FERN’s Friday Feed: Baking for the vote
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How women used cookbooks to fight for voting rights
Eater
“Mary Poppins came out in 1964, long after women got the right to vote both in the U.K. and the U.S., but Mrs. Banks embodies many of the Victorian arguments against women’s suffrage (and, incidentally, 1960s — and 2020s — arguments against women having jobs): If women began taking part in public life, who would take care of life at home?” writes Aimee Levitt. “The children would run amok! … The men would … starve! Society would collapse! All because women wanted to have five minutes alone in a booth with a ballot.” The early suffragists “also needed money to run their campaigns and publish their newspapers and organize their marches. Fortunately, a model for women’s fundraising already existed. During the Civil War, women … couldn’t fight or hold public office and many of them didn’t have money of their own, but they knew how to cook. They could bake cakes. They could make pickles and jam. They could compile their best recipes into cookbooks. And then they could sell these things for money that they wouldn’t have to turn over to their husbands.”
Southern clam culture?
The Bitter Southerner
“Clams don’t take up much space, if any, in the South’s culinary consciousness. A year ago,” writes Caroline Hatchett, “if pressed, I couldn’t have named a single Southern clam dish or notable clamming town. It is true. Beachgoers don’t load up in cars and head to Hilton Head as they do on the Cape, walking, buckets in hand, to the shore to clam. Southern clambakes (yes, they do exist) aren’t the stuff of American holidays and mythmaking. But our coasts hold an older truth, if you know where to look, and if gated communities haven’t swallowed it up and rising sea levels haven’t washed it away. Middens, those heaps of refuse formed by Indigenous people, stand testament to ancient clam harvests and roasts. More often than not, near those whitewashed mounds — in fishing villages and off barrier islands — folks are clamming still, some for fun and others to feed families across the country.”
Helene leaves North Carolina farms with toxic, depleted soil
The Guardian
“It’s not just a question of what Helene, now the nation’s deadliest hurricane since Katrina, took. It’s also a question of what it left behind: tons of soil, sediment and toxic sludge in places where it shouldn’t be – including covering our region’s farms,” writes Chris Smith. “Any farmer who understands sustainable, regenerative or organic agriculture practices will tell you that soil is life. It teems with microbes, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthropods, other insects and animals. All that soil life has a deep relationship with the plants via their roots. The plants trade carbs and sugars for essential nutrients and water from the soil’s underground microbiology. This complex, invisible collaboration breaks down when soil is submerged, and life begins to die.”
Tapping waste heat from Bitcoin mining to grow food
Ambrook Research
“For many people, cryptocurrencies exist as a quintessential artifact of the digital age. A financial abstraction. A human contrivance. It’s hard to think of anything less organic, less biological, less living than a Bitcoin,” writes Luke Carneal. “A garden-fresh tomato, on the other hand, is a basic unit of the natural world. Its warm red flesh — sometimes purple, sometimes yellow-green — feels self-evidently full of life in your palm. We all know what a tomato is. But for some Bitcoin miners, this seeming incompatibility between agriculture and the world of crypto is actually an opportunity for symbiosis.”
Can a ‘million-acre grocery store’ be revived?
High Country News
“A few miles outside Pullman, Washington, a remnant of the Palouse Prairie lies on a small hill, surrounded by undulating wheat fields and studded with cracked and weathered headstones from the late 1800s. More than 100 plant species bloom here at Whelan Cemetery, including pink prairie smoke, purple lupine and yellow arrowleaf balsamroot. Two centuries ago,” writes Kylie Mohr, “before settlers came to the Palouse, these plants were part of what Melodi Wynne, a citizen of the Spokane Tribe, describes as a ‘million-acre grocery store.’ The fertile, well-drained soils of the Palouse, which stretches from the forests of northern Idaho south to the Snake River, were carpeted with grasses and wildflowers, many with roots that have long been used for food and medicine by the Nez Perce, Palouse, Coeur d’Alene, Spokane and other Indigenous peoples … Beginning in the mid-1800s, though, settlers forced Indigenous peoples onto reservations across the Pacific and Inland Northwest and converted the prairie to cropland … But the soil remains rich with root matter from the plants that once grew here, and some locals believe that it’s possible not only to preserve what is left of the Palouse but to bring it back — one front yard, school parking lot and apartment complex at a time.”