Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Epic floods sharpen a long-running debate over how to manage a river
FERN
“In November, when a string of catastrophic storms hit the Pacific Northwest, the Nooksack River flooded, submerging farming communities in both the U.S. and Canada. Cows were swept away, and farmers raced to save them on boats and jet skis. By the time the waters subsided, thousands of farmers and farmworkers had lost their livelihoods—particularly in British Columbia—and a long-running dispute over how best to manage the Nooksack had gotten a lot worse,” writes Teresa Cotsirilos. “It’s a fight that pits farmers against Native communities, the U.S. against Canada, and the demands of development against the demands of conservation.”
A case of ‘deconstructed Mexican salad symbolism’
The Wall Street Journal
A Las Vegas judge has been asked to decide “a culinary conundrum that has two restaurants at odds: What is Mexican food?,” writes Alicia A. Caldwell. Chop Stop, a salad chain, has a Viva Mexico Chop salad, the Santa Fe Chop, and a “Chopurrito, a bowl with rice, beans, salsa and up to six toppings.” Cafe Rio, a neighboring fast-casual Mexican chain, says that “Chop Stop’s offerings violate a provision in its lease that no other restaurant in the same shopping center can make more than 10% of its sales from Mexican or Tex-Mex food. Chop Stop has said in response that its menu items are generic offerings that don’t belong in any culinary category. The result has been a grand showdown over the nature of food, culture and salad ingredients.”
Appalachian forests turn up another culinary winner
Outside
“The Appalachian truffle, Tuber canaliculatum, is a one-ounce ball of delight that could be the next culinary star, yet it’s virtually unknown,” writes Rowan Jacobsen. “There were rumors that it was delicious, but all the reports seemed to be thirdhand. I was intrigued but skeptical. I finally managed to get my hands on a T. can sample … and I was skeptical no more. It smelled like a hazelnut torte that had taken a tumble in the moss with a wood nymph. It was the prettiest piece of fungus I’d ever seen, wrapped in a jewel-like burgundy coat. I thought: Has one of the world’s greatest wild ingredients been sitting in our backyard all along, waiting for someone to notice?” (For more on American truffles, check out Jacobsen’s piece for FERN.)
How KFC doomed the ‘Colonel Sanders of fish and chips’
Aeon (video)
“In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the serendipitously named Haddon Salt was well on his way to becoming the Colonel Sanders of fish and chips. Instead, as this short documentary recalls, his once-thriving restaurant chain H Salt Esq became the fast-food empire that never quite was. After World War II, “Salt moved from Skegness in England to Sausalito, California. There, he sold the deep-fried delicacy alongside the ‘romance of England’ to enthusiastic American patrons. However, his company’s growth was curtailed after he decided to let Kentucky Fried Chicken buy his ascendent business and the product suffered.”
An ancient, hop-less beer tries to crack a hop-heavy market
San Francisco Chronicle
“Craft beer is so closely associated with big, hoppy flavors that the idea of making beer without hops might sound impossible,” writes Lou Bustamante. “But hops, a.k.a. the flowering cones of the Humulus lupulus, are actually a relatively recent introduction in brewing. Until the 17th century, hops weren’t allowed in English ales, and Germany didn’t require hops in its official brewing laws until 1906. For many centuries, a vast majority of the beer made around the world used other spices and botanicals for flavor. That kind of botanical beer is called a gruit (pronounced groo-it).”