How the Himalayan Blackberry Took Over the Pacific Northwest

The tangled history of an invasive plant and a scientist’s troubling quest to engineer a more efficient natural world.

There is no summer in the Pacific Northwest without the blackberry. Across Washington and Oregon, jagged walls of blackberry brambles choke out nearly every hiking trail, highway shoulder, and vacant lot in the region. Come August, dense thickets beckon berry-pickers to stain their fingers with the juice of the sweet purple fruits, promising the potential of a fresh-baked blackberry pie after a long day’s harvest. But despite the strong association between the region and the fruit, the species of blackberry that most locals have come to enjoy is anything but native.

The story of how the Himalayan blackberry came to swallow the West Coast is a monument to late nineteenth-century industrial ambition. In the late 1800s, transcontinental rail travel revolutionized the United States’ approach to agriculture. A rapidly growing, urbanizing populace demanded a constant supply of fresh fruits and vegetables. To meet this demand, the market required crops engineered for this new era, encouraging innovation that produced plants sturdy enough for cross-country travel and aggressive enough to thrive in any backyard soil.

At the core of this innovation was the enterprising horticulturist Luther Burbank. Operating out of his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, Burbank functioned more like a “plant wizard” than a traditional farmer. His mail-order catalogs allowed amateur gardeners across the country to purchase from a selection of hybrids suited for the shifting needs of the nation. Among these plants were the Shasta daisy, plumcot, spineless cactus, and Russet Burbank potato, known today as the most widely grown potato in the United States. As historian Phillip Thurtle states, Burbank’s explicit goal in crafting his hybrids was “to take the rough spots out of nature,” domesticating the wild to promote utility and commercial efficiency.

In 1885, Burbank received a packet of seeds that he had imported from India. Upon opening it, he discovered that the seeds bore a hardy blackberry plant that thrived in temperate areas and produced large, succulent fruits. Pleased by its capacity for growth, yet ill-informed of its true regional roots, Burbank named the plant the “Himalayan Giant” to signal its believed origins and great size. The name was a misnomer, as the species, known scientifically as Rubus armeniacus, is actually native to Armenia and northern Iran.

Impressed by the size and strength of the Himalayan Giant, Luther Burbank marketed the plant to growers in the damp, temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest in a targeted flyer in 1894, promising a plant of extreme utility. The marketing push was met with a large wave of orders from the region, and according to Burbank, “the plants could not be multiplied fast enough to meet the demand.” Over a century later, the Himalayan blackberry has spread far beyond the modest backyard bounds its importers envisioned, opting instead to take over indiscriminately and displace the native trailing blackberry (Rubus ursinus) in the process.

Like all blackberries, the Himalayan blackberry is not a berry but rather an aggregate fruit of multiple drupelets, with each drupelet containing an individual seed. These sweet fruits attract birds and other animals in the summer, which encourages seed dispersal and the rapid spread of the plants through their feces. In addition to reproducing through seeds, Rubus armeniacus may also clone itself through vegetative propagation, which occurs when the stem tips root as they come in contact with the ground, contributing to its aggressive growth strategy.

The plant is impressively sprawling and hardy. An individual bush can grow up to 15 feet high and 40 feet long, with thick stems, also known as canes, marked by sharp, hooked thorns. The density and hardiness of Himalayan blackberry thickets allow the plant to “choke out other foliage and prevent the establishment of trees.” Furthermore, Himalayan blackberry bushes thrive in poor and disturbed soils, allowing them to flourish in abandoned lots and fields.

Combined, these traits have led the plant to be known as the unofficial state weed of Washington. Frustratingly, Rubus armeniacus is notoriously difficult to get rid of, as traditional approaches to invasive management such as fire, herbicide, and mowing are insufficient at eradicating the plant. Thus, this weed, whether northwesterners like it or not, is here to stay.

The industrial impulse that welcomed this hardy blackberry also manifested in Burbank’s vision for the future of American society. In 1907, he released The Training of the Human Plant, in which he directly applied his plant breeding techniques to the development of a “superior” race of people. Burbank argued that just as plants could be improved through careful crossbreeding to optimize their positive characteristics, the same opportunity existed for the improvement of mankind. Deeply informed by his American context, Burbank alleged that the “vast mingling of races” brought to the United States via immigration presented an opportunity for “developing the finest race the world has ever known,” as the ethnic variety allowed for a wide array of traits to select from. In light of this potential, Burbank called for a long-term overhaul of American childrearing in order to immerse generations of children in favorable environments that would lend themselves to the development of a “healthy [human] animal.”

While it is tempting to categorize Burbank’s ideas as typical of the rigid, genetically determinist eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century, his eugenic theories possessed a uniquely American appeal, emphasizing productivity, efficiency, and one’s ability to reshape their reality. Central to Burbank’s thesis was his belief that environment mattered as much, if not more, than heredity. For Burbank, heredity was “simply the sum of all the effects of all the environments of all past generations on the responsive, ever-moving life forces.” Under this view, human and plant species were entirely malleable, shaped profoundly by the pressures of the natural and artificial world around them. Thus, through enough hard work and careful attention to environment, one could bend the will of evolution to create more productive organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms. [...]

