Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
In one burger’s journey, the toll of the coronavirus becomes clear
The Washington Post
“Solano pressed the patty with the back of his spatula and watched it ooze. This particular burger was on its way to an engineer who’d just finished another day of working from home — an option Solano and his nearly 200 laid-off co-workers never had. Instead, the 26-year-old took a pay cut and a demotion from sous chef to line cook just to be … able to return to Le Diplomate’s kitchen. On the burger’s journey from a Kansas farm to the engineer’s dinner plate, every person had a story like Solano’s. A rancher with five children who lost thousands every week. A factory worker who brought the virus home to her son. A courier who calculated the true cost of every delivery not in profit, but in the risk it required her to take.”
From ghastly lemon meringue pie, a lesson in love and trust
The Bitter Southerner
Kathleen Purvis details her lifelong hate of “soft meringue, the kind made from egg whites and boiling syrup. Just the thought of forcing a forkful into my mouth brings a gag response … It brings up more than disgust: Guilt, that I’m a Southern food writer who can’t abide a classic of the Southern baking arts. Sadness, that I could never appreciate my late mother’s lemon meringue pie, allegedly one of her highest achievements. And there’s another layer of emotions under there, as important to the proceeding as my mother’s flaky pie crust. That layer is all mixed up with love, and trust, and the lesson in bravery my parents taught me.”
WiFi for farmworkers
Daily Yonder
“Long before the annual fruit harvest began this year” in the orchards of Columbia Gorge, in the Pacific Northwest, “local public health officials and community leaders were discussing how to support farmworkers and their families during the quarantine,” writes Judy Bankman. “While most conversations focused on housing and personal protective equipment, it quickly became clear that the internet would be critical for two reasons: accessing non-emergency Telemedicine services and providing education for children of farmworkers unable to attend their usual in-person summer classes.”
Nearly extinct, an amazing catfish confronts Trump’s border wall
High Country News
The Yaqui catfish — the only catfish species native to the western U.S. — is functionally extinct in America. The search for any remaining fish has turned to Sonora, Mexico, part of the borderlands that straddle northwestern Mexico and the southwestern U.S., where a region once full of “rich waterways and aquatic communities” has been depleted by dams, development and, more recently, Trump’s border wall. “The current extinction crisis speaks to an uncomfortable truth,” writes Maya L. Kapoor. “In a land of finite resources, every choice, big or small — irrigating an alfalfa field, taking a swing on a golf course, burning fossil fuels — means choosing what kinds of habitat exist, even far away from town. And that means choosing which species survive.”
Building diversity in rural Minnesota
The New York Times
“Mateo Mackbee, 47, and Erin Lucas, 27, his girlfriend and business partner, moved to central Minnesota from Minneapolis two years ago. They were driven by a shared desire to bring awareness of racial inequities to rural communities,” writes Brett Anderson. A restaurant and a bakery came first. Next up is a nonprofit farm that will bring “students of color who didn’t otherwise have access to nature.”