FERN’s Friday Feed: An insect Armageddon?
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The troubling decline of insects
Ensia
You’ve read about the problems of bees and other pollinators, but a growing body of evidence suggests a broader decline among insect species, a troubling prospect given that “insects are linchpins of the living world, carrying out numerous functions that make life possible,” writes Mary Hoff. “Insects pollinate a spectrum of plants, including many of those that humans rely on for food. They also are key players in other important jobs including breaking dead things down into the building blocks for new life, controlling weeds and providing raw materials for medicines.”
‘If the river turtle is too gooey, try the caiman’
The New York Times
“Once every few years,” writes Nicholas Casey, “a group of cooks and owners from acclaimed restaurants in Bolivia, Argentina and Peru hire a river boat to take them to places unlisted in the Michelin Guide and where no food critic has likely ever dared to tread.” They’re looking for new things to cook, and on this trip into the Bolivian Amazon Basin, they contemplate such things as roasted tapir, tuyo tuyo (a beetle larvae)—even caiman sushi.
Humpbacks, grizzlies and coyotes in the Arctic … oh my!
Yale Environment 360
The warming climate, on land and in the sea, is sending a host of animals northward, including killer whales and whitetail deer, into the boreal forests and Arctic tundra—places they’ve never before roamed. “[E]merging evidence suggests that some of these newly arriving species may be bringing rare or novel pathogens to the Arctic,” writes Ed Struzik. “In recent years, a plethora of deadly and debilitating diseases have struck reindeer in Scandinavia and Russia, muskoxen on Banks and Victoria islands in Arctic Canada, polar bears and seals off the coast of Alaska, and eider ducks in northern Hudson Bay and the Bering Sea.”
Enough with the gilded chicken wings and glitter pizza …
Eater
you overindulged, narcissistic, Intragram-obsessed “influencer.” Whitney Filloon takes down the trend, which has spread from buzz-hungry hipster restaurants to Popeye’s and Buffalo Wild Wings, of covering food in 24-carat gold or glitter: “Like iPhone-toting magpies, we flock to document all that is shiny and sparkly for Instagram — and, once it’s been photographed from every possible angle, to eat it … Glitter is for strippers, children’s craft projects, and Mariah Carey; it is not for gravy and certainly not for pizza.”
Why we must destroy the cranberry to save the cranberry farmer
The New Food Economy
It’s a paradox of the U.S. agricultural system that, because cranberry farmers grow too much, creating a surplus that drives down prices, the industry has collectively agreed to destroy a quarter of this year’s crop in order to nudge prices higher—and this is not only legal, but enshrined in federal law. The “Capper-Volstead Act, passed by Congress nearly 100 years ago … exempts farmers from some antitrust laws,” writes H. Claire Brown, allowing them “to make decisions—like restricting supply—as a group, decisions that would be illegal in any other industry.”