Apparently some people ate those Chinese mystery seeds, because everything is dumb
Issue 200: Like, they didn't even plant them first. Excuse me while I scream into the void. Plus, the Zachs at the University of Minnesota are uniting.
Hello! Welcome to the 200th issue of Nosh Box, a food solutions newsletter! On Mondays, I send a reading guide of food system news, and on Thursdays, I dig deeper with an original essay or conversation you can only find here.
Check out last Thursday’s interview: “The food's always there, and the food's always working” — a conversation with food researcher, artist, and winemaker Ariana Gunderson on recreating food in pandemic literature and using vermouth to highlight how we infuse food with memory
Hey, thanks for sticking with me for 200 of these darn things! If you enjoy Nosh Box, now would be a great time to let someone else know they, too, should sign up for a food newsletter that doesn’t totally suck. (You’re more than welcome to use that great sales pitch.)
>>“Hundreds of Americans Planted ‘Chinese Mystery Seeds’”
I just… OK. Let me start at the beginning. Perhaps you recall the saga a couple months ago in which Americans were receiving unsolicited seed packets in the mail from China. The USDA said it was likely a type of e-commerce scam meant to boost online product reviews, and they advised mystery seed recipients to contact regulatory authorities and not plant them. Fine. “I’ll do ya one better,” said some Americans, who ATE the seeds. (!!!) Jeez, people.
Over at Motherboard, Jason Koebler filed a bunch of Freedom of Information Act requests to learn more about a government’s interactions with a suspicious, uninformed population.
One thing is clear to me, from reading these documents. American people do not seem particularly well-prepared for scams of this nature.
The emails between public officials and scientists, who were dealing with a difficult situation, seem efficient, professional, and appropriately cautious. But communication from the general public is concerning. People planted seeds even when expressly told not to. Hundreds of people had no idea whether they had ever ordered seeds, or how to check. Some people called 911. Others ate the seeds. Others ordered something specific, got what they ordered from who they ordered it from, then still panicked. Others were furious they had to pay for postage to send the seeds to the government. From one recipient in North Carolina: “I did not receive seeds. I received a suspicious package from China with a spoon and a fork in it my concerns are that it is full of Covid.”
When we talk about threats to the American food system, perhaps we need to include Americans themselves in that list? This sounds glib, and it sort of is, but it’s also sort of not.
Most of these mystery seeds were herbs and weeds, apparently, but it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which mystery seeds are actively poisonous or destructive to the land and yet thousands of Americans still plant them anyway, in a sort of anti-science, anti-government, don’t-tread-on-me type rebellion. If after 2016 our electoral system is STILL vulnerable to foreign cybersecurity threats (though it’s not as if America hasn’t spent the past century interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries…), who’s to say our food system is really all that secure, either?
At The Counter, Kayla Voigt talks about how COVID-19 is affecting the you-pick agritourism industry, which relies on massive crowds converging on a farm to wander aimlessly and touch a bunch of edible produce.
So, they’re shifting gears… curiously, in ways that more closely resemble actual farming:
Rather than wandering through rows of bushes or trees to find the perfect fruit, eating and picking as they go, guests must work in even rows, completely picking out an entire section.
Agritourism brings in big bucks. Apparently the average annual per-farm income from agritourism in Worcester County, Mass., is $246,528. Part of this, certainly, is that produce on you-pick farms isn’t harvested by hired farmworkers — it’s picked by you. You’re the labor, and you’re paying to do it. But this leaves you-pick farms in a bind for years like 2020, when they don’t have the staff to pick and sell crops conventionally even if they wanted to:
“We’re a business that really relies on crowds,” said [Chelsea Martin, the general manager of Honey Pot Hill Orchards in Stow, Mass.]. “There aren’t a lot of other options for us. We don’t have the staff, even if we wanted to, to pick any more than 30 percent of our crop and for a year like this, it’s not possible [to even do that.]”
This Thursday, I’m going to dig in deeper into the idea of “pastoral fantasy” as it relates to you-pick farms and other agritourism endeavors, which I find FASCINATING as a way for city folks to play at agrarianism without having to think of any of the tensions (labor justice, death, canning for the winter) that characterize actual farming. And our culture has been steeped in this sort of romanticization of a nonexistent better agrarian past for millennia — basically, since Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. To me, it’s a commentary on the way people see the food system — or, more accurately, don’t see the food system but think they do. So, get pumped for some Raymond Williams, y’all.
>>“James Beard was anti-elitist. He would hate the awards that bear his name.”
Last month, the James Beard Foundation decided to cancel the 2020 restaurant awards and the 2021 restaurant and media awards — ostensibly due to COVID-19’s impact on the restaurant industry. But actually, as we later found out, the 2020 winners had already been chosen and included zero (zero!) Black chefs in any of the 23 categories. The Beard awards had already been criticized considerably for not reflecting the true diversity of the restaurant world, a problem they were apparently already trying to fix. So it should not have been difficult for them to get this one right, but alas. They did not.
It’s almost as if, like Alicia Kennedy wrote in her newsletter this morning…
Awards reinforce hegemonic narratives of industries that uphold the oppressive structures that govern society as a whole. … There’s also the fact that a James Beard Award–winning essay or book reads like a James Beard Award–winning essay or book, like an Oscar-caliber movie is also something predetermined by its aesthetic choices.
And the ultimate irony is that none of this is what James Beard himself would have wanted, according to the writer John Birdsall, who’s spent four years working on a biography of him (and wrote the article that’s linked as the header of this section).
Beard spent his life urging us to kick down the barriers — of class and geography, and the manipulations of a food media run by mega companies or a small circle of Manhattan elites — that kept many Americans from knowing the pleasures of food and drink. In his life, James Beard pushed a progressive, anti-elitist message about food.
And he encouraged Americans to find a sense of curiosity — to elevate pleasure, almost as a political act — to wrest their food from the numbing mediocrity of products designed by engineers, in corporate labs. This is what we should celebrate chefs and restaurants for: rebelliousness, independence of thought, a lack of fear in slaying old idols.
If Beard’s ghost is to be dragged under a spotlight he didn’t seek, shouldn’t we at least honor who he was? Shouldn’t his eponymous awards seek to resist the status quo, to give money and influence and calcified tradition a shove as hard as Beard once tried to?
>>The Zachs at the University of Minnesota are unionizing
Just take a look:
This new group has a whole exec board ready to go, with positions like… wait for it: Director of Zachademics, Director of Zachtivism, and a Director of Foreign Affairs — the only “Zack” allowed. I mean, it’s hilarious. And he’s gotten almost 100 responses, so the Zach attack at the U is imminent.
Over at City Pages, Hannah Jones waxes poetic:
There’s something beautiful about a stunt so silly as to be completely harmless, especially in a time when so much feels dangerous, fraught, or oppressive. But there’s something even more beautiful about a stunt that ends up being… not a stunt. One that ends up being the start of several hundred friendships, a built-in community based on nothing more than the good fortune of being born with the right name.
In a time when social distancing and political differences have separated us from many of our own communities, the reminder that some can be built spontaneously out of nothing but caprice and inanity is… weirdly comforting.
Indeed. A good thing to Zachknowledge as you head into the week. See you Thursday!