Ironically, Burbank’s obsession with eliminating the weak and nurturing stronger organisms ultimately unleashed a botanical “master race” that defied his ideals of human control and smothered the Pacific Northwest. Once introduced to the region, the Himalayan blackberry found an environment perfectly suited to its needs and adapted so completely that it has become an inseparable fixture of local cultural identity. In regional lore and literature, the blackberry is depicted as a terrifyingly untamable force, with vines that “[push] up through solid concrete” and “[force] their way into polite society.” Yet each summer, the region suspends its hatred for the stubborn weed, celebrating the plant’s sweet abundance through blackberry festivals and preparing enough jars of blackberry jam to hold them over until the next year’s harvest.

Today, the Himalayan blackberry stands as a humorous rejection of Burbank’s attempt at complete human control. Amidst his efforts to “take the rough spots out of nature” and promote plants that worked toward a vision of human utility, he introduced a vegetal force that fundamentally refused to be disciplined. In doing so, the story of Burbank’s Himalayan blackberry reveals the limits of human intervention and demonstrates plants’ agency in shaping their own environments. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks seeks to highlight histories like this one, unearthing the mutual influences of humans and the plant world on one another.

by Kari Traylor, JSTOR |  Read more:

Images: Getty/Wikimedia Commons

[ed. When I went to school in Oregon, I couldn't believe the berry bushes everywhere, and being broke, I subsisted on many of them.]

The Modern Efficiency of Squid Fishing

How Japanese Fishermen Use Robots To Catch Billions Of Squid (IE).

Video: YouTube

[ed. For calamari lovers. Squid fishing has gotten pretty efficient these days (and they land some big ones!). I remember catching them at night with my brothers in Kona, to use as bait for over-night tuna fishing (Ika Shibi). We'd go a ways offshore, put out a parachute anchor, then turn on the floodlights to attract them to the boat. Soon there'd be hundreds of them darting in and out of the light, coming from nowhere, out in the middle of the ocean. Using a multi-pronged snagging jig we'd catch our needed supply in no time. Fun! But wierd too - being surrounded by darkness except for the lights illuminating a small circle around the boat. It felt like fishing in a swimming pool.]

The One Surprising Mistake Everyone Makes With Pancakes

The secret to consistently perfect pancakes lies in a few simple but crucial moves. And sometimes the biggest mistakes are not the things you did, but the things you didn’t do. Here is a primary culprit, with a few others to consider:

You’re not resting your batter

You know the old chestnut that the first pancake you fry is for the dog? That’s because if you haven’t let the batter rest, those first few pancakes will turn out too thin, with the batter running all over the pan. Letting the batter rest fixes this, giving the flour time to hydrate and the batter a chance to thicken. It also lets the leaveners (baking soda and baking powder) fully dissolve and disperse, so you get an even rise.

Pancakes made with a batter that has been rested for 10 minutes

The sweet spot is 10 to 30 minutes on the counter, but the batter will keep in the fridge for up to 48 hours. A longer rest actually deepens the flavor: The buttermilk has more time to work on the flour, yielding something slightly more complex. Pancakes made from an overnight batter won’t rise as much. If you know you’re going to keep the batter overnight, you can wait to add the leavener until just before frying, which helps with the rise. (The batter will be very thick by morning — that’s fine, don’t thin it out — and need a touch more time in the pan to cook through.)

One more thing to note: Lumps are not only OK; they’re expected. The goal when mixing is to combine the wet and dry ingredients until there are no streaks of dry flour — that’s it. A lumpy batter is a properly mixed batter. Those lumps will hydrate and smooth out as the batter rests. Overmixed batter, on the other hand, develops too much gluten, and the result is a flat, dense, rubbery pancake that no amount of syrup can save.

More common mistakes

If your batter is rested but still isn’t yielding a fluffy result, you may want to consider these popular pitfalls:

You’re not using an acid (like buttermilk)

A great pancake batter is a chemistry equation: Acid (buttermilk, lemon juice or vinegar) plus a base (baking soda) equals lift. When baking soda comes into contact with an acidic ingredient, it produces carbon dioxide bubbles. Those bubbles are what make your pancakes light and fluffy. Without acid in the batter, the baking soda is inert, and you’re left wondering why your pancakes came out dense.

The best source of that acid is a liquid like buttermilk, which adds a gentle tang and the right texture to make a nicely pourable batter. If buttermilk isn’t in your fridge, you have more options. Plain yogurt, sour cream or kefir also contain the right acidity — just thin them with regular milk or water so the batter stays pourable. Or use this classic trick: Stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk, let it sit for five minutes, and you’ve got a reasonable stand-in.

If you have any buttermilk left over, freeze it. It will lose a little potency over time, but it still works fine for your next batch.

And yes, you can make pancakes with water instead of milk. But don’t. The fat and protein in milk (and also, the butter and the eggs) is part of what makes a pancake a pancake. If you’re cooking for someone who can’t have dairy or eggs, use a dedicated vegan pancake recipe rather than trying to substitute your way through a conventional one.

Your baking soda and baking powder are old

Most pancake recipes call for baking soda and baking powder: Each does something specific. Baking soda is the more powerful of the two, reacting with the buttermilk to produce a fast, vigorous rise and give pancakes their deep golden brown color. Baking powder has the acid already built in, activating on its own once when the liquid hits it, and again when exposed to heat (this is what “double acting” means). Together, baking soda and powder give you pancakes that are well risen, nicely bronzed and tender.

