Image by Paul Gierszewski (via Wikipedia)
Ed Posnett, winner of the 2015 Bodley Head/FT essay prize, in The Financial Times:
In Isafjordur, the capital of Iceland’s remote Westfjords region, a Lutheran pastor compares eiderdown to cocaine. “I sometimes think that we are like the coca farmers in Colombia,” he says. “We [the down harvesters] get a fraction of the price when the product hits the streets of Tokyo. This is the finest down in the world and we are exporting it in black garbage bags.”
It is difficult to describe the weight of eiderdown in a language in which the epitome of lightness is a feather. Unlike a feather’s ordered barbs arranged around a solid shaft, under a microscope eiderdown offers a portrait of chaos: hundreds of soft barbs branch out from a single point, twisting around one another and trapping pockets of air. When I return from Iceland, I ask my wife to close her eyes and put her hands out. After placing a duck-sized clump of down in her hands, I ask her what she feels. “Heat,” she says.
Over centuries eiderdown has been treasured by Vikings, Russian tsars, and medieval tax collectors who accepted it as revenue. Today, its buyers are the global super-rich. In Iceland I hear stories about Gulf royals who sleep under eiderdown in the desert and Russian politicians whose hearts can be warmed with the gift of an eiderdown duvet.