FERN’s Friday Feed: David vs. Goliath in farm country
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Right-to-repair and the pushback against corporate power
The Conversation
“The right-to-repair movement has become the leading edge of a pushback against growing corporate power. Intellectual property protections, whether patents on farm equipment, crops, computers or cellphones, have become more intense in recent decades and cover more territory, giving companies more control over what farmers and other consumers can do with the products they buy,” writes Leland Glenna. “For farmers, few examples of those corporate constraints are more frustrating than repair restrictions and patent rights that prevent them from saving seeds from their own crops for future planting.”
The dietary upheaval that accompanies a socioeconomic shift
The New York Times
“For much of my 24 years, I was a processed-food connoisseur. The Tex-Mex dishes characteristic of the Rio Grande Valley, where I grew up, and these processed foods, distinctly American, constituted my diet through to the end of high school. About half of the Rio Grande Valley is a food desert,” writes Adrian J. Rivera. “But even those who can get something other than processed and fast food often still eat it. Almost everybody I knew ate this way, didn’t mind eating this way, enjoyed eating this way, even though they knew it was unhealthy. Today, I’m embarrassed to admit that I loved these foods, that I ate them without much of a second thought for most of my life. I’m embarrassed because I ‘know better’ now.”
How colonial rice supplanted local millet in Senegalese food
Orion Magazine
“At the end of her book, Aminata Sow Fall writes that there’s a story behind everything we put on our plates. ‘Our cuisine is the pure product of our history,’ she says, both its triumphs and its sorrows. On Tamxarit, I’m always convinced that millet could, one day, reclaim its story,” writes Jori Lewis. “And maybe it can, starting with those boisterous children doing their enthusiastic Taajaboon. After all, you need to grow up with millet to fully appreciate its finer qualities, its rich and slightly sour flavor. Rice is a neutral vehicle for sauces; it conducts flavor instead of asserting much of its own. On the night of Tamxarit, some families leave a handful of couscous out for the ancestors, an offering, because millet is more than a food. It’s a conductor of a different kind, a mode of communication, an instrument to get closer to the gods.”
The race to understand how extreme heat threatens forests
High Country News
“Simply watering trees during extreme heat makes intuitive and practical sense, but that idea is based largely on knowledge about droughts,” writes Sarah Trent. “After all, nearly all of the research on climate-related stress in trees has focused only on the impact of insufficient water. But it turns out that trees respond quite differently to extreme heat versus prolonged drought. [Chris] Still’s own research, including a new study on the heat dome, is part of a growing body of work focused on untangling the effects of both conditions. Given that extreme heat and drought are both becoming more common and intense — and won’t always coincide — foresters and tree farmers will need tools to prepare for each.”
The phosphorus paradox
The New Yorker
“Guano exports from Peru peaked in 1870. Then they dropped dramatically,” writes Elizabeth Kolbert. “But the end of the boom proved to be the beginning of something much bigger. Chemists identified other deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus, which replaced guano. When these sources were, in turn, exhausted, others were discovered, or, in the case of nitrogen, invented. Farmers can now purchase fertility as readily as they might buy seeds or plows. The result is a world awash in nutrients. This has created a new conundrum: How do we feed the planet without poisoning it?”