Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How food insecurity affects children
Civil Eats
An emerging body of research is helping to clarify how children experience food insecurity. Researchers at Rutgers University and North Carolina State University interviewed dozens of the 13 million American children and teenagers who experience some food insecurity, finding that they often “help” address the issue at home by skipping meals, chipping in for grocery bills, and sleeping away hunger pains. “They recognize when their parents pretend not to be hungry in order to save food,” writes Lela Nargi. “They know the cycles of hunger—that there’s more food in the house after food stamps arrive, and less as the month progresses. They know their parents prioritize feeding their children before themselves.”
The cookbook vs. the scientist
The New Yorker
Brian Wansink, the beleaguered Cornell researcher whose once-groundbreaking food science has come under fire for data manipulation, has been busier than we thought. He recently attempted to throw the beloved cookbook “The Joy of Cooking” under the bus, claiming that it has contributed to the obesity epidemic. The book’s current keepers, the author’s great-grandson and his wife, decided to fight back with a little research of their own. “They posted a response on the “Joy” Web site,” writes Helen Rosner, “criticizing some of Wansink’s methods and calling attention to his sample size—out of the approximately forty-five hundred recipes that appear in later editions, he’d chosen eighteen, a mere 0.004 per cent of the book’s content.”
What’s in an egg spoon?
The New York Times
It started out simple enough—Alice Waters made an egg over a fire in an “egg spoon,” a single-purpose cast iron implement, on 60 Minutes. But soon after, “the lines were drawn. On one side were those who viewed cooking an egg over a fire as the embodiment of food elitism and all that is annoying about the Slow Food Movement,” writes Kim Severson. “In the opposing camp were people happy to discover a slow, delicious way to make those farm eggs that they had worked so hard to find.” Severson explores whether, at a time when cooking’s long legacy of sexism is being examined, the egg spoon controversy is yet another example of woman cooks being undermined.
Tabasco’s uncertain future
The Guardian
For 150 years, all Tabasco sauce has been produced at one factory in Avery Island, Louisiana, where the company’s founder first encountered the namesake pepper. But rising sea levels are threatening the fate of the kitchen staple. “The Avery Island marshes are retreating by around 30ft a year as salt water seeps in, ushered in by canals dug by the oil and gas industry and the level of the land itself, which is gradually sinking by around a third of an inch a year,” writes Oliver Milman. “A further sea level increase of 2ft, almost certain given the warming that’s already occurred, will leave only the lofty core of Avery Island dry.”
Sustainable salmon, by land or by sea?
PRI’s The World
Off the shores of British Columbia and Washington State, there are more than 60 open-water salmon farms. Critics of the farms–including members of the Namgis First Nation, one of British Columbia’s indigenous communities, who have long relied on wild-caught salmon–say that farmed fish are introducing new parasites into the wild fish population and threatening their numbers. So a new solution has been introduced: a salmon farm on land. “Inside [the facility], hundreds of salmon glint greenish in big round tanks, where they feed and grow until they’re ready for harvest,” writes Eilis O’Neill. The tanks produce about 12,000 pounds of fish each week.