【推荐3】On the night of 14th June 1904, New York’s Chinatown was in a deep gloom (低迷). For the past 20 years, the restaurants were filled with those crazy about a taste of real Chinese cooking “chop suey”. But suddenly, all that seemed at risk. A few days earlier, a chef named Lem Sen had arrived, saying he had invented it a decade before while working at a restaurant in San Francisco. His recipe had been stolen by an American diner to make money. Through his lawyer, he demanded restaurants pay him for using his recipe.

Chop suey was first mentioned by Chinese-American journalist Wang Chin Foo in a list of common dishes he thought most attractive to Western tastes. As he explained, “each Chinese cook has his own recipe. The main parts are pork, bacon, chicken, mushroom, bamboo shoots, onion, and pepper, while accidental ones are duck, beef, salted black beans etc. Yet it is often considered by Westerners that this is a ‘national dish of China’ more than any other dish they’ve known.”

Although a hyperbolic way to introduce this dish, it clearly showed that chop suey was indeed of Chinese origin. Where exactly its roots lay has been debated; but it was probably first cooked in Taishan, Guangdong, where most early immigrants to America had grown up. In 1866, the journalist Allan Forman noticed it as a delicious dish despite its “mysterious nature”, and nine years later, the first recipe appeared in magazines, with some un-Chinese ingredients thrown in.

It was not long before a myth making began. In 1896, Li Hongzhang visited New York, and newspapers mistakenly reported that while refusing Western dishes at a banquet (宴会), he had enthusiastically accepted a plate of chop suey. This caused a great hit, and many who never heard of it before simply assumed that it was introduced to the US by Li Hongzhang, which accidentally promoted the dish’s popularity.

【推荐1】“THEY’RE ALL IN TROUBLE,” says Kenyan ecologist Paula Kahumbu. “All elephants are in major, major trouble.”

Populations of the three species have declined: savanna (热带草原) elephants forest elephants and the smaller-eared Asian elephants. And we’re to blame. We’ve expanded (扩张) into elephant territory, building homes and roads, cutting down forests and planting crops. Besides, with the rise of poaching (偷猎), the number of elephants has decreased and became dangerously low in the past five decades.

“Poaching doesn’t just destroy animals,” says Kahumbu, “it gradually weakens society.” That’s why her organization monitored poaching cases in Kenyan courts, launched a campaign called Hands Off Our Elephants and educated children on the value of wildlife. Kahumbu’s goal is noble and urgent: to change “the whole national awareness about conservation.”

Now, she’s taking her message to an international stage with Secrets of the Elephants, a four-part series on National Geographic. It explores the hidden lives of elephants in four habitats — Asia, plus African forests, deserts, and savannas — as well as the people who are racing to save the animals.

“We kind of know what they need, but we aren’t always generous enough.” Secrets of the Elephants, she hopes, will familiarize people with the wildlife that lives among them.

While making the series, the difficult situation of some elephants shocked her. “You look at their faces and they look so sad,” she says. She particularly noticed this in Asia, where Asian elephants and people live in increasingly close distance.

“Despite decades of research into African elephants, much research into Asian elephants has fallen behind — which is why our programme in the following pages will focus on this species,” she adds.

【推荐2】Elephants can no longer maintain themselves with the small amounts of food they find in forest areas and parks. They come into the fields abutting their nature reserves and eat the crops. Dozens of elephants are getting wiped out by farmers every year. One solution that has been proposed is electric fencing but that is extremely expensive and the electricity itself can kill the elephant and every other animal. A much better idea has been put forward.

Elephants are frightened of bees. Bees enter and attack their sensitive trunks inside, causing a pain that elephants never forget. Generations of elephants have learned to associate bees with pain and they even run away when they hear the sound of the bees. Beehive fences were invented in 2002 when scientists from the Save the Elephants discovered that elephants avoided trees with beehives. University of Oxford zoologist Lucy King designed the fence and it was tried out in 2008 in Kenya.

Supported by Save the Elephants, University of Oxford, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, scientific studies concerning the theme by Lucy King have led to the establishment of a project called The Elephants and Bees Project, which teaches farmers how to build beehive fencing near fields to prevent elephants entering. More than ten African countries have now followed suit.

The bees pollinate (授粉) farmers’ crops and the nearby plants, providing an ecological and economic boost to the surrounding area. Elephants perform essential services like digging waterholes in dry river beds, spreading hundreds of fruit tree species with their dung which also feeds dozens of insects and small animal species, and making forest paths that act as firebreaks.

And even more exciting, the raw honey is sold by the farmers to markets all over the world. Beehive fences are the first fences that have been invented to make the farmers more money than what it costs to maintain the fence.

Elephants could bring in a lot of eco-tourism money. Every year, Africa has calculated that each elephant brings in nearly $ 23,000 in tourism.

All this helps the ecology of the region and the additional income of beehives gives farmers even more motive to keep the elephants alive.