Baking powder and soda do go stale, so be sure to check the expiration date. If you’re unsure, test them to see if they’re still active. For baking soda, drop a pinch into a small amount of vinegar or lemon juice — it should bubble vigorously. For baking powder, stir a teaspoon into hot water, which should cause it to fizz. If nothing happens, consider toast and eggs for breakfast instead.

Your pan is too hot or too cold

Pan temperature is another important variable in pancake cooking, and one that doesn’t get enough attention. Cook on a heat that’s too low, and your pancakes will be pale and doughy; too high, and the outside will scorch before the inside has a chance to set.

Start by heating your pan over medium-high heat for two to three minutes — longer if you’re using cast iron, which takes time to come up to an even temperature. Hold off on adding fat until the pan is hot enough. Here’s how to tell: Flick in a few drops of water. If they sizzle and evaporate on contact, you’re in the right range. If the drops skitter and dance around the surface, the pan is too hot. Pull it off the heat for 30 seconds before proceeding.

Once the temperature feels right, add your fat. A mix of butter and a neutral oil works best. Butter contributes flavor and browning, while oil raises the smoke point so that the butter won’t burn. For the crispiest edges, don’t be stingy. You want enough fat to swirl if you tilt the pan, not just a thin sheen. Then reduce the heat to medium and give the fat a moment to get hot before you pour in the batter.

Your first pancake is a test run. It will tell you whether your heat is right, whether your batter is the right consistency and whether you need more fat. If it comes out great, you’re a pancake master. If it doesn’t, eat it in the kitchen and adjust the heat. Be sure to add more fat between batches. And if the butter starts to blacken and smell burned, wipe out the pan with a paper towel before continuing.

Pan choice also has an impact. Cast iron, carbon steel and stainless steel all produce pancakes with crispy edges and caramelized bottoms. Nonstick is more forgiving and makes flipping easier, but the color will be paler and the edges not quite as crunchy.

You’re making them too big

The instinct is to fry big, diner-style pancakes, the kind you’d see people waiting in line for on social media. But smaller pancakes are almost always better pancakes. A smaller pancake has more surface area relative to its interior, which means it has crispier edges and is easier to flip. Use a ⅓-cup dry measure or a large ice cream scoop to portion your batter. Be sure to space the pancakes a couple of inches apart, since they’ll spread a bit.

by Melissa Clark, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.

Bad Lunch

April 1999, one o’clock in the afternoon. I was cooking on the 150-foot motor yacht The Rental Cow when Megan, our chief stewardess, swooped into the galley to tell me our guests were displeased with their lunch.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. A petite, blond Australian who often made bawdy jokes, she didn’t wear her usual smile. Instead she looked slightly frightened, which told me this was no ordinary complaint. Our two guests were paying $30,000 a day to sit on the top decks and take in the Mediterranean views. Like every set of guests on board that yacht, this couple needed the food to be perfectly suited to their tastes, which caused me hours of nail-biting anxiety as I sent up plate after plate, taking note of what they devoured or ignored.

It was the midpoint of their sixteen-day trip. Ten of their friends had departed that morning, and we expected ten more to arrive in a few hours.

“Should I go up?” I asked.

Megan nodded, and I threw off my apron and scaled the stairs two at a time. We were tied to a dock in Saint-Tropez, a coastal city in the south of France known for its beaches and fancy nightclubs frequented by celebrities.

Our guests, Mr. and Mrs. J., were seated on the upper aft deck, murmuring to one another over untouched plates of sweet potato gnocchi. Mrs. J. was statuesque, with pale skin and red-orange hair that fell like a cape over her shoulders. She looked like a hippie version of Nicole Kidman. Mr. J. was a silver-haired music-industry executive who exuded wealthy chic with his funky sunglasses and pastel, high-water slacks.

Mrs. J. smiled at me: a cold curl of the lips. Then she launched in, explaining she was disappointed—not just in her lunch but in me.

“We’re paying a lot of money to rent this yacht,” she said, enunciating like royalty with a Los Angeles accent. “We’ve had a terrific go of it until now, don’t you think? All week long your food has been exquisite. This should have been the easiest lunch, not the most disgusting. Why didn’t you just come talk to us?”

By now I had my hands behind my back, my body bent toward her in a gesture of contrition. Thankfully she kept talking, so I didn’t have to speak. At one point Mr. J. held his hand out flat in the air as though pushing Mrs. J.’s argument down—a gesture she appeared familiar with, as she cinched her lips.

“Let’s do a reset,” Mr. J. said. “How about you clear these plates? My wife mentioned she’d be happy with a simple green salad: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots—”

“GREEN ONION,” she interjected.

Mr. J. ignored her. “I’ll have a plate of prosciutto and some of your homemade baguette. And a small dish of your mustard dressing. Do you think you can handle that?”

It was not a question. He’d spoken breezily, but there was enough of an edge in his voice to serve as a warning. Despite all the special handling I’d provided that week—ninety hours of catering to their every culinary need—I was not forgiven. 

