FERN’s Friday Feed: The ‘it’ drink has a size problem
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Can Mezcal survive its own boom?
Bloomberg Businessweek
“The road from Oaxaca City to Santiago Matatlán winds through the vast central valley of Oaxaca, an arid plain walled by scrub-colored hills. You’ll know you’re getting close when rows of what look like giant green anemones stitch their way through the browned landscape,” writes Rowan Jacobsen. “This is agave, the spiky succulent used to make tequila and mezcal. Soon, roadside shacks advertising mezcal in a dozen varieties begin to appear. These are the tasting rooms. Distilleries, alternately chic and industrial, sit like islands of glass and concrete in a choppy sea … Most of this is new to an era in which mezcal has risen from relative obscurity to become the ‘it’ drink of connoisseurs and cocktail shooters alike. In a little more than a decade, production has soared from less than 1 million liters (264,000 gallons) to more than 14 million … For decades most of Oaxaca’s young people left, seeking work in the US. Now many are staying for jobs in mezcal, and some are starting their own companies … And yet even some mezcaleros with much to gain are beginning to ask: How big is too big?”
The Rio Grande is getting saltier. Farmers are desperate for a fix.
Texas Monthly
“Like the majority of the farms in the semiarid Lower Rio Grande Valley, [Frank] Schuster’s Val Verde Vegetable Co. depends on the river to sustain crops in the state’s most productive region for vegetables,” writes Brandon Mulder. “But as that water supply continues shrinking under the twin forces of climate change and Mexico’s increasing water use, farmers in the Valley have been wrestling with a new challenge. The river has been undergoing sporadic spikes in salinity, causing the water to run salty for days to weeks at a time—a natural consequence when salts concentrate in a depleting river … It’s an environmental issue that Texas can do little on its own to solve. Any proposal will require collaboration with Mexico. Solutions could range from costly capital projects, such as building desalination plants, to changes in water-management practices, such as introducing strict irrigation schedules. But complicating such collaboration are long-standing tensions between the two nations, stemming from an eighty-year-old treaty that dictates how the U.S. and Mexico divvy up the quantity of water flowing down the Rio Grande.”
The beef industry’s campaign to influence kids
Wired
“A beef industry group is running a campaign to influence science teachers and other educators in the US,” writes Matt Reynolds. “Over the past eight years, the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture (AFBFA) has produced industry-backed lesson plans, learning resources, in-person events, and webinars as part of a program to boost the cattle industry’s reputation. Beef has one of the highest carbon footprints of any food, but AFBFA funding documents reveal that the industry fears that science teachers are exposed to ‘misinformation,’ ‘propaganda,’ and ‘one-sided or inaccurate’ information. The campaign from the AFBFA—a farming-industry-backed group that educates Americans about agriculture—is an attempt to fight back and leave school teachers with a ‘more positive perception’ of the beef industry, the funding documents reveal.
Taking ‘garish food selfies’ didn’t start with Instagram
Salon
“Turns out, we humans have displayed our garish food selfies since at least the 1600s, when the pronkstilleven genre of painting originated in Antwerp. Meaning ostentatious or sumptuous still life, pronkstilleven art became all the rage in the Dutch Republic, both as a social documentation of wealth and a kind of moralistic satire,” writes Maggie Hennessy. “These were the early days of capitalism, and 17th-century Holland had become one of the richest and most urbanized provinces on earth, thanks not just to colonialist exploits but a multinational company formed from various trading ventures called the Dutch East India Co. The merchants who’d accumulated this newfound wealth got a taste for the good life: luscious, imported citrus and plump olives; salt and spices; rich pastries; young game meats and wine — all doled out using gold, ceramic and pewter serveware.”
The promise of underground seed banks
High Country News
“Many plants store future generations just a few inches below ground in seed banks, where seeds, roots, buds and bulbs remain dormant. Some seeds can survive for decades — even centuries, or longer. Seed banks are ‘biodiversity reservoirs,’ as one recent study described, and are found in ecosystems globally,” writes Josephine Woolington. “Across the West, they’re present from wetlands to deserts, sand dunes and sagebrush steppes. The plants wait until conditions are just right to reappear. To Native scientists like [David G.] Lewis, they offer a new possibility, that despite generations of degradation, some landscapes can come back. Northwest plants evolved unique seed structures, hardy root systems, long-living bulbs and complex dormancy periods to survive in landscapes that faced regular disturbance by everything from volcanic eruptions to flooding, drought, fire and colonialism … It’s a tool in restoration ecology that is both understudied and written off even though it’s cheaper — and better — at creating resilient biodiverse landscapes.”