GBH Daily: The emblems that make Massachusetts

⛅Mostly sunny day with highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 4:34 p.m.

Today, we take a look at the symbols Massachusetts uses to represent itself: the state songs, the sweet treats, and, perhaps, a quest to make asparagus the official state vegetable. But first, some news.

Four Things to Know

1. After 10 residents died in a fire at an assisted living facility in Fall River last summer, a state commission surveyed 270 similar facilities across Massachusetts and found that more than two-thirds of them had at least one deficiency in fire response or building safety practices. Now the Assisted Living Residences Commission is recommending changes to how facilities plan for emergencies, communicate with local fire departments, and more. Suggestions include annual inspections, updated training drills, and stricter fire safety requirements.

“We’ve thrown money at the nursing home industry and almost never regulated them properly. We have never done anything that I’d be proud to say would protect my mom or dad or any of your parents,” State Senator Mark Montigny told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer.

2. Everett’s new mayor, Robert Van Campen, is the city’s first new leader in 18 years, after defeating former mayor Carlo DeMaria in November’s election. Among other mayoral responsibilities, Van Campen will oversee the city as the Kraft Group works to build a soccer stadium on the site of a former power station. “From the same residents who want to turn the page on their industrial past, I have also heard their concerns about congestion, parking, all the logistical issues you would anticipate would arise from projects of this magnitude,” he said.

He also plans to focus on school overcrowding: “I have seen children learning under stairwells. I have seen children learning in hallways. I have seen children learning on landings of stairs. I have seen former storage spaces converted to classrooms. That is completely unacceptable in 2026,” Van Campen said.

3. Nantucket Harbor is testing new mooring tackles designed to help people harvest scallops without disturbing local eelgrass. Picture tackle that floats above the eelgrass, attached to a pyramid-shaped anchor that can be set in the spring and removed in the fall without dragging through eelgrass beds.

“We purposely had our mooring handler put the mooring in a spot of eelgrass,” said RJ Turcotte, waterkeeper for the Nantucket Land & Water Council. “And we’ve been monitoring it now since 2022. So it’s been three full seasons of it doing just fine.”

4. The leaders of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Massachusetts say they hope the mentorship their volunteers provide will help young boys combat loneliness and navigate what it means to grow into a man today, Terry McCarron, the organization’s chief program officer, told GBH’s All Things Considered. 

“I think young people today face a lot of pressure to live up to an image that they consume online. It creates this sense of constant comparison to unrealistic examples of manhood,” McCarron said. “Those examples and that exposure are nonstop. You can get an endless amount of that in your algorithm, on your social media and on YouTube. Mentors can’t stop exposure to those things on social media, but a mentor can remove a child from that pressure for a period of time and give them a real, tangible, real-life example of what it’s like to be a man in the world.”

Behind the bill: Why Massachusetts has so many official state symbols — and how asparagus could become our official vegetable

By Katie Lannan, GBH News State House reporter

Massachusetts has an official state cookie (chocolate chip), a state bean (navy), and a state beverage (cranberry juice), each honoring a piece of local history. And now a pair of state lawmakers from Western Mass. are proposing to name asparagus as the official state vegetable.

So where do these obscure official designations come from, and how do they make their way into Massachusetts law books?

It’s not something the Legislature spends much time on, especially in recent years. But quite a few of the emblems we have today came from local students.

Our state cookie is chocolate chip, which was invented in Whitman, home of the original Toll House cookie. That was the idea of a third grade class in Somerset in 1997. A year before that, a civics class from Norton High School sponsored the bill that made the Boston Cream Pie the official state dessert, and fifth graders on the North Shore led the lobbying push to name the cranberry the state berry of Massachusetts in 1994.

Many of the emblems were written into law in the 1990s: that’s also when cranberry juice became the state beverage, honoring cranberry producers, and the state bean was named the navy bean, since that’s what the original Boston Baked Beans recipe called for.

One of the most recent additions was in 2022, when then-Governor Charlie Baker signed a law granting Massachusetts an official state dinosaur: the Podokesaurus holyokensis, or “swift-footed lizard of Holyoke” Its bones were first discovered near Mount Holyoke by a scientist named Mignon Talbot, who holds the distinction of being the first woman to name and describe a dinosaur.

So where did the idea for naming asparagus as the official state vegetable come from? The lawmakers behind this proposal, State Sen. Jo Comerford and Rep. Homar Gomez, represent the town of Hadley, near Amherst. Asparagus, known by the nickname Hadley grass, is a marquee crop there, with an annual festival celebrating its historical significance. Third graders from Hadley pitched their lawmakers in December, and then they went out and wrote the bill.

There’s another bill to name an official state seasoning — Bell’s Seasoning, a spice blend that you might put on your turkey at Thanksgiving. That was first invented in Boston more than 150 years ago. Beyond that, we could see cookies and cream become the state ice cream flavor, or eelgrass become the official marine flora of Massachusetts, or the blue-spotted salamander the official amphibian.

If you’re curious: Here’s a full list of every Massachusetts state symbol, which includes multiple rocks, a tabby cat, and a tartan.

Dig deeper: 

-Recipe: Risotto with Asparagus and Favas from Chef Lidia Bastianich

–Massachusetts has seven (yes, seven!) state songs. But is it enough?

–Why is Massachusetts a commonwealth, not a state?