Once upon a time, in another life, I had sat on a green shag carpet as close as possible to the television to watch The Love Boat, a show about crew members on a cruise ship with a revolving roster of celebrity guest stars. I especially loved the unflappably cheerful cruise director, Julie McCoy. Another show I watched religiously growing up was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, hosted by nasal-voiced Brit Robin Leach, who escorted viewers through the properties of the extravagantly wealthy.

At the time, my family lived in rural Washington State, in a double-wide trailer on a crabgrass lot. We’d never been flush with money, but after my parents’ divorce, my mother would agonize each month about where to spend her meager funds: on gas and electric bills or groceries? She hunched over her checkbook, lips puckered with worry. We lived in a perpetual state of panic over having zero dollars. The fear had a metallic scent that lingered in my nose long after I climbed into bed. For a while we had food stamps in the drawer, but my mother was too ashamed to use them. That she could choose not to indicates a certain degree of financial stability, but a child doesn’t distinguish between being cash poor and being unable to pay the rent. And even with grandparents volunteering to purchase school clothes, I marinated like a pickle in that atmosphere of scarcity, walking a thin line between my hunger to consume and my management of that hunger, always thinking of the costs.

My mother didn’t like to cook, so I learned my way around the kitchen. As a kid who did not have enough healthy food to eat, I literally dreamed of shopping trips like the ones I took to buy food for the yacht, filling multiple carts with expensive items and paying for it all with my employers’ gold credit card.

I’d become a ship’s cook almost by accident. On a break from college in my early twenties, I was traveling in France and took a job as a deckhand on a 128-year-old Spanish brigantine that made trips back and forth across the English Channel. I endured a lot of teasing from the mostly British sailors—working-class Brits really know how to twist the knife—but my tears gave way to laughter as I developed a thick skin to go with my sea legs.

The food on board was standard English fare: hunks of roasted meat and potatoes served with reconstituted gravy granules. I thought constantly about improvements I could make. Though I had no formal training, I had little doubt I could produce nourishing and delicious meals—part bravado and part the result of a lifelong curiosity about food that had compelled me to experiment with recipes growing up. I volunteered to help in the galley, peeling potatoes or scrubbing pans. Before dinner one night I asked the cook if she would mind if I deglazed the roasting pans with sherry to bring flavor to the gravy. “Knock yourself out,” she said. I added salt to the stockpot of boiling potatoes. When the captain noticed a small improvement in the food, the cook said, “Don’t look at me, it’s her,” and the captain suggested I report for galley duty. The cook much preferred working on the decks anyway. Before long I was providing meals for a dozen or more people a day.

I became romantically entangled with a sailor aboard that ship, and we soon left to try to find work as a team: He would captain commercial sailing yachts, and I would be his cook and sidekick. The romance ultimately fizzled, but it served as a springboard into a previously unimaginable career. As the ships grew fancier and the guests more demanding, cooking interesting and creative meals day after day required an engagement akin to a spiritual practice. The repetitive motion of knife through vegetables soothed me. I wrote lists of ingredients for wine-braised chicken legs or chocolate crinkle cookies. When we moored in a harbor, I would talk my way into commercial kitchens, explaining I was a self-taught cook who worked aboard a yacht, and could I ask the chef about his favorite dishes? They always allowed me in for a few hours.

About four years into my maritime career, I took six months off to attend a French-themed culinary school, hoping the expected salary increase would be enough to recoup the money I’d spent on tuition. Everyone in the marine industry said that charter yachts rented by the super-wealthy were where the crews made the biggest money.

I’d been aboard The Rental Cow for three months by the time Mr. and Mrs. J. arrived. It wasn’t the most beautiful in the fleet of charters available on the Mediterranean that summer. Though at first glance she looked like the other boats, with her high bow and sleek lines, a second look revealed cracks in the paint and chips in the varnish. Our economy-minded boss outfitted the decks with Pottery Barn furnishings, while the more state-of-the-art yachts we moored beside displayed Balinese wicker. Some of the biggest vessels had Ming dynasty rugs and helicopter pads and charged upwards of $500,000 a week. Our main draw was our relative affordability. Depending on which week of summer it was, we charged between $25,000 and $35,000 a day. The rental contract recommended guests leave a minimum 8 percent gratuity for the crew. Some left far more, and the crew celebrated wildly. Others stiffed us.

Our captain, Brian, was a mild-mannered, mostly ineffectual leader. Lance, our first mate, picked up the slack with his endless enthusiasm and charm. He understood the importance of the food to our guests’ experience and checked in with me frequently to see if I needed anything. Lance’s wife, a therapist, served a dual role as both deckhand and empathetic listener for other crew members. The other deckhand was an Italian with prior experience as a restaurateur, and after finishing his other duties, he donned dress whites and served meals or even stepped into the galley to help with my endless prep.

I’d come to think of being a chef on a yacht as a kind of psycho-spiritual quest, like Homer’s Odyssey, only instead of tumultuous seas and six-headed monsters, our challenges were wealthy clients who arrived by private jet with Louis Vuitton purses on their arms. True to form, I strove to please them all. People with money intimidated me, so when guests were arrogant or snobby, I pictured them as patients in a hospital and myself as the doctor assigned to their care. This imaginative leap inoculated me against the class differences and boosted my confidence that I could diagnose their needs. [...]

