FERN’s Friday Feed: When in Rome …
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Food shopping in Rome
Panorama
“[H]ow representative was my experience of food shopping in Rome? Was walking among speciality shops for artisanal foods a typical routine — or a quaint relic of a vanished way of life? I had cobbled together stereotypes and images from Fellini’s Roma,” writes Judith Sanders. “Every day nonna filled a market basket of farm vegetables for her extended family. That night they would feast al fresco at long tables covered in red-checkered cloths, passing brimming bowls of her homemade pasta and straw-covered bottles of Chianti, maybe even getting up to do a little jig to an accordion. I never actually saw such things in Rome, but that didn’t stop me from feeling, as I myself sat at a red-checkered table, that I was participating in such an experience. This resilient fantasy persisted … despite my knowing that there was little space on the timeline for it: Before modernity brought most Italians out of the fields and into offices, there was Fascism and war, and before that, poverty, so appalling and widespread that millions had fled to America, or died.”
Hey chefs, enough with the storytelling. Just let me eat.
Gravy
“Restaurants have become all about the stories they tell, writes John Kessler. “[W]hat I’m talking about is narrative, an urge on the part of restaurateurs to tell you all the whats, wheres, whens, whys, and hows of each morsel of food before you can even take a bite … These recitations have a term: spieling. In many restaurants today, it isn’t just about the cooking, but also about the inspiration. During my daughter’s brief career as a server in a tasting menu restaurant, she often came over to practice spieling the dozen or so courses she had to memorize. One, which included a trail of escargot roe, hearkened to the chef’s childhood exploring the woods behind his grandparent’s summer cottage. Dad, should I use the word ‘traipsed’? … The restaurant tells you what to think, what flavors to identify, and even how to use utensils to transport food to your mouth before you’ve taken one bite or… assumed any agency. The dogged storytelling in restaurants seems to be an American thing—or, at least, it seemed that way to me after spending two glorious weeks in Spain. There, I was rarely told anything about my meal other than ‘here it is.’”
Wild bees, not space, are the final frontier
Hakai Magazine
“Here in British Columbia, according to the Entomological Society of British Columbia, there are currently 483 known species of wild bees, nearly as many as the province’s birds. But in reality,” writes Anne Casselman, “there are probably many, many more. In the past six years, 19 new species of bees have been recorded in the Kootenays alone from specimens collected by Rampton and Best, including at least two species new to science. Go coastal and the wild bee finds continue, with a new-for-British Columbia species found in the sands of Calvert Island, off the province’s central coast, in 2020. It would seem that whenever someone qualified bothers to look, they find a new species of wild bee.”
The coming pollen storms
Noēma
“Inside my body, a more intimate climate-related disaster appears to be unfolding,” writes Monica Evans. “I’ll explain. The Waikato is wide, flat and green: dairy country rimmed by ranges and ocean. Lolium perenne, a type of ryegrass, is one of the main pasture crops grown here … At my place in springtime, it … flower[s] in November and then d[ies] back before the heat peaks in late summer … That’s when the tropical storms tend to arrive. But the rhythms are changing. Events that used to syncopate are now in sync. Lately, these storms and flower blooms have collided. And when they do, something strange sometimes happens. The storm’s warm updrafts suck the ryegrass pollen into its thunderclouds, smashing it into smaller pieces. Cold downdrafts then drag these finer pollen particles downward and outward. In places with high populations, this phenomenon can cause a very particular kind of emergency. That’s because a lot of people are allergic to ryegrass.”
Island Creek moves to revive the U.S. cannery industry
Modern Farmer
“In the summer of 2010, the 135-year-old Stinson’s sardine cannery in Prospect Harbor, Maine, shuttered. The plant was no longer economically viable due to federal restrictions on herring catch. Stinson’s was one of the last remaining seafood canneries in Maine—and the last sardine cannery in the United States,” writes Sarah Angileri. “While reducing herring quota is intended to prevent overfishing, in coastal villages such as Prospect Harbor, such measures can have a devastating effect on the local economy … Chris Sherman, CEO of Island Creek Oysters, an aquaculture business based in Duxbury, is no stranger to the environmental and economic challenges of running an aquaculture business. Island Creek is a vertically integrated oyster operation, meaning it both farms and distributes its own oysters. But he’s still intent on turning the tides of the canning industry. In July, Sherman announced the launch of his latest venture, the Island Creek Cannery, the first ever single-origin canning facility of its kind in the US.”