Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The influencer who convinced the world to drink tea, not eat it
Atlas Obscura
“Sometime in his adolescence, in the 700s, Lu Yu, an aspiring writer and professional clown, had his first taste of tea soup,” writes Miranda Brown. “Lu was unimpressed; he called the soup ‘ditch water.’ What bothered Lu was not the tea, but all the other ingredients. The offending brew contained scallions, ginger, jujube dates, citrus peels, Dogwood berries, and mint, all of which cooks ‘threshed’ together to make a smooth paste … Lu Yu, in fact, adored tea—he’d go on to become the ‘tea god’ and the world’s greatest tea influencer. But the tea he loved—brewed only from powdered tea leaves, without any other flavoring—was, in the grand sweep of human history, a recent invention. People in Asia, where tea trees are native, ate tea leaves for centuries, perhaps even millennia, before ever thinking to drink it.”
Want to undercut Putin? Starve the U.S. ethanol industry.
The Atlantic
“For decades, the U.S. government has … encouraged farmers to grow more corn so that it can be turned into ethanol, a gasoline additive,” writes David Frum. “Federal regulations require ethanol to be blended into gasoline, creating a giant industry that would not exist without large subsidies and imperious mandates … Demand from the ethanol industry, in turn, bids up the price of corn, and the income of those who farm it. Ethanol has become a Washington joke. John McCain often quipped that he started his day with a glass of ethanol. Who could blame him? The ethanol program is a giveaway so big, so entrenched, and so wasteful that laughter might seem like the best response. But as we laugh, we’re missing that America’s ethanol madness has strengthened Russia’s grip upon the world’s food supply.”
The clash between clever whales and commercial fishers
Hakai Magazine
“In the Gulf of Alaska, as well as in longline fisheries throughout the world from the Bering Sea to the Antarctic and tropical waters between, toothed whales—that is, any whale that feeds with teeth instead of baleen, such as sperm, pilot, and killer whales—are learning to see fishers and their gear as a source of an easy meal,” writes Nick Rahaim. “Scientists researching this behavior, known as depredation, say whales are increasingly eating lucrative catches right off the hook instead of foraging naturally. There’s no easy way to stop it, and the behavior is spreading through whale culture. Whales’ penchant for hooked fish might be the biggest fisheries story that hardly anyone knows about.”
Inside the battle to save compost in New York City
Outside
In spring of 2020, after the pandemic forced the city to suspend its compost program and start sending organic scraps to the landfill, “the collective frustration of over 20,000 compost-loving New Yorkers culminated in the creation of Save Our Compost, one of the most energetic and diverse garbage-driven campaigns the city has seen in years,” writes Rachel Nuwer. “The group is seeking nothing short of a complete revamp of New York City’s approach to compost. Its ideal program is one both universal and mandatory, with accompanying educational outreach and a strong emphasis on local processing. ‘This is literally the bare minimum any government at a local level has to do today,’ [Caren] Tedesco says. ‘New York City must have a universal composting program, and this has to be implemented as fast as possible.’”
Please don’t feed the elk. If only it were that simple.
The Washington Post
“The meal service was part of one of the world’s most unusual and the West’s most controversial wildlife management programs, under which more than 20,000 wild elk in northwest Wyong are fed daily all winter — on 22 state feed grounds, like this one, and the federal National Elk Refuge in nearby Jackson,” writes Karen Brulliard. “The feeding started more than a century ago to prevent withered herds, devastated by hunting and settlement that cut off migration routes, from starving during frigid winters. It has since morphed into a tool to keep the animals — which spend summers grazing on high-elevation grasses in forests and Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks — away from ranches and roads, and to keep the area’s elk population robust for hunters and tourists. But what began as a lifeline is increasingly viewed as a potential path to a ghastly elk die-off throughout the famed Yellowstone ecosystem.”