FERN’s Friday Feed: Can the USDA make amends?
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Can $3 billion convince Black farmers to trust the USDA?
FERN and NPR (audio)
“The Biden administration’s $3.1 billion Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grant program hopes to convince farmers and ranchers to adopt practices that will reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon in the ground. It also seeks to make amends for a century of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the grants,” writes Amy Mayer. “It is a laudable goal, but one that faces many obstacles. The climate-smart partnerships are just underway, but it’s clear that some of the biggest projects—the ones that got the most taxpayer money and are led by giant for-profit companies and major agricultural lobbying groups—have not thought through in any detail how they will serve BIPOC farmers.”
Steve Ells is still trying to solve lunch
New York Magazine
“At Hudson Eats, an upscale food court in lower Manhattan, the bankers and media workers descending from nearby office towers can find anything they dream of for lunch — so long as they dream in bowl form,” writes Elizabeth G. Dunn. “This is the way untold millions of Americans eat lunch now: by shuffling through a base → protein → toppings assembly process, then shoveling the $18 result into their mouths. At noon on a recent weekday, Steve Ells, who founded Chipotle Mexican Grill and is therefore among the people directly responsible for the dominance of this fast-casual format, joins the masses for lunch … For the past two years, Ells has been attempting to create the restaurant of tomorrow in a test kitchen a few miles uptown, with an ever-growing team of chefs, industrial designers, coders, and hardware engineers. The menu will be plant-based and robot-powered; human interaction will be kept to a minimum; the food will not come in the form of an agglomerated bowl. It’s called Kernel, and this month it’s scheduled to open to the public on Park Avenue South, in between a Cava and a Just Salad.”
Are $18 Big Macs the price of falling inequality?
Vox
“[I]n late December, the socialist commentator Doug Henwood noted that a far more important economic indicator showed the US economy in crisis, posting on X, ‘Can’t imagine why people think this isn’t a great economy. Lunch for three at McDonald’s: $44!!’ Many liberals proceeded to accuse Henwood of tacitly lamenting fast food workers’ wage gains. After all, such workers had secured large raises in recent years, thereby increasing their employers’ labor costs, and thus, menu prices,” writes Eric Levitz. “Nevertheless, Henwood is far from alone in bristling at inflation in the quick eats sector … And for progressives, such discontent may be symptomatic of a genuine political challenge. Reducing wage inequality typically requires increasing the cost of labor-intensive services, at least for a period. In the long run, thinning the ranks of the working poor can leave almost everyone in society better off. In the short term, however, middle-class households can experience low-income workers’ wage gains as a burden.”
The next generation of catering is coming for your dinner party
Eater
“As in-person socializing continues its comeback, the concurrent return of the dinner party has engendered a new slate of companies that will, in effect, hold dinner parties for those who don’t want to do the cooking,” writes Jaya Saxena. “But if you scroll through their websites and Instagram accounts, you will never see the word “catering.” Instead, customers can ‘reserve a feast’ for up to 12 people from critically lauded restaurants around the country. They can host an ‘intimate dining event’ with a chef from Per Se or Tatiana in the kitchen of a private penthouse. They can ‘turn [their] home into a restaurant.’ Welcome to the New Catering. Or, at least, welcome to it being easier than ever to eat a restaurant chef’s food in your home. It’s an arrangement that many chefs and restaurants are hoping is the key to their survival.”
How Mississippi agriculture’s ‘middle class’ got squeezed out
Mississippi Today
“In the early 1930s, Mississippi had over 300,000 farmers, the most ever recorded for the state in federal census records. The last survey, from 2017, listed just around 55,000. In the 1930s, the average farm size was around 50 acres. Today, it’s over 300 acres. For decades from the early to mid 20th Century, Black farmers outnumbered white farmers in the state,” writes Alex Rozier. “Today, 86% of Mississippi’s farmers are white. While agriculture is still the top employer in the state, who farms, what they farm, and who they sell to has changed greatly over the last century. Victim to many of those changes, experts say, is the so-called ‘middle class’ of farmers.”