Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The pasta industry’s quest to make pasta healthy
BuzzFeed
Maybe you’ve seen some optimistic articles recently claiming that pasta is good for you. Well, look again. It turns out the studies driving those headlines were funded by Big Pasta. “At least 10 peer-reviewed studies about pasta published since 2008 were either funded directly by Barilla or, like the one published this month, were carried out by scientists who have had financial ties to the company, which reported sales of 3.4 billion euros ($4.2 billion) in 2016,” writes Stephanie M. Lee. “And the company hired the large public relations firm Edelman to push the latest study’s findings to journalists.”
In poultry-dominated region, regulation is an uphill battle
InsideClimate News
On the Delmarva peninsula, the poultry industry has a political and economic grip on the community. But residents are pushing back against the environmental effects of the hundreds of chicken houses, each housing tens of thousands of birds, that have taken over this finger of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. “They’re tired, they say, of seeing bucket-loaders routinely dump hundreds of dead chickens into ‘mortality composters,’” writes FERN contributor Georgina Gustin. “They’re tired, they say, of the smell, of driving home on roads flecked with manure, or pulling into their driveways at night through showers of manure particles and feathers that drift past headlights like falling snow.”
Inside the warehouse where TV’s fake food lives
Eater
Nearly 25 percent of the inventory of Prop Heaven, a prop rental company popular among television and movie producers, is food-related. At the company’s warehouse, you can find a full farmer’s market set, a bakery, and thousands of fake fruits and vegetables. “On a pretty ordinary Tuesday afternoon, by 2 p.m., Prop Heaven had already shipped pieces to over 30 shows,” writes Alexandra Ilyashov. “[W]hile Central Perk was a permanent set on Friends, basically any restaurant scene outside that beloved, fictitious coffee shop included rentals from Prop Heaven.”
Republicans still don’t know how they’d pay for SNAP overhaul
Politico
The Republican draft of the farm bill that passed the House Agriculture Committee last week would expand work requirements and job training for people on food stamps. But, writes Helena Bottemiller Evich, “[t]here’s little evidence the training program actually works, let alone that it can be scaled up quickly to enroll hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new participants.” Anti-hunger advocates are protesting the plan, arguing it will drive millions of SNAP participants away from the program.
A message—and some rice—in a bottle
The Washington Post
Twice a month, a group of South Korean activists tosses hundreds of plastic water bottles, filled with rice, medicine, and USB drives containing movies and other information, into the Han River. The hope is that they float downstream to North Korea, where hunger—for food, facts, and fun—is rampant. “The three pounds of rice in each bottle, donated by South Korean churches, is worth about two months’ salary for a state worker in North Korea,” writes Anna Fifield. And, Lee Soon-shil, one of the activists who escaped from North Korea a decade ago, says: “Change doesn’t happen when people are hungry.”