FERN’s Friday Feed: As appetites waver, so do profits
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
As consumers lose their appetites, food companies scramble to keep Wall Street happy
The New York Times
“[I]n recent years, the big packaged food brands that dominated American pantries and refrigerators for decades are struggling as consumers spend less on brand-name cookies, spaghetti sauce and cream cheese. The companies are grappling with a number of stressors,” write Julie Creswell and Lauren Hirsch. “Shoppers, feeling pinched by higher food prices over the past two years, are cutting back or trading down to less expensive private labels. Others are eschewing highly processed foods for healthier, more natural items. And the continued rise of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic are reducing cravings for sugary and salty snacks. Among the debates consuming executives in boardrooms of U.S. food companies is which brands consumers are buying and avoiding — and how large and lasting the impact of the weight-loss drugs will be.”
LA’s food culture, transformed by ICE raids
The New Yorker
“The terror felt existential in the city’s food industry, which depends almost entirely on immigrant labor. In heavily Latino areas, many business owners, and their employees and patrons, were afraid to leave their homes, turning some commercial corridors into ghost towns,” writes Hannah Goldfield. “Perhaps no one seemed so vulnerable as the city’s many street-food venders: on June 12th, a popular truck in East L.A., Jason’s Tacos, was abandoned, slivers of carne asada still smoking on the grill, after ICE detained several of its workers and customers, according to the owner.”
Welcome to the Great Bear Sea
bioGraphic
“[T]he ocean off [British Columbia’s] Central Coast is some of the richest in the world,” writes Serena Renner. “Yet here, as in so many other places, stressors like overfishing and climate change are threatening this productivity and the ways of life that depend on it. … In response, the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation—like many other Indigenous peoples here and around the world—have been working to take ocean management back into their own hands. Over the past two decades, British Columbia has made strides in recognizing Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous-colonial relationships that had long been antagonistic have become more cooperative. Yet most of the progress has occurred in terrestrial environments. Now, a new network of marine protected areas (MPAs) in a region known as the Great Bear Sea is trying to bring strategies that have worked on land into the ocean.”
The hypervigilant lives of California’s undocumented farmworkers
The Guardian
“Driving into the Salinas valley, about two hours south of San Francisco, hand-painted signs fly by, advertising cherries, pistachios, avocados and garlic. From above, the valley looks like a quilt stitched together out of a thousand shades of green – the fields of lettuce, spinach and strawberries that give the region its nickname, ‘the salad bowl of the world’. Undocumented farm workers form the unseen backbone of this fertile, year-round agricultural powerhouse, where perfect growing conditions and staggered harvests keep fresh produce flowing non-stop,” writes Isabeau Doucet. “The Guardian spoke to more than a half-dozen Spanish-speaking farm workers at two farms in Salinas Valley about the unprecedented militarized raids on farms, factories, courthouses and other spaces in California this summer, and how the fear they have caused is affecting their lives, families and dreams for the future.”
Seeds of change
The Bitter Southerner
“The Mississippi Delta is as much a legend as a place,” writes Boyce Upholt. “It’s as if you’re transporting yourself into another realm, another era.” It’s a place apart, and also one that is extremely poor, “the lingering aftereffect of slavery and sharecropping. … The region is not helped by the fact that the crops grown here — cotton, first, and now corn and soybeans, too — are commodities, rendered into industrial products, often shipped abroad. It’s a stark irony: This is some of the lushest farmland on Earth, and it grows almost no food.” It’s an irony that Amanda Delperdang is working to change, turning a “30-acre overgrown lot” into “the Mississippi Delta Nature and Learning Center. … This summer … Delperdang has hired five ‘garden interns,’ teenagers who are planting beans and hot peppers, squash and carrots, plums and apple trees. The crops look a little ‘higgly piggly,’ as Delperdang says, laughing — because it turns out you shouldn’t assume teenagers know what you mean when you ask them to ‘plant a row.’ Still, make no mistake: This is not just a garden, but a farm, she insists. … ‘a place that cares for the earth and the people who live here.’ Which, despite its seeming simplicity, is a quietly radical reenvisioning of the Mississippi Delta.”