The Primal Stoner

Rhinos & Hippos & Lemurs, Oh my! It’s #NationalFossilDay! In the middle Eocene around 45 million years ago, give or take a million, a very different suite of creatures roamed the area now known as Glacier National Park. 

Five years ago, Finca El Valle, a small, family-run coffee farm south of Antigua, Guatemala, was producing 140,000 pounds of superior-quality Arabica for a select handful of America’s premier specialty-coffee roasters.

An outbreak of coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, hit the celebrated coffee-producing region in 2012, and by 2014 it had infected the entire farm. That year El Valle harvested a meager 28,000 pounds of coffee, an 80 percent drop. The next harvests were even smaller. With the lowest coffee prices in a dozen years, reviving the farm has been deeply challenging.

“We are in the middle of the biggest coffee crisis of our time,” said the Guatemalan producer and exporter Josué Morales, who works with over 1,300 growers.

Central America, where smallholders produce 80 percent of the region’s coffee, has been particularly hard hit by rust. Some 70 percent of the farms have been affected, and over 1.7 million coffee workers have lost their jobs. Many are leaving the coffee lands to find work elsewhere.

“The problem is not just the rust; it’s the rust and catastrophically low coffee prices,” says Stuart McCook, author of the upcoming Coffee is Not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Rust. “It’s difficult for farmers to weather both.”

Coffee Rust Threatens Latin American Crop; 150 Years Ago, It Wiped Out An Empire

By deleting key sequences of DNA in embryonic stem cells harvested from female mice, Chinese researchers successfully kicked off a new generation of the tiny mammals without the need for males to fertilise any eggs.

These fatherless mice not only made it to adulthood, they also went on to have babies of their own, demonstrating the method is a vast improvement on earlier attempts to assist reproduction without the need for both a male and female parent.

To make the Iraqi and Kurdish dumpling soup kubeh, Melanie Shurka dedicates hours. There are the broths to make, such as the beet-based selek or the lemon-infused hamusta enhanced by rounds of zucchini and Swiss chard. But more time is dedicated to making the dumplings themselves.

She and her cooks in New York City braise beef until it has collapsed on itself. Small palmfuls are then carefully tucked into a dough of semolina and ground bulgur, shaped into a ball with the corners of the dough kissing, and finally rolled out into a disk that’s plunged into hot broth.

The process requires skills that can only be taught by someone who has entrusted their recipe and technique to another. Perhaps because this dish is so difficult to make, Shurka, who is half Israeli and half American, has become the first person to dedicate a restaurant, fittingly named “Kubeh,” to it in the U.S.

She brought it to the U.S. not from the soup’s original home, but from its adopted one, Israel, where it’s a comfort food staple made by gifted home cooks for the Sabbath and in small restaurants that dot some of the country’s outdoor markets, most notably the one in Jerusalem.

An Iraqi-Kurdish-Israeli Dumpling Soup Makes Its Way To America