Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The everyday foods demonized by Britain’s class wars
The Guardian
“It is perhaps in the domain of food that Britain’s sentinels of class stand guard the most sternly, dobbing people in for perceived culinary transgressions and demarcating what might, in a nod to Nancy Mitford, be called W (working-class) and non-W foods,” writes Jonathan Nunn. “It’s a bizarrely infantilising view, one that assumes that an interest in better or different foodstuffs is class treason and that puts people in clearly defined boxes, just as much as the identity politics that these commentators supposedly rail against.”
Do a restaurant’s good deeds absolve so-so food?
Gravy
“In recent years, a new kind of restaurant has emerged—one that attempts to combine destination-worthy cooking with a philanthropic calling,” writes John Kessler. “Jon Bon Jovi’s JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurants in New Jersey serve simple meals to paying customers and those in need. If someone can’t pay, they can trade their family’s meal for a work shift. Staplehouse in Atlanta … has been labeled the best new restaurant in America by Bon Appétit. All of its profits go to … a nonprofit foundation to help hospitality workers in need. No critic would subject JBJ Soul Kitchen to a review, while every ambitious critic in America jockeys for a table at Staplehouse. But … [a]t what point do you applaud the mission rather than critique the food?”
The food media’s culturally loaded ‘archive repair’ efforts
Columbia Journalism Review
“Last summer, as the country reeled from the murder of George Floyd and the police killing of Breonna Taylor, American food media went through its own race-related upheaval,” writes Navneet Alang. “For some media outlets, accountability meant a confrontation with their own archives … Critics … seized on the idea of archival repair, suggesting that it threatened the sanctity of the historical record … But if permanence is the defining characteristic of an archive, then the very nature of the Web—expansive but also impermanent, subject to content drift and link rot and the sudden, widespread deletion of whole online communities—undercuts it.”
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African swine fever arrives on U.S.’s doorstep
Wired
African swine fever, which was detected in the Dominican Republic in July, “poses no risk to humans, but it is incredibly destructive to livestock,” writes Maryn McKenna. In China it has killed “millions of pigs, at least one-quarter—and possibly one-half—of the entire herd of the world’s largest pork producer. In the United States, animal health authorities are now on high alert. The US Department of Agriculture has pledged an emergency appropriation of $500 million to ramp up surveillance and keep the disease from crossing borders. African swine fever is so feared internationally that, if it were found in the US, pork exports—worth more than $7 billion a year—would immediately shut down.”
Why is Arkansas the driest state in America?
The Bitter Southerner
“In Arkansas, 34 of 75 counties are dry. The morality of a dry county, given how many people drive down the road drinking and tossing empty beer cans out the window, is lost on me,” writes Alice Driver. “I wondered why dry counties continued to exist and why Arkansas has the most in the country. When I started writing this essay a year ago, I wanted it to be about alcohol as a territory for exploration, about geography, soil, history, and the poetic language of wine and spirits. I wanted it to be about all the things I never learned growing up in a dry county where alcohol is sin. But my research took me in another direction. It led me to the Ku Klux Klan, to crystal collectors and anti-vaxxers. It left me even more puzzled about the spirit of this place.”