A Walk in the Woods and Other Scary Climate Tales + Recipes to Beat the Heat
Issue No. 83
In this issue, Matt thinks about the new IPCC report, we look at no-recipe recipes, the ethnic food aisle, and Jackie refuses to turn her stove on. Also for those of you that reached out, Matt and I do not have breakthrough Covid! Just the exact same level of hypochondria.
If someone shared this newsletter with you, subscribe here:
A couple days before I planned to meet my friend Steve for an excursion through the Maine seaside, I lost my glasses. We pressed on with our plans, including a hike through some woodlands.
Who cares that I couldn’t see... Inside the woods. In Stephen King Country. What could go wrong?
After 15 minutes of strolling through crunchy leaves and patches of tall grass, I stopped in my tracks. I called out to Steve and gestured to my shoes, socks and pant legs and asked if he could identify the blurry, red dots crawling over them. He replied: “You’ve got ticks, brother!” And so did he. 😱
We had been swarmed by deer ticks, the species that carry lyme disease. Right before the trip, I scared myself by going down a WebMD rabbit hole on lyme disease. Although rarely deadly, lyme sometimes can lead to a controversial, chronic illness with similar symptoms to long COVID. Just the type of mysterious, debilitating disease to set off my hypochondria.1
I scrambled back down the trail and out of the woods, stripping off my socks and shoes as soon as I arrived at a bench. We managed to remove close to a dozen total between us. None latched on to the skin, even though I was still finding stragglers around my shoes hours later.
THE VIBES ARE OFF
Here are some more recent horror scenes from nature that have stuck in my mind. A photo a friend sent me of the sky in Denver — the city with the worst air pollution in the world last weekend — with the sun blotted by smoke from a forest fire that was consuming Oregon. A colleague’s home in Houston became unlivable for over a month after a so-called once-in-a-generation winter storm did severe damage to his house. The local newspaper published an investigation on the unprecedented die-off of Florida manatees.
It’s easy to see these extreme events as unlucky coincidences. But the newly published U.N. climate change report signals the correct way to think about these shocking events: This is how the world works now. Scientists in the report say the next 30 years of warming are locked in. The report contains hope too. A hotter future is inevitable — but how hot remains up to us.
The consequences of the locked-in 1.5 degree Celsius increase in the climate means more fires, more species die-offs, and freak storms feeling less freaky and more commonplace. Even the sudden explosion of ticks in the spring can be blamed on an abnormally short winter. But I’d rather call it the new normal. The tweet below from when two hurricanes simultaneously threatened the gulf coast last summer encapsulates that new normal:
While 1.5 degrees of warming is bad, a 2 to 4 degree increase would be disastrous. A carbon neutral (or even carbon negative) future is a must. To start working toward that, it helps to recognize that climate change is already everywhere. I think of each major hurricane or suffocating fire as a symptom of a larger problem — that fossil fuel companies have run the world for the past several decades, and in doing so, they’ve caused catastrophic damage to the environment. Even in my work in immigration, there’s a clear climate connection to why people are suffering and seeking refuge at the U.S. border. Racism can’t be solved by fixing climate change, but it really exacerbates it. Even pandemics have a link to the climate! Hell, email me any current issue you’re reading about in the news and I’ll try to explain how climate change is at least partially behind it.
‘A CAUTIONARY TALE’
The media should do a better job of synthesizing these relationships between climate and other problems too. Read these paragraphs from the Washington Post on the climate-fueled forest fires in the tourist town of Winthrop, Wash. The fires sink economies, damage lungs and raze homes in the Pacific Northwest and the stifling smoke can drift tens of thousands of miles away.
The consequences of these disasters are both visible and harder to track. Residents with respiratory troubles face acute health problems and difficulty breathing while others report sore throats, coughing, tightness in the chest, headaches and raspy voices. Many suffer from anxiety and depression. Staff members at a local social services organization, Room One, said that domestic abuse cases and residents coming to them with “suicidal ideation” spiked last month during the most intense smoke.
“This is normal summer now. The last 10 years, seven of those had smoke episodes that extended beyond a week,” Walker said. “How are we going to do better than survive? How do we retain a love of place? A love of summer?”
The increasing number and size of wildfires could make Winthrop something of a cautionary tale as more smoke spreads across the country.
I feel a wave of clarity when I see all these connections. It puts in perspective both the massive task of taking on climate change, but also the colossal consequences. A toastier outlook has arrived, but don’t let anyone say there’s nothing to be done about it. I will fight for a future that ensures anyone vulnerable to symptoms of climate change feel better protected. That means demanding policy changes that put people ahead of the profits of the mega corporations wrecking the environment and donating time and/or money to environmental groups. If that’s not motivating enough to save the planet, try some further introspection with a walk through nature. Just watch out for the ticks.
abrazos,
Matt
Share this issue and get your friends worked up about climate change!!
🪵⁉️ The Mysterious Street Snack That Has Baffled Botanists for Decades | Atlas Obscura
Push-cart vendors in India sometimes hawk a snack that looks like a cream-colored tree trunk. They give it various names (“Bhoochakara Gadda in south India and Ram Kand Mool up north”) and claim various origins of it. It’s crunchy, juicy but with only a faint taste. And scientists cannot confirm where it comes from.
