FERN’s Friday Feed: How to love an Oly
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The Pacific coast’s only native oyster is making a comeback
Hakai Magazine
“Most people, even those who know a thing or two about oysters and may perhaps enjoy eating them, have no idea that the sweet and buttery bivalves they are slurping down in San Francisco or Vancouver are not the native species of the West Coast but Japanese imports. It’s an easy mistake to make, considering that Japanese oysters (Crassostrea gigas) are commonly referred to as Pacific oysters—as in western Pacific—though they have been commercially cultivated in North American waters for nearly a century,” writes Brendan Borrell. “But this introduced species has spread so easily and become so common that you can find them rooted in places where no one has deliberately planted them. Our appetites have fueled this alien invasion. It is only on rare occasions at certain bougie establishments that you might encounter the much-smaller Olympia oyster (Ostrea lurida) on the menu, a Proustian remembrance with its miserly portion of meat and coppery taste.”
Hope is the thing with feathers
Longreads
“We’d stumbled upon the delight of raising chickens entirely by accident when we traded a 50 lb. bag of flour and a jar of sourdough starter for a bucket of day-old chicks. It was the sort of barter people were making in the early days of the pandemic, when the unthinkable and the absurd upstaged the logical and the predictable,” writes Amory Rowe Salem. “We had no prior experience with poultry; we didn’t have a coop or a brooder lamp or the faintest idea of how to raise a palmful of down into an egg-laying hen. We needed to learn. Not just for the sake of the birds, but for our own sakes: we craved a learning curve. The world was going two-dimensional on us—all screens and games and apps—but those tiny feathered bodies, each one housing a beating heart the size of an infant’s thumbnail, demanded our attention. We became dedicated keepers of those hearts; and the flock, in turn, shocked our family’s flatlining system, giving us back the gift of emotional amplitude that had been compressed by our escalating attention to the glossy artifice of the staged and surface-level.”
The woman helping farmers navigate a grim, uncertain future
The Guardian
“[Heather] Wildman is one of a very rare British breed,” writes Bella Bathurst. “She describes herself as a succession facilitator – a role combining professional consultancy, financial advice, legal mediation, succession planning and life coaching to people working in agriculture: a farm-business counsellor, if you like. She works to unknot the snags of identity and inheritance, using group meetings and individual sessions to help farmers work out the easy questions (‘Who’s doing the soil sampling?’) and the hard ones (‘Do your children really want to inherit this business?’). In the UK, Wildman’s job has only really existed for the past 15 years, and there are just a handful of others doing the same work. When things went wrong on a farm in the past, lawyers dealt with the legal parts, accountants dealt with the finances and bureaucrats dealt with the regulations, but no one dealt with the people. As Wildman explains, she meets individuals who are on the brink of selling up/divorcing/shooting themselves/shooting each other, sits them down in a neutral space and gets them to talk about things they never usually talk about.”
The story of a knife forged in fire
Chicago Magazine
“In Sam’s kitchen and in the shop, I had seen a kind of knife called a nakiri. I wanted one. If you’re a knife nut, as I am, that’s all you have to say,” writes Laurence Gonzales. “People who love cooking can’t always say what makes them fall for a particular style of knife. Most chef’s knives are at least eight inches long, which feels too big for me. Sam had already made me a chopping knife called a tall petty, whose blade was five inches long. ‘Tall’ means that my fingers clear the cutting board, and ‘petty’ means that the blade is short. I use it all the time for chopping, but sometimes it’s too short, as when I have a big onion. I wanted one that was a little longer. The nakiri is ideal for preparing vegetables, which is most of what I do. I have always loved the shape. And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool. When I had my first dream about this knife, I woke up and knew that I had to have it.”
One man’s fight to preserve Pakistan’s perfect cooking pot
Atlas Obscura
“The gorkon is a bit of a marvel. Once removed from a heat source, it will keep the stew inside boiling for over half an hour, depending on the size of the pot, and warm for much longer. Traditionally,” writes Juneisy Hawkins, “the gorkon was carved from a stone known in the local language as balosh, though other types were also used. Before modern iron tools, artisans used the hard horns of the local Himalayan ibex to carve the stone into pots. This process took two to three years for one single gorkon, making them prized possessions passed down from generation to generation. But over the past several decades, the treasured vessel has disappeared, a victim of a changing culinary landscape in Gilgit-Baltistan, the region where Minapin is located. The completion of the Karakoram Highway in 1978 ushered in a cooking revolution in the area, and once-common foodways were replaced by new ones. For one, pressure cookers arrived, bringing with them an ease and speed of cooking that the gorkon couldn’t match.”