One afternoon Lena, our second stewardess, spied Mrs. J. at the back of the main saloon, making small dots on the window with a tube of lipstick. Lena went around the yacht studying the mirrors and windows and finding similar marks. Apparently Mrs. J. was testing the proficiency of the housekeeping staff as well.

“She’s smart,” Lena said, in her French accent. “Some of the marks are hard to find.” To make one, she said, Mrs. J. must have climbed up on the counter in the master cabin.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I replied.

“They’re all the same,” Lena said, placing her hands on her small hips. “Trying to get their money’s worth.”

by Mishele Maron, The Sun |  Read more:
Image: © Dominique Philippe Bonnet

Sake: It’s All in the Rice

The nuanced world of Japanese sake and how to pair it with food.

If your experience with sake is limited to the warm cup at your local sushi spot, you’re missing the larger world of sake, which is as nuanced and layered as wine.

The traditional Japanese drink is brewed (not distilled) from rice, yeast, water and koji, a mold that converts the rice starch into sugar. Premium sakes might add some distilled alcohol. Sometimes other ingredients are added for flavor, but purists stick to the essentials.

“It’s quite incredible to think of the variation in flavor sake provides, given these constraints,” says Yoko Kumano, who with Kayoko Akabori owns the shop Umami Mart in Oakland, California. The pair has written a new book, “Everyday Sake.”

She also likes to remind people that sake is a food-pairing beverage.

“It is meant to be enjoyed with food — and not just sushi,” Kumano says. Umami Mart’s monthly sake club has tried pairings with cheese, pizza, French cuisine and more.

Every batch of sake — which in Japan is called nihonshu — is overseen by a toji, or master brewer, whose skill shapes the final flavor.

Here are some quick sake facts so you can sound savvy about it at a restaurant or wine store.

It begins with rice

The first step in making sake is rice polishing, or seimaibuai. Each grain’s outer layers are milled away to reveal its starchy center. The more polished the rice, the lighter and more refined the sake; the less polished, the earthier the flavor. Sake also varies based on whether distilled alcohol is added and how it’s filtered, stored and served.

The two main families of sake are Junmai and Honjozo. Within those, you have grades like Ginjo and Daiginjo, reflecting how much the rice has been polished.

Grade names are on the label, though not necessarily the polishing ratio.

Junmai
Means “pure rice,” with no distilled alcohol added. These sakes range from light to full-bodied, and often have more umami and structure than other sakes. Think earthy, rice-forward flavors that pair beautifully with grilled meats or heartier dishes. Junmai is often served warmed or at room temperature, highlighting its comforting depth of flavor.

Honjozo
Contains a touch of distilled alcohol, which lightens the texture and enhances aroma without significantly changing the alcohol content. Smooth and versatile, it pairs with everything from tempura to sushi to teriyaki.

Ginjo
More delicate, made with rice polished down to 60% of its original size and fermented at lower temperatures. A bit of distilled alcohol may be added to enhance aroma. The flavor is often floral and fruity. Ginjo is best served chilled, and pairs well with lighter dishes like sashimi, sushi, salads and delicate seafood.

Daiginjo
The most extensively milled sakes, with at least 50% of the outer rice layers removed. The result is aromatic, delicate and often considered the highest-quality sake. Expect a higher price tag.

Nigori
Coarsely filtered, leaving some rice sediment (kasu) behind, giving it a milky appearance and slightly sweet, creamy texture. Its sweetness pairs especially well with spicy dishes.

Sparkling Sake
In recent years, sparkling sakes — some naturally carbonated, some artificially — have become popular as a festive touch to many occasions.

Nama
Kumano says Nama (unpasteurized sake) has been growing more popular, and appeals to people who like fresh, young beverages like Beaujolais Nouveau or fruity wheat beer. Make sure it’s refrigerated both at the store and at home.

Creative additions
Hirohisa Hayashi, chef-owner and sake sommelier at Hirohisa restaurant in New York City, makes different versions of plum sake each year. He steeps Washington State-grown plums in low-alcohol sake, sometimes with shiso (a minty herb) and, this year, Okinawan brown sugar.

Serving and storage tips

Ultimately, whether sake is served warmed, chilled or at room temperature is subjective. “In general, classic dry junmai sake is often said to become softer and more approachable when (slightly) warmed. On the other hand, if you warm a fragrant daiginjo, its delicate aromas and refined character can be lost,” says Hayashi.

Sake is best consumed within a year of bottling. Store it in a cool, dark place. Once opened, refrigerate and enjoy within a week. Unpasteurized sake (nama) must be refrigerated and consumed within a few days.

Finally, take a cue from Japan: Pouring for others and refilling their glasses before they’re empty is an act of hospitality and attentiveness. And don’t forget to clink glasses and say “Kanpai” (“Cheers”) before you sip.

by Katie Workman, AP |  Read more:

Image: Katie Workman

[ed. For more details, see also: Sake 101: A Beginners' Guide (Sake Hub):]

***

Koji
While the rest of the ingredients of sake are straight-forward, koji tends to trip up sake beginners. Koji, also known by its scientific name aspergillus oryzae, is a special mold. Koji helps break the rice starches into sugars to prepare for fermentation.

As important as both water and rice are for brewing sake, the sake production process can't get off the ground without koji.

