FERN’s Friday Feed: Floods, fires and a farmworker food crisis
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Extreme weather creates food crisis for California farmworkers
FERN and Here & Now
“Farmworker food insecurity has been a problem for years. The federal government doesn’t keep data on this, but the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that between 1.1 million and 1.9 million farmworkers and their family members don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” reports Teresa Cotsirilos. “Now, with wildfires, heat waves, drought, and floods taking a toll on California’s farmland, some farm laborers are working less, if at all.”
Making sense of the deluge in California
The New York Times
“The great deluge of 2023 has come and gone and left us Californians wondering what to make of it all,” writes Mark Arax. “Do we shake our fists at the sky or thank the heavens? How to apprehend the loss of life and property alongside the gift of rain and snow that might break a decade’s drought? In a state a thousand miles long with 100 million acres of wildly different landscapes inside it, the way we tell the story depends on which California we call home.”
NIMBY-ism comes for oyster farmers
Hakai Magazine
“Oyster farmers across the United States and parts of Canada are being confronted by a growing population of coastal residents who are upset about where farms are going up. Along the US East Coast, as well as in other prime oyster-growing regions such as Washington State and British Columbia, tempers have flared. Coastal homeowners are making passionate speeches at local meetings and enlisting lawyers, as Devon Yacht Club did, to help appeal farm leases they deem are too close to where they live and play. ‘It’s probably as contentious as it’s ever been,’ says Ben Stagg, who, until the end of 2022 was chief of shellfish management at the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, an agency that manages that state’s oyster leases.”
The species declared extinct in 2022
The Revelator
“In 2022, scientists announced that they had given up efforts to find dozens of long-lost species, including two frogs, one of the world’s biggest fish, an orchid from Florida, a grass from New Hampshire and many others,” writes John R. Platt. “And those are just the ones we know about. Another 2022 study warned about the threat of ‘dark extinction,’ the loss of species science has never even identified as having existed in the first place. By conservative estimates, millions of species are yet to be discovered, identified and named, and most are at risk of disappearing before that ever happens as humanity continues its relentless expansion. And if we don’t know they exist, we can’t do anything to save them.”
The secrets of saliva
Knowable Magazine
“Scientists have long understood some of saliva’s functions: It protects the teeth, makes speech easier and establishes a welcoming environment for foods to enter the mouth, writes Chris Gorski. “But researchers are now finding that saliva is also a mediator and a translator, influencing how food moves through the mouth and how it sparks our senses. Emerging evidence suggests that interactions between saliva and food may even help to shape which foods we like to eat.”