FERN’s Friday Feed: After Hurricane Florence, what’s next for hog farming?
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Reflecting on hog farming after Florence
Daily Yonder
In the wake of Hurricane Florence’s enormous environmental and economic impact on rural communities, a fifth-generation Missouri farmer reflects on the current conventions of large-scale livestock agriculture. “There are better ways to raise hogs than the way it is now,” writes Richard Oswald. But reform efforts are “currently being fought tooth and nail by big agribusiness and producer groups who take no hesitation in placing hog towns next to clean air, clean water, small town rural America that sits in the eye of the storm.”
How one small-town restaurant is taking on President Trump
The New Yorker
A small, “all-organic, sourcing-obsessed, vegetarian-friendly” restaurant in a remote area of Utah has become embroiled in a lawsuit against President Trump since he announced he would shrink the size of the Grand Staircase national monument. “Put a road through Grand Staircase and you don’t just bisect it; as the science writer David Quammen once observed, you tear it in half, like fabric, and the natural world on both sides begins to unravel,” writes Kathryn Schulz. “In Grand Staircase, that logic extends to the human world as well. Whole communities and careers and lives have grown up around the monument; now, with its protections gone, those are threatening to come apart as well.”
FERN Talks & Eats is coming to Brooklyn on October 1st!
Join us for an engaging panel discussion that will delve into the #MeToo movement and issues of equity and inclusion in the restaurant business. Amanda Cohen, chef at Dirt Candy and one of our panelists, wrote an essay about this in Esquire, highlighting the media’s neglect of women chefs until the current scandals. “Women may not have value as chefs, but as victims we’re finally interesting!” she wrote. We’ll hear about the ways that #MeToo intersects with race, gender, class and identity politics – ultimately influencing the food on our plates. We’ll hear personal stories, discuss the problematic past, and reimagine a future restaurant culture. It’s a discussion that’s nothing if not timely. We hope you’ll join us. Tickets available!
Wansink’s fall points to need for more skepticism about buzzy food science
The Atlantic
As head of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, Brian Wansink became famous for gimmicky studies that suggested obesity could be solved with smaller plates and specific music. Then, with a number of those studies retracted, he was forced out at Cornell after an investigation found “academic misconduct.” “It’s tempting to believe … that smaller portions lead us to eat less,” writes James Hamblin. “But the real lesson here seems to be that it’s exactly those sorts of findings of which we need to most consciously train ourselves to remain skeptical—to remember that science is about asking questions, not pursuing answers.”
The unknown future of the ‘wheatie’
Civil Eats
For nearly a century, custom wheat cutters—”wheaties”—have harvested wheat from Texas to Montana. “Wheat, like all commodity crops, must be harvested at just the right moisture level—not too dry that it loses nutrition, and not too wet that it can’t be stored for many months in a silo or grain elevator,” writes Michael Dax. But wheat harvesters are facing growing challenges to their livelihoods. “Climatic changes, increasing competition from global markets, changes in cropland, increasing overhead costs, deficient government policies, and the depopulation of rural America have coalesced to cast doubt on the future of custom cutting.”
From the bellies of goats to the mouths of kings
JSTOR Daily
In early modern Europe, a global market developed around “bezoars,” strange lumps formed in the stomachs of goats after the beasts swallowed an indigestible hair, which was then bathed in stomach acid, gathering layers—much as a pearl develops inside an oyster. “Smooth, lustrous, and dung-colored, bezoars range in size from pebbles to goose eggs,” writes Amelia Soth, noting they were worth “three times their weight in gold.” Worn as jewelry or dissolved in water or wine and drunk, bezoars were believed to “banish fever, melancholia, even plague. Most famously, they were supposed to counteract any poison, making them a must-have for paranoid monarchs.”