FERN’s Friday Feed: Table to farm
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
On compost
London Review of Books
“I sometimes wonder whether my love of compost is a response to the dispiriting cleanness of modern life – the spray’n’wipe, the no-touch flush, the sanitisers and disinfectants. The compost pile stands in productive contrast to a domestic order founded on the concealment of waste. We so rarely have to deal with our own shit, and this avoidance extends beyond sewage. It’s true that it’s easy to rhapsodise about the wholesome messiness of compost when you’re historically detached from the terror it once held. A branch of my family survived the 1832 cholera epidemic in which half of their Easter Ross village died,” writes Fraser MacDonald. “Thinking that the disease came from a miasma – the knowledge that it was water-borne was decades away – the authorities ordered that all dung heaps and middens be destroyed. In those days, decomposition was contagion, and this belief was an ordering force in the world. ‘The dream of purity and freshness was born from the omnipresence of muck and dust,’ John Berger wrote in his essay A Load of Shit. ‘This polarity must be one of the deepest rooted in human imagination.’”
Death, divorce, and the magic of kitchen objects
The Guardian
“I have long felt that kitchen objects can have a life of their own. Even so, I found this eerie. One August day in 2020, I was going to fetch clothes out of the washing machine when suddenly a cake tin fell at my feet with a loud clang. It wasn’t just any cake tin. It was the heart-shaped tin I had used to bake my own wedding cake. I wouldn’t have thought much of it except that it was only two months since my husband had left me, out of the blue,” writes Bee Wilson. “I started looking for other people who had invested objects in their kitchens with strong meanings or emotions. The more I asked around, the more I saw that feeling emotional about kitchen objects was the rule rather than the exception, even for people who were not especially interested in cooking. I wasn’t alone in having intense and even magical feelings about the things I cooked and ate with.”
The funky, fermented roots of Japanese cuisine
The New York Times
“Fermentation isn’t unique to Japan, but arguably no other nation has so fully committed to it. An archipelago nearly 2,500 miles north of the Equator, Japan lacks the climate to grow the kind of rich, vivid spices abundant in South and Southeast Asia, and its isolation, by geography and by choice, kept it on the margins of the spice trade,” writes Ligaya Mishan. “For flavor it had to look within, to the harvest of its fields and the surrounding sea. Fermentation turns a restricted set of ingredients into a bounty.”
The birds who farm the forest floor
bioGraphic
“As engineers, superb lyrebirds depend on their formidable claws. Throughout the rainforests of southeastern Australia where they live, the birds dig and rake for worms, centipedes, spiders, and other invertebrates to eat, annually displacing enough dirt per hectare to fill five medium-sized dump trucks. That’s roughly 14 truckloads per bird—an amount that Guinness World Records acknowledged in 2020 as the ‘most surface material displaced by a land animal,’” writes Jude Isabella. “The researchers who carried out the 2020 study … followed up on that work with more questions: How does displacing so much leaf litter and surface soil affect habitat? And does that displacement benefit the superb lyrebird itself? Lead author Alex Maisey … found that these pheasant-sized ground dwellers aren’t just digging for their dinner—they’re creating better conditions for their invertebrate prey to thrive. They are, in a sense, tilling the soil to grow their own food.”
As in-building restaurants surge, apartment-complex residents shrug and order delivery
Gravy
“Across the rapidly urbanizing South, mixed-use developments like Meeting Street Lofts are opening at a swift clip. Dedicating street-level space to restaurants is a practice that appeals to city planners, who like to see people out and about, and developers, who appreciate the reliable source of rental income,” writes Hanna Raskin. “Yet if the situation in Charleston, where I visited four upmarket mixed-use developments, is any indication, most apartment dwellers aren’t forming deep bonds with the restaurant downstairs. What might have seemed like the ultimate amenity a decade or so ago has largely lost its luster in an era when people can order food delivered from just about anywhere and mix drinks from the home bars they built up during the pandemic.”