FERN’s Friday Feed: America, your pepper is old
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How to season your food like the French
The New Yorker
“My education, as such, began fifteen years ago, when I was living in Lyon with my family and training to cook French food at l’Institut Paul Bocuse,” writes Bill Buford. “There I heard an early and oft-repeated lesson: that the two most important ingredients in the French kitchen are salt and pepper. Frankly, this was an almost comically reductive take on one of the world’s most complicated cuisines, but implicit in it was an attitude: that even the most obvious, most taken-for-granted ingredients in your kitchen need attention. I began paying attention. The whole family did … We found ourselves seriously liking pepper. What was it that was so appealing? There was the heat, obviously, which is different from a chili (more of a dark, low, slow-burn than a red-hot sizzle), and an appealing aromatic complexity that I hadn’t noticed before (sometimes pine, sometimes fruit, sometimes both). There was also a quality that chefs like to describe as ‘mouth feel,’ especially when the peppercorns were left whole or ground coarsely so that, when crushed between the teeth, they revealed new flavors.”
EPA wants to ease restrictions on a toxic pesticide
ProPublica
“When you bite into a piece of celery, there’s a fair chance that it will be coated with a thin film of a toxic pesticide called acephate. The bug killer — also used on tomatoes, cranberries, Brussels sprouts and other fruits and vegetables — belongs to a class of compounds linked to autism, hyperactivity and reduced scores on intelligence tests in children. But rather than banning the pesticide, as the European Union did more than 20 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed easing restrictions on acephate.”
The waning reign of a wetlands architect (not the beaver!)
Hakai Magazine
“Since the early 1970s, muskrat populations appeared to have fallen by at least one-half in 34 US states. In a handful of states, the collapse was near-total, coming in between 90 and 99 percent … The animals are often mistaken for beavers, another semiaquatic rodent,” writes Brandon Keim. “That lack of appreciation extends to the ecological roles performed by muskrats. Though their influences are subtle when compared with the wetland engineering of beavers, muskrats are still important habitat makers and nutrient movers. They help the world come to life, even if we don’t readily notice them doing so; their diminishment would reverberate far beyond them. It is also foreboding. What does it portend, and what does it say about how humans have transformed the world, when in so many places such a common, hardy animal can no longer thrive?”
The battle of Big Taco
Texas Monthly
“In phrasing that many taqueros might take umbrage at, Velvet’s and Torchy’s offerings have been described as ‘elevated’ takes on the taco. What that means exactly differs quite a bit between the two chains, but each offers creative combinations of ingredients and an irreverent brand identity that trades on hedonism. Both have taken large investments … from coastal private-equity firms aiming to grow them into enormous publicly traded companies. Mexican restaurants are on a tear in the U.S., recording some $50 billion in sales in 2022 and growing by more than 9 percent annually, far outpacing the overall economy,” writes Tom Foster. “To be sure, other players are scrambling to claim a piece of that emerging mega industry—call it Big Taco—but Velvet and Torchy’s share an important advantage in being headquartered in Dallas and Austin, two of the best places anywhere for building food brands …. It’s not surprising that the future of the taco business is being invented in Texas, but the reason has less to do with the state’s Mexican heritage and 1,200-mile international border and more to do with its proclivity for shrewd business.”
Was California’s wine revolution just a mirage?
Punch
“In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, he writes of the spectacle of watching tragedy unspool far away. ‘Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in.’ This is doubly true in wine,” writes John McCarroll. “Disasters and freak incidents that would shock any other wine-producing region—floods, fires, earthquakes, sometimes all in a single calendar year—seem to occur with depressing frequency in California. It’s a place where we are so used to bad things happening that we fail to notice them getting worse. Case in point: Today, California is home to one of the greatest concentrations of talented young winemakers in the world, and yet many of them will tell you that they are one step away from hanging it all up for good.”