FERN’s Friday Feed: ‘Weird meat’
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The strange future of lab-grown meat
FERN and Fast Company
“Weird meat is a departure from what the cell-meat industry originally promised. It’ll be expensive, to start with. (As of November, Vow was selling its quail parfait to four restaurants in Singapore for $100 a pound.) It’ll feature tastes and textures that don’t exist in nature. And it’ll be made from animals that people aren’t used to eating. Think crocodile, peacock, songbird, and more. Last year, Vow made international news after its ‘mammoth meatball’—an enormous, one-off prototype that mixed elephant cells and prehistoric woolly mammoth DNA—led to a viral clip on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Ultimately, Vow hopes building a robust luxury market for weird meats will give it a chance to gradually lower costs further through continued R&D—though it’ll first need to normalize the idea of eating offbeat species,” writes Joe Fassler. “It represents the start of a new, ambiguous era—one in which cultivated meat will finally be available, just not in the way anyone expected.”
Transforming the Delta
FERN and Switchyard Magazine
“South of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, the valley of the Mississippi River fans out into a broad plain known as the Delta,” writes Robert Kunzig. “Every part of the region was once either under the river or so close that it was regularly flooded. As a result, Delta soils are ancient river sediments, generally more than a hundred feet thick. They’re as fertile as can be … The Delta today is perhaps the poorest region in the U.S.—a flatland of small, half-abandoned towns surrounded by large, mechanized farms. The land ownership is predominantly white, the poverty disproportionately Black. The farms mostly grow commodities—soybeans, corn, cotton, and rice … Grocery stores are scarce. Food insecurity is rampant. The history of how this happened—how one of the country’s most fertile farming regions became a knot of poverty, hunger, and racial injustice—is complicated and painful. But the more urgent question is whether anything can be done to cut the knot.”
Animals as chemical factories
Works in Progress
“Horses are just one of the many animals we use as chemical factories: there is a veritable Noah’s ark of biopharming. Every year,” write Niko McCarty and Xander Balwit, “over 700,000 horseshoe crabs are caught and bled. Their blood is used to test for contamination in the manufacture of medical equipment and drugs. The global vaccine industry uses an estimated 600 million chicken eggs a year to produce influenza vaccines. And we boil between 420 billion and 1 trillion silkworms every year to produce silk. Some of these practices go back millennia. On a small coastal spit along the Mediterranean Sea, ancient Phoenicians harvested snails from which they derived a rich-hued pigment known as Tyrian purple. In a multistep process involving sun-drying and fermenting the gland that produces the color, 12,000 of these mollusks went into every single gram of dye. The complexity of its production, and therefore rarity of the product, made the dye expensive, costing approximately three troy pounds of gold per pound of dye. Tyrian purple was reserved for highly selective items such as the toga picta worn by the Roman elite.”
What Ohio’s data-center boom is doing to the state’s rural communities
FERN and Switchyard Magazine
“I was searching for power lines,” writes Mya Frazier, “because I wanted to make sense of another kind of imbalance within the landscape of central Ohio: that between corporate control and ordinary people; between economic development and nature; and, most acutely in a season of drought, between electricity-hungry data centers and something as necessary for human survival as a field of crops. That’s what brought me to this roadside in Sunbury, a once quiet farming village … nearly at the bullseye center of Ohio. This was the starting place for two proposed 13-mile high-voltage transmission line corridors to be built by American Electric Power Ohio … The lines would start just south of Sunbury at a sprawling substation and then traverse a stretch of farming tracts and country homes within a rural township until they reached two substations northeast of New Albany. The 150-foot-wide corridors, with towers equally tall, connect two cities radically divergent in fortune and political influence, another kind of imbalance.”
Dumplings in a laundromat
Panorama Journal
“The drinks arrive in frosted glass mugs. Kanpai! We clink mugs. Cheers…for what? The CD release, yes! Dumplings? Double yes! They’re big and plump and look a bit like fat webbed fingers,” writes Yoko Nogami. “There are little dishes for us to make our own dip of soy sauce, chili oil, and vinegar. We make deep salty puddles, then grab surprisingly large and heavy dumplings with chopsticks, and soak them in the concoction. ‘It’s hot, be careful!’ Shirota-san warns. Cautiously, I tooth the edge, then take a real bite. It is stuffed with juicy pork, cabbage, garlic, and chives. It is good, yes indeed. We both chug our beers as the Ma Po Tofu arrives in a huge bowl along with fried rice. Shirota san says, ‘Para para rice!’ Not sticky, as Chinese fried rice should be. The Ma Po Tofu is dark reddish brown, thick and shiny with chunks of tofu and small lumps of ground pork. Not as spicy as the version in Ochanomizu but it has plenty of heat. The fried rice has been tossed with savoury oil, eggs, scallions, and peas. We savour our food, talk a little bit about the music, our kids, some coincidental birthdays and the cat on the cover of his new album that looks so much like my own cat and so forth until the last grain of rice is gone.”