FERN’s Friday Feed: Broken ribs
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Texas’ barbecue schism
The New Yorker
“[T]the once common idea that the best Texas barbecue comes from long-running small-town operations is increasingly obsolete. In 2003, the Texas legislature declared Lockhart, a small town about an hour south of Austin, the state’s official barbecue capital. Yet when Texas Monthly last published its list, in 2021, not a single Lockhart barbecue joint made the cut. Many of the places that are likely to make up this year’s list, which will be announced in May, describe what they do as ‘craft barbecue,’ a term that gained traction around a decade ago. It has come to connote high-quality meats, attentively made sides, and a chef’s rigor applied to what was at one time considered humble food. When I asked Daniel Vaughn, Texas Monthly’s full-time barbecue editor, about craft barbecue, he told me that it was a label he generally tried to avoid. ‘It signifies that other barbecue people—old-school barbecue people—aren’t paying that close attention,’ he said. I usually just call it “big-city barbecue.” And I call it that because it requires a population base of people who have enough money to support it. That just doesn’t happen in a small town.’”
From the gut
Virginia Quarterly Review
“Recent years … have seen a surge in awareness of digestive disorders—IBS, celiac disease, lactose intolerance, ulcerative colitis,” writes Will Boast. “A 2020 survey by the Rome Foundation, which promotes GI health, says that more than 40 percent of the globe suffers from a digestive disorder. Almost half the population, seemingly, feels something isn’t sitting right. … Doctors and the internet provided only partial answers, so I went looking in books, where I found a sprawling body of medical history and, surprisingly, literary history on these indelicate matters. The gastrointestinal agonies of writers, it turns out, forms practically its own canon, one that dates back almost to the beginning of Western science’s attempts to understand the digestive tract. For more than two hundred years, countless bizarre theories and treatments were adopted and feverishly promoted by men of letters, including such esteemed figures as Voltaire, Coleridge, Twain, Henry James, Kafka, and Beckett. While the root causes of our collective dyspepsia eluded me, never mind a cure, I did find strange comfort in such company. And I got some context and understanding. The literary history of indigestion, I came to see, has much to tell us about why we seem to be living, once again, in an age of the stomach.”
The plan to make America hazardous again
The Lever
“President Donald Trump’s environmental regulators are advancing a proposal to block states from warning consumers about herbicides and other agricultural products in their food, according to federal documents reviewed by The Lever. Among the substances that could now go undisclosed is a widely used chemical that some studies have linked to cancer and that Trump’s own health secretary has called a ‘poison,’” writes Freddy Brewster. “Last month, Trump issued an executive order mandating agencies ‘fully address the growing health crisis in America.’ But the initiative from Republican attorneys general — which would usurp state labeling authority — is now being moved forward by Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. The measure would declare that any label citing scientific findings not acknowledged by Trump’s EPA would ‘constitute misbranding.’”
A foot soldier in America’s losing war with chronic disease
The New York Times
“Sam had been visiting Cora every week for almost two years, helping her to lose 40 pounds, stabilize her blood sugar levels and lower her cholesterol back into the normal range, but each problem they solved revealed another,” writes Eli Saslow. “Cora and her live-in boyfriend regularly had less than $100 in their joint bank account, so she needed help applying for government assistance. She finally qualified for food stamps, but she had no way to go shopping. She occasionally managed to buy meat and vegetables, but her oven was usually broken, so instead she relied on the cheap, ultraprocessed foods that make up 73 percent of the U.S. food supply. Those foods made her sick. Her illnesses made her anxious and depressed. Anxiety raised her blood pressure and complicated her ability to manage diabetes.”
‘I told him to stop.’ The elite restaurant culture that consumed me.
The Guardian
“There was a fundamental part of me that felt turned upside-down,” writes Hannah Selinger. “Was it wrong to be grabbed by a chef during work hours in a chocolate room, even if I liked it? Was it wrong, in the aftermath, for him to have requested my silence and complicity, for him to have issued blame, claiming that if I had said anything that I would be jeopardizing his career? And surely it was wrong for him to have asked me to put a pillowcase over my head, even if it was only some infantile execution of his male fantasy? The truth – I would learn later – was that Johnny Iuzzini had a long-term girlfriend, and the casualty, in all of this, was me. When he suggested that I put a pillowcase over my head, he really did not want to see my face, the reality of me, the person behind the sex. I was just a girl in a basement who looked good in a uniform. I was just a girl at a bar after a shift. I was just a girl on a couch listening at the right time. I was just a girl whom he could ask to put a bag over her head. I was just a girl.”