FERN’s Friday Feed: California nightmare
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
California agriculture on the edge
The New Yorker
“Across the state, he said, many produce farmers were weighing the market prices of their crops against the rising cost of water. To meet their contracts, some had overplanted, and now they found it was more cost-effective to kill certain crops than to proceed with the harvest. Others had already scaled back and planted less,” writes Anna Wiener. “Farmers were throttling production, razing fields, and disposing of surplus. If these adjustments seemed crude, even unfathomable, they were in response to complex, intertwined issues: immigration policies, trade wars, a housing shortage, agribusiness monopolies, resource mismanagement, climate change, globalization, supply-chain disruption, accelerating financialization.”
Revolt of the delivery workers
New York Magazine and The Verge
“Cesar, Sergio, and three other members of their family, all of whom work delivering food, had been standing watch each night for nearly a month. They … heard about the attacks through the Facebook page they co-founded called El Diario de los Deliveryboys en la Gran Manzana, or ‘The Deliveryboys in the Big Apple Daily.’ They started it in part to chronicle the bike thefts that have been plaguing workers on the bridge and elsewhere across the city,” writes Josh Dzieza. “For Cesar and many other delivery workers, the thefts broke something loose. Some started protesting and lobbying, partnering with nonprofits and city officials to propose legislation. Cesar and the Deliveryboys took another tack, forming a civil guard.”
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The desert chefs who cook with the sun
BBC
“Ogalde belongs to a generation of cooks who have opened solar restaurants in remote parts of Chile’s sun-baked Atacama Desert, which begins just north of Villaseca, ends at the Peruvian border and is known as the driest place on Earth,” writes Mark Johanson. “The Atacama has the planet’s highest solar radiation — 30% higher, on average, than the Mojave Desert of the US Southwest — yet few residents have harnessed that energy quite so imaginatively as these homespun chefs, who were inspired by an experiment that took place in Villaseca back in 1989.”
The emotional toll of ‘dirty work’
The New Republic
From slaughterhouse workers to prison guards, American society is full of jobs most of us would rather not think about, let alone do. In his new book, Eyal Press describes this kind of labor as dirty work, “in the sense that the people who do these jobs are doing everybody else’s dirty work for them. Dirty workers carry out actions with a ‘tacit mandate’ from a society—which wants the jobs done, considers them necessary, but prefers to have the whole process kept out of its sight,” writes Jo Livingstone. “[B]ut that takes a toll on workers in the form of guilt and shame. Doing such stigmatized or morally compromised work incurs some very specific psychological effects, he argues, which in America are compounded by the fact that most of these jobs are taken not out of choice but out of economic necessity.”
The ‘culinary subversion’ of Pittsburgh’s Turkey Devonshire
Belt Magazine
“Blandi’s dish is a culinary subversion,” writes Ed Simon. “Just as John Coltrane deconstructed the vanilla melody of ‘My Favorite Things’ and made it a baroque jazz masterpiece, or Mel Brooks appropriated the Western into the Borscht Belt brilliance of Blazing Saddles, so too did Blandi zhuzh away the bland of the turkey sandwich with some bechamel and smoked paprika broiled at 350 degrees. More than comfort, what the Devonshire represents is how somebody can come to the United States, see what’s being offered, and make it better.”