FERN’s Friday Feed: If it’s too hot for hot peppers …
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The sriracha shortage is a very bad sign
The Atlantic
“The sriracha shortage is hardly the worst crop crisis that’s being fueled by climate change,” writes Katherine J. Wu. “For years, Michigan cherries have been suffocating in too-high temperatures, while Florida citrus have been obliterated by hurricanes; India’s wheat crops have roasted, while rice around the world has been double-teamed by floods and heat waves. But to now see peppers in peril is its own special burn. Bred in some of the world’s warmest regions, chilis have long been a poster child of heat tolerance. They, more than so many other plants, were supposed to be okay.”
Why Alaska gave an uninhabited island to a bunch of cows
Hakai Magazine
“A remote island in the Gulf of Alaska, Chirikof is about the size of two Manhattans. It lies roughly 130 kilometers southwest of Kodiak Island,” writes Jude Isabella. “The city is a hub for fishing and hunting, and for tourists who’ve come to see one of the world’s largest land carnivores, the omnivorous brown bears that roam the archipelago. Chirikof has no bears or people, though; it has cattle. At last count, over 2,000 cows and bulls roam Chirikof, one of many islands within a US wildlife refuge. Depending on whom you ask, the cattle are everything from unwelcome invasive megafauna to rightful heirs of a place this domesticated species has inhabited for 200 years, perhaps more. Whether they stay or go probably comes down to human emotions, not evidence.”
The case for abandoning ‘great green walls’
Knowable Magazine
“For more than a century, people around the world have tried to stop ‘encroaching deserts’ by planting ‘green walls’ of trees, sometimes thousands of kilometers long. These efforts have failed,” write Matthew Turner, Diana Davis, Emily Yeh, and Pierre Hiernaux. “Tree survival rates are often less than 30 percent, biodiversity has decreased, water tables have dropped, local livelihoods have been disrupted, and already-poor people have been further marginalized. Despite this problematic history, the vision of a green wall of trees to hold back the desert remains very popular, with billions of dollars pledged and spent in China on the Three Norths Shelterbelt Program, and in Africa on the Great Green Wall Initiative.”
On food, marriage, and identity
Literary Hub
“My husband, a professor of electrical engineering by trade, is the kind of obsessive for which I have an affinity in my writing life. A refugee born in Latvia, John loves Latvian rye bread fervently. He eats Latvian rye several times a day and is unable to leave home without a five-pound loaf crowding the shirts and shoes in his carry-on,” writes Michaele Weissman. “A couple of years after I published God in a Cup—which follows three young hotshots who were transforming the specialty coffee industry around the world — as I pondered what next, John … co-founded a teeny company marketing Latvian rye bread, online and in gourmet stores up and down the east coast. John was now in the food business. I wrote about food. For the first time in our marriage, our professional worlds converged … One night I had a dream in which the title of my next book revealed itself: The Rye Bread Marriage. But I had no story, just the name.”
The pistachio, a ‘quiet luxury,’ is having a moment
Taste
“In restaurants and in home cooking, pistachio sends a subtle message as an ingredient: ‘I’m fancy. We’re fancy.’ Because of its price point, around $18 for a shelled pound, $9 for a carton of Táche pistachio milk, or $22 for a jar of pistachio cream imported from Italy, pistachio is, for most, a special-occasion ingredient. (Look at woeful salted cashews, on sale this week for a mere $9 a pound.),” writes Alex Beggs. “Even if the cook doesn’t intend to say, ‘I’m fancy,’ it can’t be helped. And if food can be a signifier of class, as our clothes and cars can, it can also fall under the ‘quiet luxury’ category, a buzzword that sparkles like a flake of Maldon.”