The quality of koji also affects the sake's flavor profile immensely. That's why sake brewers take koji production (seigiku) itself so seriously.

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago

[ed. Mental Awareness Day. Pretty dope.] 

The Way We Treat Pigs is a Sin

I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.

And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:

There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.

In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.

Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.

This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.

I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God, and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs. [...]

On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.

In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.

Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:

Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…

In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”

Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:

The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.

Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts: [...]

In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Humane Society via Wikimedia Commons; Our World in Data; YouTube

[ed. Is anyone surprised this continues? Everything Congress does (or doesn't do) is purely transactional. The Congress/lobbyist/fundraising/election process/system is a contagion on our society (... and pigs). See also: Leadershit.]

An Ode to Miller Lite

One of the many humiliations that arrive in your 30s is the grudging recognition that a parent was right about something. For some people, their parents were right about a financial decision they recommended, or a romantic relationship they disapproved of. My dad was right about a 96-calorie American lager produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.

In my 20s, I turned enjoying craft beer—and booze in general—into a minor hobby. I stood in long lines to buy limited releases from various “gypsy brewers.” I nursed recurring obsessions with Monastrell wines from Jumilla. I hunted down vintage bourbon; National Distillers–era Old Grand-Dad was a particular fixation.

In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.

The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.

The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

by Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Pinterest via
[ed. 100%. Lite is the archetypal go anywhere beer. Always remembered for bringing the concept of "light" (as in "less calories"), into the public consciousness. Interestingly, where I live, you can only find it in 16oz 12 packs; regular 12oz cans only come in cases (no 6 packs). Not sure of the message there...]

via:

The Case of Missing American Mushrooms

Why the U.S. is missing a million pounds of mushrooms a week.

I am a grocery-list-captured male shopper. If something is not on the grocery list, it most likely does not go into the shopping cart. There is one item, though, for which I make an exception. Whether it is on the list or not, I always get a pack of mushrooms because I love them. I love mushrooms in my soup, in my burgers, on my toast, or just sauteed with garlic1.

Given the short shelf life of mushrooms and their fragility, I had always assumed that most of the mushrooms I buy must be coming from some nearby place in California.

I recently learned that Canada’s mushroom production has been growing over the last 20 years, and much of it is exported to the United States, while production in the United States has declined. Differences in policy toward migrant workers between the United States and Canada, and differences in investments in new technology may explain the divergence in mushroom production between the two countries.

But before we get into the details, it is important to understand where and how mushrooms are grown, harvested, and shipped.

US mushroom production

You would be surprised to learn that almost 69% of the US mushroom production occurs in the borough of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It is a small town of about 6000 people, but mushroom-growing facilities around town produce almost 451 million pounds of mushrooms annually (2024). 451 million pounds of mushrooms would occupy about 45 American football fields or 35 soccer fields. The dollar value of mushroom production in the US is roughly $ 1 billion per year.

China is the undisputed leader in mushroom production. China accounts for 93% of the world’s global mushroom production.

The history of mushroom farming in Kennett Square dates back to 1885, when a grower obtained mushroom spores from Europe and began growing mushrooms. This concentration of mushroom farming in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is due to historical immigration patterns, primarily of Italians in the 1950s or 1960s, easy availability of horse manure for the mushroom substrate, an easy access to the Philadelphia and New York markets.

Growers use an old system called “Pennsylvania doubles” to grow mushrooms. Specialized, two-story cinderblock buildings with wooden shelves and intensive manual picking characterize the system. The system is designed with the assumption of cheap labor.

The growing houses provide a strictly controlled environment for growing white button, cremini, and portobello mushrooms on stacked beds, producing approximately 400 to 500 million pounds of mushrooms annually. Growers can manage the temperature, humidity, and airflow to create optimal conditions for mushroom mycelium to grow and fruit.

The houses are equipped with vertical wooden or aluminum shelves, which maximize growing space. The shelves house pasteurized compost (often made from hay, straw, poultry litter, and cocoa shells) used to grow mushrooms year-round.

As you can see in the video below, the conditions inside the mushroom-growing facilities are hot, humid, and stinky! The process of harvesting mushrooms is fairly manual, unless the grower has invested in a robotic harvesting system from companies like 4AG Robotics. Most US production facilities lack an automation design.

Mushroom shelf life dictates the supply chain

Mushrooms are a type of fungus. If you have the right spawn available and can control the environment economically, you can grow mushrooms year-round. Mushrooms have a short shelf life. Mushrooms are 92% water. A mushroom starts losing water as soon as it is harvested. Anyone who has seen a fresh mushroom that has begun to dehydrate knows how unappetizing it can look.

The dominant mushroom variety grown in both the U.S. and Canada is called the Agaricus. Your most common mushroom variety in your grocery store, the white and brown button mushrooms, cremini, baby bellas, and portobello, all belong to the Agaricus family. The Agaricus family accounts for more than 90% of mushroom production and sales in North America. Shiitake (my favorite or oyster mushrooms) do not belong to the Agaricus family.

Canada and the United States grow mushrooms year-round in climate-controlled, indoor warehouses. Readers of this newsletter are aware of my massive skepticism about the economic viability of vertical farming, but mushrooms provide a counterexample in which vertical farming actually works. The main difference is that mushrooms are fungi and do not need sunlight for photosynthesis.

