FERN’s Friday Feed: Going to pot
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How the slow-cooker changed the world
Longreads
“It was the right product for the right time. Married women were beginning to seek jobs outside of the home, taking them away from the kitchen,” writes Olivia Potts. “A major oil crisis had bumped up the cost of cooking. And Rival knew what they were doing: The Crockpot was available in all the trendy colors of the day — harvest gold and avocado — and marketed as the pot that ‘cooks all day while the cook’s away.’ In 1971, sales were $2 million. By 1975, they were $93 million.”
The model for America’s modern craft-beer boom
Literary Hub
“The impending obsolescence of one of his two best accounts got Joe Allen thinking. Business was good, and money, thanks to his sister Agnes’s management, was not a problem,” writes David Burkhart. “And his brewery—the oldest in the West, the smallest in America, and The Only Steam Beer Brewery in the World—was still selling all the beer he could make, about a hundred half-barrels a week. It was more of a calling than a career, and Joe was Anchor Steam’s unflappable high priest, deeply devoted to the joys of small brewing and the integrity of his product. But he was seventy-one. The robust brewer of the robust beer could no longer hoist kegs with the gusto of his younger days … He hoped that someone would come along to take his place, but nobody did. So Joe and Agnes weighed their options and made a decision.”
How floating wetlands help clean up urban waters
Yale Environment 360
“Like natural wetlands, floating versions provide a range of ecosystem services,” writes Susan Cosier. “They filter sediment and contaminants from stormwater, and laboratory experiments show that some plants have the ability to lock up some chemicals and metals found in acid mine drainage. These systems take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones, and recent research suggests they could be used to reduce manmade contaminants that persist in the environment. Though it’s difficult to quantify the exact benefits these systems offer, and they have limitations as a tool in remediating polluted waterways, they could provide another option, researchers say.”
The elusive roots of rosin potatoes
The Bitter Southerner
“Outside the context of the woods, cooking potatoes in rosin is a wholly impractical preparation,” writes Caroline Hatchett. “Rosin is highly flammable, and its fumes are noxious. It requires a dedicated pot and tongs; there’s no easy cleaning of hardened rosin. Oh — and you can’t eat the potato’s skin. Despite those odds, the technique went mainstream in the 1950s and merited inclusion in James Beard’s 1960 Treasury of Outdoor Cooking and in the 1975 edition of The Joy of Cooking. In 1976, rosin potatoes were on the table the night my parents got engaged at Art’s Steakhouse in Gainesville, Florida, and Cracker Barrel served the potatoes from 1983 through 1991.”
The promise of ‘coral gardening’
The Washington Post
“[T]hrough a symbiotic collaboration between five tourism companies and marine scientists at the University of Technology Sydney, ‘coral gardening’ in underwater nurseries is trying to help preserve [Australia’s] famed Great Barrier Reef,” write Frances Vinall and Michael Robinson Chavez. “Divers for the companies — all intimately acquainted with the reef and, like so many businesses, dependent on its vitality — scour the seafloor. There they collect broken pieces of coral and attach them to submerged frames on which the fragments can recover and grow. Ecologically minded tourists pay to see the unusual attraction.”