Summary
What ever happened with those mysterious seeds that were showing up in U.S. mailboxes?
Related episodes
Show notes
- Michigan Department of Agriculture tweet
- USDA answers frequently asked questions about the mystery seeds, including “What should I do if I already planted the seeds?”
- Facebook post from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development
- Invasive species are no joke!!!!
- As of this writing, Snopes said there was no motive determined for the seed shipments: Are Americans Receiving Unsolicited Mailings of Seeds from China? (Snopes)
- USDA still hasn’t found anything to cause major concern, but it has now identified more species and some viruses. This is an updated comment as of Nov. 18: “Altogether, we have identified approximately 460 taxa of seeds. We have detected 2 quarantine insect pests using x-ray and 28 Federal Noxious weeds based on identifications by APHIS botanists. We have also identified 6 quarantine significant viruses or viroids using molecular testing.” Also, here are some [[”https://www.flickr.com/photos/usdagov/sets/72157715308343856/with/50210545578/”|photos]] of U.S.D.A. investigating the seeds with microscopes.
- Jason Koebler and [[”https://twitter.com/emanuelmaiberg”|Emanuel Maiberg]] of [[”https://www.vice.com/en/section/tech”|Motherboard]]. The last story Underunderstood collaborated on with Motherboard was [[”https://www.vice.com/en/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-replacing-restaurants-phone-numbers-so-grubhub-can-take-a-cut”|this one]] (Recorded for Awesomeness).
- Hundreds of Americans Planted ‘Chinese Mystery Seeds’ (Motherboard)
- Zack Franklin in action
- Amazon explains [[“https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201910460”|fulfilled by Amazon]] and a little bit about [[”https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help_search_1-3?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201889310&qid=1606187951&sr=1-3”|fulfilled by merchant]].
- “The mysterious seed is back! Shenzhen cross-border seller actually sends parcels here” (forum post)
- Moss’s website for Amazon sellers and Moss on [[”https://www.zhihu.com/people/moss-98-87”|Zhihu]].
- Honest Buyers Club on Facebook is an example of one of these groups. Once you get involved, you’ll start to get one-on-one messages from sellers. To clarify, I (Adrianne) have never actually ordered anything, I just lurk and try to harass people into doing an interview (100% failure rate). I’m definitely not endorsing giving your address out to strangers on the internet, but I think these guys are mostly legit. So, maybe you could give them, like, a PO box?
- ”Evaluation blacklist” — a crowdsourced list of people who accept free gifts without providing the requisite review