Due to supply chain constraints and the limited shelf life of mushrooms post-harvest, most fresh mushroom consumption occurs within a few days of production. For example, mushroom production from Pennsylvania mostly stays within a few days of transit.

Most mushroom production facilities in Canada are located in British Columbia and Ontario, close to the US border, and deliver their products to the northern United States within 36-48 hours of harvest. Production geography relative to population is the structural constraint that neither shelf-life extension nor improved cold chains can fully overcome.

The shelf life of mushrooms is the hard constraint. Fresh button mushrooms have a 7-10 day usable shelf life under an optimal cold chain, beginning at harvest. Mushrooms are a high-respiration-rate product. They consume oxygen, produce CO2, and generate moisture. Every degree of temperature above the ideal range of 34-38 degrees F doubles the respiration rate and halves the effective shelf life. Continuity in temperature from the moment of harvest to when the customer picks it up is a critical supply chain variable.

Mushrooms are fragile and bruise under their own weight. Vibration and pressure can cause bruising in transit. Each bruise initiates a localized decay, which accelerates from the point. It limits the number of handoffs or transfer events, since each event is a risk. Mushrooms can lose quality if they dehydrate or become too heavy, and they require an ideal relative humidity of 90-95%.

The same MAP technology used for packaged salads is also used for mushrooms and can extend their shelf life, though it cannot do much for the product’s fragility or the minimum handling requirements.

So, why is US production dropping while production in Canada is rising, even though 99.6% of Canada’s exports go to the US? A big part of the answer to this question lies in how the United States and Canada provide support to migrant workers who come over to pick mushrooms.

by Rhishi Pethe, SFTW | Read more:
Images:Rhishi Pethe; YouTube: Alan Rockefeller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?

Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.

In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.

By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.

That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.

I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)

Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.

More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.

With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?

In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.

In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.

There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.

In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]

Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.

But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.

Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.

At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]

No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.

by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times

[ed. Any place blow-torching sushi should be avoided.]

My Journey to the Microwave Alternate Timeline

As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:

Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanish from collective consciousness. Before shutting down forever, though, the alternate branches of the tech tree leave some faint traces behind: over-optimistic sci-fi stories, outdated educational cartoons, and, sometimes, some obscure accessories that briefly made it to mass production before being quietly discontinued.

The classical example of an abandoned timeline is the Glorious Atomic Future, as described in the 1957 Disney cartoon Our Friend the Atom. A scientist with a suspiciously German accent explains all the wonderful things nuclear power will bring to our lives:

Sadly, the glorious atomic future somewhat failed to materialize, and, by the early 1960s, the project to rip a second Panama canal by detonating a necklace of nuclear bombs was canceled, because we are ruled by bureaucrats who hate fun and efficiency.

While the Our-Friend-the-Atom timeline remains out of reach from most hobbyists, not all alternate timelines are permanently closed to exploration. There are other timelines that you can explore from the comfort of your home, just by buying a few second-hand items off eBay.

I recently spent a few months in one of these abandoned timelines: the one where the microwave oven replaced the stove.

First, I had to get myself a copy of the world’s saddest book.

Microwave Cooking, for One

Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:

To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.

But this is completely misinterpreting Microwave Cooking for One’s vision. First – the book was published in 1985.

When MCfO was published, microwave cooking was still a new entrant to the world of household electronics. Market researchers were speculating about how the food and packaging industries would adapt their products to the new era and how deep the transformation would go. Many saw the microwave revolution as a material necessity: women were massively entering the workforce, and soon nobody would have much time to spend behind a stove. In 1985, the microwave future looked inevitable.

Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.

So, my goal is twofold: first, I want to know if there’s any merit to all of these forgotten microwaving techniques. Something that can make plasma out of grapes, set your house on fire and bring frozen hamsters back to life cannot be fundamentally bad. But also, I want to get a glimpse of what the world looks like in the uchronia where Marie T. Smith won and Big Teflon lost. Why did we drift apart from this timeline?

by Malmsbury, Telescopic Turnip |  Read more:

Images: Microwave Cooking For One/YouTube/uncredited

Chip Buddy

When I first told my colleagues about the chip butty, nobody believed me. British chips…sandwiched between two slices of buttered, untoasted white bread? Hey, don’t knock it until you try it. The chip butty is a working-class staple sold at chippies—fish and chip shops— across the United Kingdom, and the delightful, comforting snack I sought out as a university student in Scotland many years ago. There was a lot of rain and not a lot of shine, and I, like many other students, drowned my sorrows in fried food. As journalist Tony Naylor wrote in The Guardian, “Hard liquor and soft drugs aside, the chip butty is the most reliable way we human beings have to mentally shut out this harsh world and, momentarily, transport ourselves to a happier, more innocent place.”

by Genevieve Yam, Serious Eats | Read more:
Images:Amanda Suarez, Serious Eats/Eric Nathan/Alamy
[ed. Yep, it's a real thing.]

'Get Them All'

Why are WA farmers blindsided by an ICE crackdown?

It looks like farmers are starting to have some buyer’s remorse.

“ICE raids rattle Washington farmers who backed Trump’s immigration promises,” read one headline.

“A Republican farmer relies on immigrant work. He sees his party erasing it,” read another.

