Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Facing down the next farm crisis
Civil Eats
The combination of low crop prices, ongoing consolidation, and a trade war is leading some to wonder whether we’re headed for a second farm crisis, an echo of the crisis of the 1980s, when thousands of farm businesses closed. “For well over a year, worries about a new farm crisis have rippled across rural America,” writes Siena Chrisman. “Grain and dairy farmers were beginning to see a repeat of the ’80s as their prices dropped this spring—and then President Trump started a trade war. Retaliatory agricultural tariffs have kicked this new farm crisis into high gear.”
Andrew Zimmern’s lasting success
The New York Times
Andrew Zimmern is one of the hardest-working guys in food media, with a new restaurant, children’s book, and endless speaking engagements packing his schedule. “In an age of reckoning over sexual harassment and the rise of global American cuisine that rejects cultural appropriation, the man who once sold T-shirts printed with the slogan ‘Food Woody’ and made a career eating coconut grubs and raw pig testicles in other countries should be getting pummeled by ratings and torn up on social media,” writes Kim Severson. “But so far, the opposite is happening. He has never been more successful or more popular.”
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!
What are fishing rights, if there are no fish?
The New Food Economy
“Like many tribes in the Pacific Northwest, the [Yurok Tribe of Northern California] had to fight hard to gain the fishing rights granted to them by government treaties generations ago,” writes Tove Danovich. “The so-called ‘fish wars’ or ‘fish-ins’ (in the style of Civil Rights lunch counter protests) pitted the tribes against police, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (UFWS), and other government agencies, until the courts finally decreed during the 1970s that Native Americans be allowed to fish the rivers as they had for thousands of years.” But mismanagement of waterways has led to a depletion of the fish population in the Klamath River, prompting an economic crisis for the Yurok community. (For more on the Yurok culture of fishing, check out this FERN story from last year.)
Fifty years later, Still Hungry In America is still a punch in the gut
Gravy
Earlier this year, the Southern Foodways Alliance re-released Al Clayton’s 1969 book, which remains sadly relevant. “Clayton’s photographs deal with a topic that was difficult for viewers to confront in 1968,” writes Ralph Eubanks, “and is still difficult fifty years later: the existence of hungry Americans who live in poverty and see no way to escape from it. Both yesterday and today, the hungry seem to live on a hidden plane, whether it’s the homeless person we casually stroll past on a city street or the rusting house trailers we ignore that punctuate the Southern landscape. Poverty is still invisible, and Clayton sought to make it visible.”
Scurvy, citrus and the birth of La Cosa Nostra
Aeon
In the first half of the 19th century, global demand for lemons, as a way to prevent scurvy, spurred a booming export market for citrus in Sicily. Even after the reunification of Italy in 1860, Sicily remained a lawless place, and the lemon growers needed protection for their valuable crop. “Landowners began engaging local groups of … strongmen to protect the valuable lemon groves,” writes Ola Olsson. “At the same time, this ‘protection’ sometimes took on the character of extortion, and was more or less forced upon citrus growers.”