Posted on 03/27/2018 8:36:26 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
With thousands of square miles of land already lost along the coast, Avery Island, home of the famed hot sauce, faces being marooned.
The home of Tabasco, the now ubiquitous but uniquely branded condiment controlled by the same family since Edmund McIlhenny first stumbled across a pepper plant growing by a chicken coop on Avery Island, is under threat. An unimaginable plight just a few years ago, the advancing tides are menacing its perimeter.
It does worry us, and we are working hard to minimise the land loss, said Tony Simmons, the seventh consecutive McIlhenny family member to lead the company. We want to protect the marsh because the marsh protects us.
Around 2,000 sq miles of land, roughly the size of Delaware, has vanished from the state since the 1930s due to a cocktail of maladies and self-inflicted wounds, stemming from the overdevelopment of the Mississippi river and an unquestioning embrace of extractive drilling, topped off by the wrenching global consequences of climate change.
Climate change has cast a shadow over several everyday staples, menacing the production of chocolate, the harvesting of hops for beer, the growing of coffee beans. Tabasco has no plans to join this list, with the company insisting the production of its peppers isnt at risk and that its ancestral home can be safeguarded.
There are signs of hope, at least environmentally. Recent diversions of sediment have provided a jolt of growth to patches of the delta, a restoration that would be further bolstered by the master plans projects.
The branching wetlands, with white pelicans soaring overhead, remain an ecological wonder, persisting despite the scars of pipelines and the ongoing plight of its native communities, such as Isle de Jean Charles, that will be among the first climate change refugees in the US.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Naaah. Don’t like Tabasco on anything. It’s pretty much all heat and no flavor, and it’s thin and watery. Crystal is much better. Even iin Louisiana, even if they put Tabasco on the tables, you’ll almost always find Crystal there, too.
But yes, this is a really weird article. Could almost be the prototype Global Warming alarm article, lots of fear, but no facts.
Guilty as charged. I’ve used the analogy that Tabasco sauce is to food what a kimono is to women. Both make tasteless have taste and beautiful even better.
Thank you for coming along with a truth injection for the thread! I learned what you are talking about in college in the 70s yet it seems a lost volume today.
I prefer the green Tabasco sauce, made from jalapenos. A little less heat, a lot more flavor.
“Avery Island is a money pit.”
You state that like it’s a bad thing. Does all that free enterprise you detailed just make you itchy all over or something???
No, no..... I am congratulatory. The ability to convert what appears to be a wild and useless bayou tract of ground needs recognition.
Later, it was learned that under the salt was oil. The oil was drilled and produces currently.
Each of which may well be adding to the subsidence. Dig or pump too much from underneath without replacing it and the land will subside.
They outgrew their acreage on Avery Island and made the decision to grow the pepper production offshore and maintain their seed production on site.
Possibly for quality and consistency of the peppers that go to make up the sauce. The seeds not only go to South America, they also go to four countries in Africa. If the locals used seeds produced locally, then the nature of the pepper grown in different countries would eventually change due to local growing conditions and climates. At least that seems reasonable.
Could. Anybody?
Mmmmm...mebee, mebee not.
The entire area is composed of primeval sludge. Some places are drier than other places. The drier places are called “land”; the wetter places are called “bayous”, but the sludge is the underpinning for the entire area. Sometimes the wetter places and the drier places exchange place. It’s that simple.
Very little. Most of the Tabasco pepper crops are grown elsewhere these days.
Hmmmm. Guessing with the rapid approach of save muvver erf day on 4/22 the assclowns feel the need to ramp up the rhetoric again. Gotta get some tires to burn.
I had a professor at LSU (nuclear science) who was a McIlhenny, and part of the family. There is an obvious family relationship between his looks and this picture.
I assume the company has for many years studied the traits of peppers that give them the optimum flavor, color, yield, etc... they want. They can control those traits through plant breeding. Once out in the field, over generations of plants, the variety may lose some of those characteristics. As such, McIlhenny controls the seeds, and will continuously provide them to growers to make sure their product remains "pure."
Yes, but the submergence is due to a lack of soil replenishment due to the channelization of the Mississippi River.
Unfortunately, with the long-term dredging of the existing channel, the delta has extended far enough into the Gulf so that the load of suspended soil is dropped into deep water.
What is needed is to redirect the channel to run west rather than south. It would probably also help if the Bonnet Carre floodway was rebuilt to dump into the Atchafalaya basin instead of Lake Ponchartrain.
But either of those would cost quite a bit.
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All BS, all trhe time.
Temps continue their 84 year decline, and oceans continue to fall with them, but the scam must survive reality at any and all costs.
.
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Just sprinkle on a little cayenne powder!
You’re gonna have to change your handle...
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