The Bizarre Rumor About Star Trek’s Nastiest Food
Star Trek is a franchise that has been around so long that a few crazy urban legends were bound to pop up. One of the wildest such legends concerns the nasty food known as the leola root that Neelix cooks with in Star Trek: Voyager. For a weirdly long time, there was an inaccurate rumor that this food was named after a character played by Geneviève Bujold, the original Captain Janeway who left the show after production on season 1 began.
One Of Neelix’s Favorite Ingredients
Obviously, both describing and debunking this rumor is going to require giving you some context. Let’s start with the leola root: basically, this was an awful-tasting vegetable in the Delta Quadrant that nonetheless was one of the greatest local sources of vitamins and minerals.
Because of this, Neelix frequently included it in dishes that he would make (including leola root stew) despite the crew frequently complaining about how bad the root made all these dishes taste.
Nicole Janeway
Most fans know about Neelix’s preferred cooking ingredient, but few modern audiences know about the rumor connecting the leola root to the woman that Kate Mulgrew replaced as Janeway.
Geneviève Bujold was the Voyager producers’ first choice to play the captain, who was then named Nicole Janeway. Bujold was an accomplished film veteran, and two out of the three main producers on the show thought that she would be the perfect choice to class up this new spinoff.
Nicole Was Soon Replaced By Kathryn
However, notorious third producer Rick Berman accurately predicted that film star Bujold would not fit into the world of relentless TV show filming. According to Berman, once they began filming the premiere episode “Caretaker,” Bujold had trouble memorizing seven pages of script, hated working with unfamiliar directors, and didn’t so much as want her hair adjusted by the hairdressers.
She went to her trailer crying on the second day of filming; she was sent home and ultimately replaced by Kate Mulgrew, who in retrospect was truly the perfect choice for this role.
Was Leola About Leona?
By all accounts, there was no real ill will towards Bujold on the part of the producers, but that didn’t keep a strange rumor from circulating that she was whom the leola root was named after.
Or, more specifically, that it was named after a character she played in The Adventures of Pinocchio. Because the leola root is so legendarily bitter and nasty, the rumor claimed that this was meant to be an ongoing slight against the woman who effectively abandoned the role of a lifetime.
However, there was less substance to this rumor than there was decent flavor in leola root stew. First of all, the character Bujold played in that film was named Leona, not Leola. Second of all, leola root was introduced in the 1995 episode “State of Flux,” and Bujold’s film wouldn’t come out until 1996.
Rumors Are Gonna Rumor
It’s easy enough to debunk the leola root rumor these days, but back in the mid to late-90s, it stuck around thanks to fewer people being internet-savvy or even having a computer. That allowed for plenty of crazy urban legends to develop and stick around far longer than anyone could have guessed.
As for the Bujold rumor, if that had been any nastier, we can only assume Neelix would have been shoving it down the Voyager crew’s mouth for seven long years.