Randy Kraght is one such farmer. He runs a berry farm in Ferndale, in far northwest Washington, close to the Canadian border. Recently he emerged on a radio show in Bellingham, called “The Farming Show,” to tell how immigration agents had nabbed two of his longtime workers and sent them to the Tacoma detention facility.

“They’re my two main guys, unfortunately,” he said on KGMI on March 28. “Really good guys. Squeaky clean. Don’t drink. Not even a traffic ticket, none of that stuff.

“That’s why I didn’t worry too much about it, this whole crackdown thing,” he added. “All of a sudden you come to find out you’re wrong.”

Kraght said he had believed rhetoric from the Trump administration that it was targeting criminals, not workers. He said as a right-winger himself who backed Donald Trump — in 2020 he also gave $500 to the Loren Culp for governor campaign — that he’s “ended up really disappointed.”

What should those of us who are not farmers make of stories like this?

The crowd on social media was not sympathetic.

“You voted for this,” said one. “Haul your butt out there and work the fields yourself.”

“You just thought Trump would hurt other people,” said another.

“What did you think ‘mass deportation’ meant?” asked a third.

That last one was my reaction as well. At the GOP convention in 2024 the delegates waved “Mass Deportation Now!” signs. Trump pledged “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Rally crowds chanted “send them home, send them home.”

It couldn’t have been clearer, could it?

Trump also talked of deporting up to 20 million people, which is thought to be more than 100% of all the people in the country illegally. It’s true Trump has also emphasized removing “the worst of the worst.” But he has canceled past directives that ordered ICE to focus its enforcement on criminals.

“He wanted mass deportation, rather than targeted deportation,” summed up the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

The director of a local farming advocacy group told me he thinks it’s unfair to say farmers should have known better.

“I don’t think farmers are simply cherry-picking what they want to hear,” said Ben Tindall, executive director of Save Family Farming in Whatcom County. “They have been told repeatedly that the workers on their farms who have been with them for years are not the targets.

“While Trump may have promoted one narrative at times during his campaign, what farmers and Americans more broadly have been told over and over and over again this past year and a half is something very different.”

A Tri-City Herald editorial decrying recent arrests on farms in Central Washington made a similar case.

“On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said that immigration enforcement would primarily target undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes,” the paper wrote. “In practice, ICE has cast a wide net, capturing anyone who lacks the right papers and even some who have them.”

That’s not what I heard. On the campaign trail, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country.” He put that in writing. He wasn’t talking just about people with criminal records. Being in the country illegally isn’t a crime by itself anyway; it’s a civil violation, like a traffic ticket.

A year before the 2024 election, in November 2023, the media outlined what Trump planned to do. “Sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 immigration plans,” The New York Times reported.

Did people not hear this — are we all in information silos? Did they not expect it to happen?

Or did they rationalize it, as the commenter up above said, as something that would only happen to others. You’d think farmers who employ undocumented immigrants would be less prone to this empathy deficit, if for no other reason than immigration is central to their business interests.

Or maybe this is one of those instances where some people take Trump literally, while others process the gist.

Recently the Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and discussed this exact issue.

“I see there’s a lot of language out there that President Trump’s backing off on mass deportation,” Homan said. “No, he’s not … The Biden administration, he told ICE you can’t arrest an illegal alien unless he’s convicted of a serious offense. President Trump says, ‘Get all. Get them all.’ And that’s what we’re doing.”

There’s not much wiggle room in “get them all.”

Immigration arrests in Washington state are up 73% through the first 14 months of Trump’s term. Less than half had any criminal record or charge. Some were following green card or asylum rules and got detained anyway. A national analysis this past week found that arrests of people without criminal records is up eightfold.

It seems completely predictable that any mass deportation scheme will increasingly snatch up the “squeaky clean,” as farmer Kraght described his workers.

The second-guessing of this farmer, and others who suddenly are speaking out, is human nature.

Some empathy is called for as well.

Farming is in a tough spot right now, with tariffs and energy prices soaring. Tindall of Save Family Farming said adding immigration raids on top of all that, without any effort at reform of the system with permits or legal pathways, is threatening the farm system and potentially the food supply. As well as the due process rights of migrant workers and their families — something “farm owners have become deeply concerned about.”

Farm country is Trump country. It can’t be comfortable for this group, or this farmer, to cross that red line. Farmer Kraght didn’t have to tell his story or acknowledge being wrong. Or to suggest some of his workers were undocumented, a reality farmers sometimes gloss over.

Political change comes in many ways, from small gatherings in living rooms to mass street protests. This is one of the ways, when one by one, the scales begin to fall from people’s eyes.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Matt Rourke / The Associated Press

[ed. At least annual farm subsidies will help some. But workers will lose an entire season's pay.]

Hawaii’s Small Farmers Begin Recovery After Catastrophic Flooding

Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.

Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.

“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.

But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.

Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.

“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.

One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.

“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.

And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]

Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.

The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.

The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.

Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.

The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.

So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.

Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.

“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”

Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.

He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.

“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.

Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.

“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.

by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm

[ed. Climate change. We lost the fight before ever getting started. Because it was a hoax. Because we needed to protect our corporations and our economy, 401Ks, consumptive standards of living. Because it was too complex and too far in the future. Because it was just too hard. See also: They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere.]