Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How #cleaneating tricked us into thinking it was healthy
The Guardian
“At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms),” writes Bee Wilson in The Guardian. “Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others espouse various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me).” #Cleaneating has sold millions in cookbooks devoted to making readers more beautiful via avocado vegan cheesecake and quinoa everything. Hawked by diet gurus with lustrous skin and insanely popular twitter followings, the movement is often absolutist in its terms. No gluten. No sugar. No dairy. Heck, no nightshades. But psychologists worry that it has given rise to a new kind of eating disorder — orthorexia — fixated on the consumption of “pure” foods. In an age when diet advice is confusing, the medical system has spent decades ignoring nutrition, and the industrial food system does indeed seem to be full of toxic traps, it’s no wonder so many people have been wooed by the promise of a more holistic approach — even if it means being holistically deprived.
The search for the perfect strawberry
The New Yorker
The trick for Driscoll’s — “a fourth-generation family business, [that] says that it controls roughly a third of the six-billion-dollar U.S. berry market, including sixty per cent of organic strawberries, forty-six per cent of blackberries, fourteen per cent of blueberries, and just about every raspberry you don’t pick yourself” — is keeping people interested, especially when it comes to strawberries, the company’s totem fruit. The strawberry industry has contracted in recent years, with 30-percent fewer acres planted with the berry today than in 2013, in part because immigrant labor has gotten much harder to find. Driscoll researchers are working now on white strawberries they hope millennials will try even if their parents won’t, strawberries that can grow in saltwater — a helpful trick since fertilizers and pesticides tend to salinize the soil — and strawberries crossed with wild relatives from Alaska to give consumers an “I just picked these in the woods” feeling.
Why does Trump’s national monument review matter? Ask these animals.
The New York Times
It isn’t just land that’s at stake as the Trump administration reviews national monuments, but the many strange and beautiful creatures that thrive in marine preserves. Creatures like the blue-banded goby, which can “change it’s sex back-and-forth depending on who’s available,” and the mantis shrimp that “can see things humans cannot like infrared and ultraviolet ranges,” says the Times. The boundaries around 11 national marine sanctuaries and monuments covering an area larger than the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Michigan combined are being reconsidered. The public comment period closes Tuesday.
Farming in space, the next frontier
San Francisco Chronicle
If humans are ever going to live on another planet or even take longer trips through space, we have to figure out a way to grow food somewhere other than Earth. To that end, “NASA is testing the Vegetable Production System, dubbed Veggie, a chamber with controlled lighting and water that can grow crops like lettuces from seeds that have been planted in special “pillows” of soil and fertilizer. The system is designed to see how various crops grow in a weightless environment.” The agency plans to use Veggie to produce potatoes, soybeans, wheat and other crops in order to land humans on Mars by the 2030s.
Ladies like dudes who eat their spinach — and squash, eggplant and cabbage
NPR
Women prefer the smell of men who eat a lot of fruits and vegetables way more than they like the stench of carbo-loaders, says a new study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Researchers recruited a group of healthy, young men, then assessed the amount of produce they were consuming by taking a sample of their skin using a spectrophotometer — an instrument that can pick up on the presence of “carotenoids, the plant pigments that are responsible for bright red, yellow and orange foods,” says NPR. They asked the guys to work out wearing T-shirts, which they handed over to a bunch of ladies to smell. The women liked men who ate their share of the produce aisle, but the odor from eating a lot of meat wasn’t any more — or less — enjoyable, simply more intense.
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