Writer Barkha Kumari attempted to investigate this flavorful mystery by speaking with botanists and vendors. But vendors know the riddle of the snack is part of its allure. One seller told her that it’s a root that can grow five feet deep and weigh 300 kilograms (661 pounds), and yet climbs like a vine and blooms flowers. These tall tales help evade providing any real answers:
Yes, there is a pattern to what the vendors say: It’s a root; it’s medicinal; they get it from a forest 200 kilometers away or in Africa. They say the Hindu god Ram, and his wife and brother, subsisted on Ram Kand during their exile in the forests, and that Bhoochakara Gadda is a sweet-something growing underground. Try to buy their stock in bulk and they’ll spare no more than a few slices. Probe them and they’ll cart away. “Forest officials in Maharashtra have tried to spy on them, but it was futile,” [botanist Dr. Mansingraj] Nimbalkar recalls.
Kumari — with the help of a reluctant vendor and the advice of some local scientists — thinks the Ram Kand is a type of agave (the same plant used to make tequila). But with the pandemic shutting down the country, botanists have yet to affirm that the mystery is resolved.
🧑🍳 The Constant Reinvention of No Recipe Recipes | Eater
New York Times food editor Sam Sifton has a new type of cookbook out. The ingredient lists contain no exact measurements, and the instructions for each recipe are kept under a paragraph. For Sifton, cooking without recipes is “a proficiency to develop, a way to improve your confidence in the kitchen and makes the act of cooking fun.”
James Beard-winning cookbook author Andrea Nguyen loves this new book, which reminds her of older Vietnamese cookbooks that serve as more of a loose guide, and assume a level of kitchen proficiency among the readers. This improvisational style can be found in most cookbooks written before the mid-twentieth century. But she wonders if she could get away with this style of fast and loose recipes in her own cookbooks, which focus on Vietnamese cuisine. Women of color in our culture often have to prove their authority foremost. The work of BIPOC recipe writers must be exacting, meticulously researched and tested, while also accessible to a white audience. According to Eater reporter Marian Bull, “for white writers and editors with institutional backing, authority is more variable, typically requiring little more than a passion for cooking and a wide-ranging pantry.”
Improvisational cookbooks are as old as...well, cookbooks! But Sifton’s “No Recipe Recipes” is part of a new riff on the genre which, along with modern classics like Samin Nosrat’s “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”, attempt to give the readers the tools and skills needed to confidently improvise in the kitchen. I hope to see a resurgence in contemporary BIPOC cookbook authors applying this freer “no recipe” recipe style to the cuisines of their heritage.
🛒 Why Do American Grocery Stores Still Have an Ethnic Aisle? | NY Times
Even in diverse minority-majority metropolises like New York City, the ethnic food section in the grocery store still exists. The aisle often doesn’t even make sense. Chitra Agrawal, who makes Indian condiments, questions why Finnish crackers were in the cracker section but Asian rice crackers were found in the ethnic section.
But she and other food makers do sometimes see the placement as a necessary evil to introduce shoppers to unfamiliar products. At the same time, the ethnic foods location can be a barrier to bigger sales.
Colonialism is built into the grocery store business. So-called ethnic foods seem “to exist more for those looking to find ingredients new to them than for the communities whose cuisines are represented there.”
Times reporter Priya Krishna writes:
That aligns with the ethnic aisle’s original purpose: to serve returning World War II soldiers who had tasted foods from countries like Italy, Germany and Japan while abroad. But while many of the European foods eventually migrated out of the section, most of the foods from other parts remained. (Conversely, some grocery stores in countries like France and Colombia have “American” aisles, with products like peanut butter, mayonnaise, boxed cake mix and barbecue sauce.)
Unless those smaller brands can afford to pay for primo shelf space, they are subjected to the whims of grocery store managers. At times that means having a company’s product stuck in the ethnic lane.
Some large retailers like Walmart and Kroger’s will integrate traditionally “ethnic” products depending on the stores location. That does lead to other trade-offs. Foods like hummus get divorced from their cultural heritage. Some products like pomegranate molasses aren’t easy to categorize. Nevertheless, it can feel quite convenient for customers searching for a Mexican Coca-Cola to find it right next to domestic sodas instead of banished to a special section of the store.
Recipes to Cool the F Down
Are you hot? It’s hot out! Otto’s Bread Club is on summer break, and I am enjoying staying out of the kitchen for once. So instead of a new recipe, I wanted to share some oldies from the archives that are perfect for beating the heat.
because cold soup is refreshing and oh so classy
a perfect summertime sip, with or without booze
don’t let your lack of ice cream maker hold you back from a delish frozen treat
We found the best way to prevent infection from the Delta variant! (Just kidding it’s the vaccine. It’ll always be the vax 💉)
Talk to Us
Send in your comments, mailbag questions, recipe mishaps, or cooking tips: sunshineandmicrobes@gmail.com. Also do us a favor and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Visit our website and cook yourself something nice.
If you enjoyed this email, please share it with others. If someone forwarded this to you, click the button to sign up:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is a cook and kitchen educator based in Stuart, Fla . She runs Otto’s Bread Club and is co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a communications strategist at the ACLU of Texas. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.
Avoiding the Maine woodlands won't safeguard everyone from tick attacks. Lyme disease-carrying ticks are even turning up on California beaches. It's the fastest-growing vector borne illness in the country. On the plus side, a lyme vaccine might be on the horizon.