FERN’s Friday Feed: A pollinator mystery
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Her bees were dying. The culprit was a nearby ethanol plant.
FERN and Switchyard
“[Judy Wu-Smart] took a drive, found the AltEn site, and traced the waterways that led from there toward her bee hives. She came across a pile of wet cake that was sitting beside a gravel road,” writes Dan Charles. “‘That’s when it hit me,’ she said. ‘The smell was so pungent you could barely breathe. Seeing that pesticide-loaded waste sitting right next to a culvert with rainwater puddling around it, with plants blooming around it. It’s just a feeling of complete disgust, disappointment, surprise. Like, how could this have happened?’ Later observations confirmed that her bees had been poisoned by water runoff and windblown dust from piles of pesticide-laden waste at the ethanol plant … It was a scandal-in-waiting, and it was about to blow up. Within a year, AltEn’s misdeeds would be exposed for everyone to see, provoking tough questions for government regulators and seed companies.”
Birth of a chilihead
TAP Magazine
“One Saturday morning in the mid-1980s, a ten-year-old boy and his mother are roaming the weekly farmers’ market in a college town in western Massachusetts … [T]he stalls are overflowing with … stacks of late-season sweet corn, piles of tomatoes, watermelons almost as heavy as the fifth-grader himself,” writes Matt Gross. “The boy’s attention is caught, however, by a display of cherry peppers—deep-dark red, squat and round, somehow both shiny and dull, and, he suspects, spicy. Spicy: he knows what that means, yet he doesn’t know. He’s eaten Indian food with his parents … and maybe that was in some way spicy, but this little fruit right here, he knows, is something else. He picks one up and looks at the farmer manning the stand. The farmer nods. The boy chomps in without hesitation (where is his mother, anyway?), and his mouth explodes. Never has he felt pain like this. This is no skinned knee, no vaccination. This is electric, unfiltered, living pain that hums and vibrates and will not let go until, minutes later, it crests and relents and recedes into a muted throb, then a memory. And yet—the boy is alive! Undamaged! Oddly joyful! He has faced this danger, let it have its way with him, and emerged not just unscathed but stronger.”
The ancient Hawaiian myth that sparked an ecological breakthrough
Aeon (video)
The scientific practice of Kiana Frank, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, melds contemporary techniques of empirical data-collection with Indigenous knowledge born of her Native Hawaiian heritage. In Decoding Ancestral Knowledge, Frank recalls how an ancient Hawaiian myth, handed down through oral tradition, led her to a scientific breakthrough with meaningful implications for managing and restoring local fishponds.
A tale of two kebabs
Eater
“Galouti kebab, a staple of my dad’s hometown of Lucknow, is something I’ve rarely seen outside India,” writes Jaya Saxena. “And when I have, it hasn’t been good. The kebab is supposed to be minced into oblivion, a pillowy pate of buffalo meat, mutton, or goat, spiced with a heavily guarded masala recipe, and fried in ghee for the barest smashburger-esque crust to keep it all in. Stateside, I’d found a whopping two restaurants that offered it, but each time I visited I was served essentially a burger, or something indistinguishable from other kebabs. It was wrong. It was heartbreaking. Now, there was a new promise that I didn’t have to get on a plane for 24 hours to experience what has come to feel like an integral part of my heritage.”
Welcome to the ‘agrihood’
Modern Farmer
“Kiawah River is an ‘agrihood’—a planned community with a working farm at its center. Residents may work or volunteer at the farm, or they may participate in a residents CSA program or visit their own farmer’s market. Kiawah River worked with established farms to begin its agrihood, building a community around preexisting farmland,” writes Kirsten Lie-Nielsen. “Other agrihoods establish farms as central hubs when planning the community. Chickahominy Falls is located outside of Richmond, VA, in what is known as the French hay district, an area that has traditionally been farmland. The agrihood there is for residents 55 and over, and 10-acre Woodside Farms provides a gathering space, volunteer and working opportunities and a CSA … Agrihoods are not a new phenomenon, but their presence has grown in the United States in recent years. According to a report by the Urban Land Institute, in 2018, there were more than 200 agrihoods in 28 states.”