Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The women who cook to remember Mexico’s ‘disappeared’
The Atavist
“The problem with a decades-long issue like los desaparecidos is that the public grows weary of it—of hearing the names of the missing, of fathoming their ever growing numbers, of seeing photos of bodies and watching mothers weep,” writes Annelise Jolley. “How then, could Las Rastreadoras push back against the erasure of their loved ones? How could the women resist oblivion? Food was the answer. All the women had memories of their missing that were tied to cooking and eating. They decided to gather recipes for the dishes their loved ones had enjoyed most. They would invite cookbook readers to taste their loss.”
Could a more efficient leaf prevent a global food crisis?
The New Yorker
“The more that was discovered about the intricacies of photosynthesis, the more was revealed about its inefficiency … Plants convert only about one per cent of the sunlight that hits them into growth. In the case of crop plants, on average only about half of one per cent of the light is converted into energy that people can use,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert. “[Stephen Long] became convinced that photosynthesis’s inefficiency presented an opportunity. If the process could be streamlined, plants that had spent millennia just chugging along could become champions. For agriculture, the implications were profound. Potentially, new crop varieties could be created that could produce more with less.”
Rancher Cody Easterday tried to game a rigged industry. He lost.
High Country News
“[W]ithin two weeks of his death, everyone would know what Gale Easterday likely knew that day: Tyson Fresh Meats — one of the nation’s largest meat distributors — was investigating Easterday Ranches and slowly discovering that Gale’s son, Cody, had sold them hundreds of thousands of cattle that never existed,” writes Lee van der Voo. “The deceit that soon unspooled may seem like a one-off fraud. But … it exposed a problem widespread in the beef business, which is that the price of a steak has increasingly little to do with the cost of fattening a steer.”
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Uncle Sam wants an army of seed-hunters
National Geographic
“Nestled between two big rocks on the bank of a brook is what he came for: a cache of pine cones worth $15 a bushel … Tucked inside each one are up to 10 pearly-white seeds, each no bigger than a lentil, which one day could grow to over 200 feet tall and absorb at least 48 pounds of carbon dioxide each year. Across the western United States, the seeds are in high demand. Over the next 20 years, the U.S. aims to plant billions more trees in order to restore millions of acres of scorched forest and help offset planet-warming carbon emissions,” writes Christie Hemm Klok. “In the past few decades, however, the number of skilled seed collectors in the U.S. has been dwindling … Fewer collectors means fewer seeds, and ultimately, trees.
Paraguayan tribes pushed to brink by pesticides, land grabs
Al Jazeera
“The Ava Guarani are one of 19 Indigenous groups in Paraguay who have sustained cultural, spiritual and territorial dispossession for decades by the country’s land-owning elites aligned with agribusiness,” writes Neil Giardino. “But after more than a decade of sustained pesticide fumigations at soy plantations near Campo Aguae, a village of approximately 400 people, there is a glimmer of hope that residents’ appeals for help might finally have been heard. A recent decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee accused Paraguay of violating the rights of the Ava Guarani by failing to monitor fumigation and prevent the use of banned pesticides in neighbouring soy plantations, resulting in health problems and deterioration of the tribe’s land and culture.”