Hotting Up: How Climate Change Could Swallow Louisiana's Tabasco Island

"With thousands of square miles of land already lost along the coast, Avery Island, home of the famed hot sauce, faces being marooned

Avery Island, a dome of salt fringed by marshes where Tabasco sauce has been made for the past 150 years, has been an outpost of stubborn consistency near the Louisiana coast. But the state is losing land to the seas at such a gallop that even its seemingly impregnable landmarks are now threatened.

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.”"

Oliver Milman reports for the Guardian March 27, 2018.