FERN’s Friday Feed: I’ll have the chicken
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The lazy man’s guide to climate-conscious animal eating
Gravy
“In pursuit of a climate-conscious diet, my poor body has been through hell. In 2015, partly as a premise for a PBS Frontline documentary and partly for research on my book The Omega Principle, I ate fish and shellfish as my sole sources of animal protein for an entire year. I had fish cakes for breakfast, salmon sandwiches for lunch, and anchovy-sauce pasta for dinner. I had self-caught striped bass for a week, during which I ate every fricking part of that damn animal and even boiled down its bones for stock. … When I got tired of it all, I comforted myself with the fact that fish, specifically wild fish, tend to carry a fraction of the carbon burden of landfood,” writes Paul Greenberg. “But when it was all said and done, the experiment was a failure. Not only was it expensive and inconvenient to be fully pescatarian, but by the end my blood mercury was well above what my home state’s health department deems safe. This despite the fact that I generally ate the low-trophic fish and shellfish that are supposedly the lowest in environmental pollutants.”
The worm hunters of southern Ontario
The Local
“If you’re in the market for fishing bait anywhere in North America, and now even in parts of western Europe, odds are you’re buying a Canadian nightcrawler plucked from this stretch of land between Toronto and Windsor,” writes Inori Roy. “These wild Canadian worms, who live so far beneath the surface of the soil that breeding or farming them is impractical, are hand-picked by a small army of workers, almost all immigrants from Southeast Asia, including generations of Vietnamese refugees and, more recently, temporary foreign workers from Thailand and Laos. It’s a niche sector of the western economy that’s exclusively sourced from this small corner of the province, and run primarily by family businesses passed from one generation to the next. In a given year, the more than $200 million industry sells between 500 and 700 million worms. But with changing demand, immigration labour policies, and the climate crisis, it’s also at an existential crossroads.”
Why is Martha’s Vineyard going vegan? It’s all about tick bites.
The New York Times
“On Martha’s Vineyard, this was supposed to be the summer of the shark. Instead, it’s the time of the tick,” writes Pete Wells. The Massachusetts island is throwing a monthslong party for the 50th birthday of ‘Jaws,’ with tours of locations where the movie was filmed, a museum show, grinning-shark cashmere sweaters and a commemorative kale salad featuring turnips carved in the shape of sharks’ teeth. As the season has gone on, though, great white sharks have been replaced as the Vineyard’s scariest animal. When islanders get together these days, they talk about their fears of an eight-legged creature the size of a grape seed. On the porch of the Chilmark General Store and at sunset-watching parties on Menemsha Beach, conversations circle ineluctably to the lone star tick, which after a single bite can leave people with a life-threatening allergy to most meat and dairy.”
The plight of the bumblebees
bioGraphic
“Bumblebees are lovable, adorable, and admirably occupied,” writes Jude Isabella. “But I had no idea how much I cared about bumblebees until I had trouble meeting one particular species: the western bumblebee, Bombus occidentalis. … [D]uring the COVID-19 pandemic when my physical world contracted, a different apian wonder lured me into the big world of bumblebees. I had a garden, thankfully, and … bumblebees … routinely buzzed my tomato blossoms. … I snapped a photo of one, uploaded it to a website devoted to bumblebee identification, and discovered it was a native species called Bombus vosnesenskii, the yellow-faced bumblebee. … B. vosnesenskii led me to B. occidentalis … the species that would have been pollinating my tomatoes in Victoria, British Columbia, some 30 years ago. Since then, B. occidentalis has slipped from being the most common bumblebee species in western North America to noticeably uncommon. … As I ventured deeper into B. occidentalis territory, I realized how dramatically the spheres of wild and lab-born bees have collided over the past few decades. The reality for B. occidentalis and many of its brethren is anything but cute.”
How eggs became a luxury
T Magazine
“An everyday wonder, then, versatile and cheap, whose very ubiquity and lack of chic has, perhaps counterintuitively, made it an object of obsession over the past few decades. In a restless society ever optimizing, ever in pursuit of an imagined best, the egg is not so much prized for what it is as for what it can become — how far it can be pushed and refined. With culinary knowledge now a marker of cultural status, home cooks obsess over how many minutes, down to the second, an egg should be soft boiled to achieve that elusively luscious jammy yolk. (Six? Six and a half?) The humble deviled egg,” writes Ligaya Mishan, “staple of gas stations, might appear at restaurants adorned with uni and caviar, cross-species cousins, or, more exquisitely, en chemise, as at Le B. in New York: whole and seamless, draped in a chilled sauce, with a freckling of truffles and a mousseline filling piped in.”