Welcome to our first ever episode of The Earthling Cafe’s “Did You Know?”.

Here we will share some of our favorite weird and wonderful facts about, you guessed it, Nature, Earth, and Nutrition!

To kick things off, Episode 1 is all about Nature, and is dedicated to the weird, the wonderful Castor Bean, or Castor Oil Plant.

The Castor Bean, which is common throughout the tropics, where it can grow as tall as a small tree, originated in the Horn Of Africa, and was brought to Italy by the Romans, who collected exotic plants to embellish their villas (not gonna lie, we can relate!). In temperate climates, it is a tall, robust shrub valued for the structure it gives to flowerbeds, and for its impressively large, glossy leaves, which range in color from grassy green, to aubergine, depending on cultivar. Being wind pollinated, its flowers have no need for bright petals to attract insects, but the fruit are pleasing curiosities. Each prickly capsule ripens to coral and vermillion before exploding to eject exactly three seeds, intricately patterned to disguise them from hungry rodents.

True to its membership of the Euphorbia family, many of which harbor toxins and caustic chemicals, castor seeds contain ricin, one of the worlds deadliest poisons. In the bloodstream, just half of one thousandth of a gram can kill. In 1978 in London, the Bulgarian journalist and dissident, Georgi Markov was murdered on Waterloo Bridge when a capsule of ricin the size of a pinhead was injected into his leg using an adapted umbrella.

The seeds are also the source of castor oil, for which the plant is grown and farmed commercially, principally in Northern India. Fortunately ricin doesn’t survive the oil extraction process, and castor oil has been used for 4,000 years to treat all kinds of ailments, most prevalently, constipation.

It’s heyday was in the 19th century, when castor oil was commonly used as a punishment for naughty children - with a thick, viscous texture, and tasting of lipstick mixed with a nauseating hint of dish soap, parents would give it to their children when they would misbehaved.

More recently, castor oil was adapted for a much more sinister use. Force-fed to political opponents during the 1920’s and 1930’s by Mussolini’s Fascist regime, it became an instrument of humiliating, and sometimes even fatal, torture.