FERN’s Friday Feed: ‘As perfect as a sonnet’
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The long history of writers and the martini
Literary Hub
“I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet. I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal,” writes Dwight Garner. “I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. ‘A bottle of vermouth,’ he said, ‘you should just open it and look at it.’ Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand.”
Inside Poland Spring’s attack on water rules it didn’t like
The New York Times
“When Maine lawmakers tried to rein in large-scale access to the state’s freshwater this year, the effort initially gained momentum. The state had just emerged from drought, and many Mainers were sympathetic to protecting their snow-fed lakes and streams. Then a Wall Street-backed giant called BlueTriton stepped in,” writes Hiroko Tabuchi. “BlueTriton isn’t a household name, but its products are. Americans today buy more bottled water than any other packaged drink, and BlueTriton owns many of the nation’s biggest brands, including Poland Spring, which is named after a natural spring in Maine that is no longer commercially viable. Maine’s bill threatened BlueTriton’s access to the groundwater it bottles and sells. The legislation had already gotten a majority vote on the committee and was headed toward the full Legislature, when a lobbyist for BlueTriton proposed an amendment that would gut the entire bill.”
‘Nature’s clock is out of whack’
Orion Magazine
“After you’ve known a place for a while, you can see one season in another. It’s not mystical or even that hard. I find it reassuring, or at least it was reassuring. These comings and goings of birds and other animals feel like rituals, but that is not really an accurate description since they are the thing itself, not a reenactment, their lives depending on getting the timing right. These timetables have been fine-tuned over millions of years. In the cocoons of our virtual and electronic worlds, it is easy to ignore these primal timetables, but we lose something when we do,” writes David Gessner. “Phenology is the discipline of watching phenomena change as seasons turn … Phenology has always been a private science, but lately it has begun serving a public purpose. It’s no surprise that Henry David Thoreau knew the timetables of his place intimately, and it turns out that his meticulous phenological journal notes are now confirming what anyone who has lived through recent non-winters already knows: nature’s clock is out of whack.”
As the climate changes, plants must shift their range. But can they?
Knowable Magazine
“Many trees and other plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds — and that’s often achieved through fruit. Like mini ecological Trojan horses, fruit evolved to be eaten, its pulp a nutritious lure to make an animal consume it and swallow a plant’s seeds, too,” writes Liam Drew. “After a while, it defecates, depositing the swallowed seeds somewhere within its range … Myriad factors will determine whether a seed ever becomes a mature plant. But by co-opting the wings, legs, guts and back ends of animals, rooted plants have evolved a way of scattering the embryonic forms of their offspring far and wide … [P]lants probably need their seed-dispersing animals now more than ever. As temperatures quickly rise due to climate change, many plants will have to move to cooler locations to survive. However, research by seed-dispersal ecologists is suggesting that the world’s shrinking animal populations do not have the capacity to mediate these migrations.”
What does it mean that Bojangles is expanding beyond the South?
Gravy, from Southern Foodways Alliance
“In much the way that a changing climate has dislocated weather events—with snow falling on Los Angeles and heat waves enveloping Portland, Maine—recent economic and demographic shifts have scrambled the fast-food restaurant map. Now eaters in a hurry can order a Torchy’s Tacos’ beef burrito in Raleigh or a Culver’s root beer float in Rogers, Arkansas. At the time of this writing, it wasn’t yet possible to score a Bojangles’ biscuit in the Buckeye state. Following a January groundbreaking, construction on the restaurant—the first of fifteen Bojangles planned in central Ohio—was delayed repeatedly by uncommonly wintry conditions,” writes Hannah Raskin. “Obviously, cultural diplomacy isn’t Bojangles’ calling. It’s been a privately held company since a pair of New York investment firms acquired it for $593 million in 2019, which means its purpose is profit … Still, I wondered: Could a chain identified so definitively with the South nudge the region’s boundaries outward a bit? Might its menu help establish havens of Southerndom in unexpected places?”