make it anyway, on purpose, with the maggots still alive inside.

Curious Harvest is a collection of eighty short, wonder-first stories about the strangest, darkest, funniest, and most surprising things humans have ever believed about food — and the real history hiding underneath those beliefs. Every chapter opens with a scene and no names attached, so you find out what you're actually reading about right alongside the reveal. From there, each story digs into where the legend came from, what's actually documented, and why people needed to believe it in the first place.

Inside, you'll find:

• The Icelandic shark that's poisonous fresh and beloved fermented — made from an animal that may have been alive since before the American Revolution
• The real reason garlic wards off vampires (and the modern medical theory for where the legend actually came from)
• A Persian spice trade lie so effective it fooled Greek and Roman buyers for a thousand years
• The popular "fact" about spinach and iron that turns out to be a myth about a myth
• A Welsh funeral tradition where a stranger was paid to eat a dead man's sins
• The bean-and-cake ritual that traces an unbroken line from ancient Rome to modern Mardi Gras
• Why an entire Aztec grain was banned under threat of severed hands — and how it survived anyway

Spanning every inhabited continent and several thousand years of human history, Curious Harvest treats food as what it has always actually been: a window into what people feared, worshipped, fought over, and couldn't live without. Each chapter stands entirely on its own — read it cover to cover, or open it anywhere and start.

If you've ever wondered why a fairy tale, a folk remedy, or a dinner-table "fact" sounds a little too good to be entirely true, this book is for you.