Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
For immigrants, school food is a gateway to British culture
The Guardian
“What schoolchildren eat for lunch has become a litmus test for how we are doing as a country,” writes Shahnaz Ahsan. “Think Marcus Rashford winning near universal admiration for campaigning for the provision of free meals for schoolchildren during the pandemic, or Jamie Oliver’s crusade against the Turkey Twizzler during his school dinners campaign.” But they “can also serve another, less recognised function. From my own experience and speaking with my family members and others from migrant backgrounds, a common perspective emerges. School dinners were our gateway to traditional British food and, in some ways, the wider culture.”
With Kyiv’s vibrant restaurant scene shut down, chefs have joined the fight
Eater
“Ever since the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, which toppled the corrupt and Russia-leaning government of Viktor Yanukovych, the business and gastronomic culture in Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv has been booming,” writes Yaroslav Druziuk. “The brutal and unprovoked Russia-waged war … put that growing scene to a sudden stop. For many Kyiv citizens, it’s all about survival now, and chefs and line cooks are among the residents being recruited into a citizens’ army. And they are determined to fight.”
How plants and animals evolve to thrive in cities
Knowable Magazine
“Brown rats in New York City may be evolving smaller rows of teeth. Tiny fish across the Eastern US have adapted to thrive in polluted urban waters. Around the globe, living things are evolving differently in cities than in the surrounding countryside,” writes Eric Bender. “‘A city changes an environment dramatically. It creates a completely novel ecosystem,’ says Marc Johnson, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga.The city is also the fastest-growing ecosystem on the planet, home to more than half of the world’s people. So perhaps it’s no surprise that studying the evolution of species in urban settings, a field that barely existed at the start of the millennium, now is a focus for many biology labs.”
The create-your-own-ending story of fried rice
Whetstone Magazine
“Food reveals our history in clues of a country that often forgets it. Chinese immigrants took to operating and cooking in restaurants when other jobs were not available to them, in the years they were stranded after building the transcontinental railroad, forced to adapt the ingredients they couldn’t come with to appeal to American mouths. To survive in an economy that excluded them, in a country that no longer needed them, versions of fast food fried rice were served in a barter to get by,” writes Kenny Ng. “And what do we lose beyond culinary history when the lineage of a dish falls into the hyphenated details of a society in which it’s devoured? In the ongoing negotiation of what can be preserved in the freedom and brutality of migrating, in moving toward the horizon of an unfamiliar life, we hide what we cannot take with us in the gaps between the grains of rice.”
Tiramisu altered dessert history. But who actually created it?
The New Yorker
“Believe it or not—no matter what you remember about menus, particularly in New York City and San Francisco, particularly in the nineteen-eighties and nineties—there was indeed a time in this great green world in which tiramisu didn’t exist,” writes Susan Orlean. “In that unimaginable before-time, people surely ate ladyfingers—those long, spongey, slightly unsatisfying cookies—and, surely, they lapped up mascarpone. But no one had thought to dip ladyfingers in espresso; layer them in a baking dish; douse them with a mixture of mascarpone, egg yolks, cream, and sugar; dust the dish with cocoa powder; chill and serve.”