Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Gravy (podcast)
Moonshine, once an exclusively home-grown (and illegal) endeavor, is now a booming legal business in the South. But the appeal is as much about the story as the hooch. “Most of these contemporary, legal moonshine distillers are selling a lost narrative, they’re selling a piece of American nostalgia,” says Matt Bondurant, a novelist who wrote about his family and its moonshining in The Wettest County in the World. “The packaging and selling of moonshine really depends upon a selling of a kind of narrative of a rebellious outlaw, a distinctly Southern sort of figure.”
The Economist
“The calorie as a scientific measurement is not in dispute. But calculating the exact calorific content of food is far harder than the confidently precise numbers displayed on food packets suggest,” writes Peter Wilson. “Two items of food with identical calorific values may be digested in very different ways. Each body processes calories differently. Even for a single individual, the time of day that you eat matters. The more we probe, the more we realise that tallying calories will do little to help us control our weight or even maintain a healthy diet: the beguiling simplicity of counting calories in and calories out is dangerously flawed.”
Can Crispr be used for a more humane livestock industry?
Wired
Some scientists are trying to create gene-edited male cattle to market to ranchers who prefer males for their higher beef ratio. “For all the anxiety and ambiguity surrounding Crispr, there’s little doubt that it could revolutionize farming,” writes Gregory Barber. But “[m]any [Crispr experiments] merely aim to improve efficiency, speeding up the process that gave us broiler chickens four times the size they were in Eisenhower’s day. That fuels perceptions that gene editing will only encourage the worst inclinations of factory farming.”
What happens when restaurant staff harass patrons?
Eater
“In the midst of the #MeToo movement, restaurants have come under scrutiny for being hotbeds of harassment,” writes Tove Danovich. “Yet the conversation has largely side-stepped what happens to guests at restaurants, a grayer area that’s informed (or not) by a lack of legal accountability, the strange dynamic between server and customer, and the fact that the definition of ‘good hospitality’ varies from person to person.”
Why ‘living shorelines’ are a better defense against coastal erosion
FERN and Scientific American
Increasingly, scientists and policy makers realize that “‘living shorelines’— natural communities of salt marsh, mangrove, oyster reef, beach and coral reef”—are more effective than seawalls and other so-called armored shorelines “in a battle coastal residents have been losing for years,” writes Rowan Jacobsen. “U.S. shores are disintegrating as higher seas, stronger storms and runaway development trigger an epidemic of erosion and flood damage. Every day waves bite off another 89 hectares of the country. Every year another $500 million of property disappears.”