FERN’s Friday Feed: A funeral for fish and chips
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Why are Britain’s chippies disappearing?
The Guardian
“One summer ago, before the region’s fish and chip industry was shaken by closures, before a death that was hard for people to bear, a lorry heaped with the first fresh potatoes of the season drove along the east coast of Scotland,” writes Tom Lamont. “This lorry wound its way along the East Neuk of Fife, dodging washing lines, mooring bollards and seagulls, parking with impunity to make deliveries. There was an understanding in the East Neuk that nobody would ever get angry and honk at the inbound ‘tattie’ lorry, fish and chips being a staple meal, vital to the region’s economy. Tourists come shocking distances to sit on old harbour walls and stab around in takeaway trays with wooden forks. The fish and chips sold in the East Neuk might be the best in the British Isles and because of that (it follows) the best on the planet. Even so, by July 2022, local friers were finding it harder and harder to balance their books.”
Confronting lead-tainted turmeric
Undark Magazine
“For most of his turmeric trading career, [Mohammad Abdullah] Sheikh engaged in an open secret: While processing raw turmeric to powder, he added a chemical called lead chromate to get the tubers to glow yellow. Sheikh and the locals refer to the compound as peuri — and nearly all the farmers and traders at the market are familiar with it. Lead chromate is a chemical used in paints to, for instance, make school buses yellow, and it can enhance the radiance of turmeric roots, making them more attractive to buyers,” writes Wudan Yan. “For decades, Sheikh didn’t know the exact harm that peuri could cause. That changed in the fall of 2019, when researchers from the nonprofit International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh … warned [Sheikh and others in turmeric trade] that consuming lead chromate could lead to kidney and brain damage or cause developmental delays in children. By that point, the spice had made its way out of the country: The problem had already gone global.”
Grief pizza
Literary Hub
“My brother Robert and I grew up on Manhattan’s East Side. Some afternoons, we’d go to a deli—he’d get a stack of Genoa salami on an untoasted plain bagel—or to a diner for a hamburger. Usually, though, we’d stop in at the Ultimate Pizza, a below-ground hole in the wall on 57th and 1st,” writes Adam Dalva. “My brother and I would always order a large half regular, half pepperoni. A simple pie, sweet-sauced and oily, which we’d take home. When I think of pizza, I think of those afternoons with my brother: Pardon the Interruption; green bean bags; the space-age boot-up sound of our Sega Dreamcast. Strange, but often remarked upon, is that food is the pathway to memory. Stranger, I’ve learned, is that when memory is distorted by loss, the food distorts too. Pizza, which I’ve always loved for its humbleness, has become redolent of grief.”
He leads the fight for farmworker rights
NPR
“When people think of farmworkers, often they think of migrant workers and labor organizers like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Now, they may add another name to those creating major changes in the farming workplace: Jose Martinez. Over the past decade, Martinez has been central to two flagship lawsuits creating policy changes in the state — making Washington one of the leaders in providing overtime to farmworkers and settling a civil rights case in favor of workers,” write Ximena Bustillo and Andrea Hsu. “And recently, he has taken his fight to Washington, D.C., where he has pushed for an expansion of legal status and protections for farmworkers.”
Unlearning assumptions around food and family
Orion Magazine
“My grandmother had a kaki tree. It grew in the backyard of her house on the outskirts of Paris. Kakis (or persimmons, as some call them) grow in winter, when most trees are bare. In this grayness, the red fruit glows like an ornament,” writes Edmée Lepercq. “My mother often came home from visiting my grandmother with a plastic bag heavy with kakis. She left them in the cold on the windowsill so the fruit would soften, and eventually sweeten. To eat a kaki, remove the four-petaled calyx. If the fruit is ripe, the calyx will yield. Juice might spurt out. Take a knife, slice down the middle. Dig through sludge and spoon out the jellylike seeds. As a child, I loved the kaki for its strange texture, its syrupy sweetness. I loved the way it tasted of plums and honey, and for the meaning it carried. I thought I ate kakis because my grandmother is Vietnamese, and because she grew them in her garden. I thought of her whenever I ate one, as if ingesting my heritage.”