FERN’s Friday Feed: An oyster garden
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How to ‘plant’ millions of oysters in one day
Hakai Magazine
“How do you inject 24 million baby oysters into a river in one afternoon? Conservationists working on a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis, Maryland, have a trick: sluice them off a boat deck with a fire hose,” write Ally Hirschlag. “As the captain of a 22-meter-long buyboat reaches his first drop point on the Severn River’s tidal estuary in August, he signals to a deckhand gripping the hose at the ship’s bow. Water pumped from the river spews from the nozzle with the roar of a rushing waterfall, and the deckhand angles it at a pile of oyster shells as tall as a Christmas tree. Flea-sized larvae of the next oyster generation are attached to the underside of each one, and collectively they go shooting off the deck through several flap doors added specifically for this purpose.”
The ‘useful illusion’ of a national cuisine
The Atlantic
“My first daughter was born in a London hospital, but her surroundings soon felt very Palestinian,” writes Reem Kassis. “By 6 a.m. the morning after she arrived, my mother had brought ijjeh (a herb frittata often made for new mothers) stuffed inside a pita slathered with labneh … to my bedside. In the afternoon, she returned with hilbeh (a fenugreek-semolina cake), purported to improve milk supply. The feast continued once we went home: maghlee (a caraway rice pudding) to celebrate the birth, hashweh (a cinnamon-and-nutmeg-infused rice-and-lamb pilaf) for dinner, and taboon bread on the weekends. The dishes of my childhood provided me not only comfort, but also a conduit to my heritage. I was not alone in my fresh role as a parent nor in my adopted country. Six weeks later, my mother flew back to Jerusalem … and I found myself with a newborn in a home now void of its familiar aromas. I panicked.”
What we write about when we write about food
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
“[W]hat separates a food writer from someone who just happens to write about food? As with any compartmentalizing of genre, there is something in the title that implies a diminishment, as if today, as in ancient Greece, the act of eating were too frivolous to be worthy of serious meditation,” writes Ligaya Mishan. “[W]hen contemporary food writers (and, I suppose, I am one) stray from celebrating flavors to probe the larger issues surrounding the parade of dishes to our tables — exploitation of labor, abuse of animals, climate change, the homogenizing of cuisines and cultures under globalization, systemic injustices that allow millions of people to go hungry each year — some readers complain. Food should not be political, they insist. Food is universal; food unites us. Let us have our cake in peace.”
The dazzling Japanese citrus that is everywhere and nowhere
Atlas Obscura
The tachibana “is one of only two citruses native to Japan—the other being the Okinawan shequasar—and is extremely rare,” writes Florentyna Leow. “Officially classified as an endangered species by the Ministry of the Environment, the tachibana is in the rather peculiar position of being omnipresent yet virtually unknown. Most people encounter it daily, engraved on the face of 500-yen coins, or in miniature as a tree on the dolls’ displays during Girls’ Festival in March.” Yet most Japanese “have never seen a tachibana in the flesh, let alone tasted one.”
Can taste be inherited?
Taste
“I was born in Korea—the exact day and year is unknown, but it was around 1979 or 1980—and raised for the first two years of my life in an orphanage, most likely in Seoul,” writes Kate Telfeyan. “The years prior to my adoption and arrival in America, along with my first experiences of food, are lost to memory. With no reference point when trying to decipher the origins of my tastes, discovering this draw to spice felt like a tiny clue in helping to solve the puzzle of me: how much (if any) of my palate is innate, and how much is a product of outside influence? Was this childish lust for salsa a reactivation of some long-dormant receptor in my taste buds, or was it simply that I had broken new ground, gastronomically speaking, and found this fresh territory to my liking?”