FERN’s Friday Feed: Flour power
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The pandemic has slowed, but indie flour mills are still booming
Slate
“In the thick of last spring’s lockdowns, a national inclination toward hoarding and kitchen experimentation knocked the American flour industry completely out of whack,” writes Linni Kral. “Classic bleached all-purpose flour … became a black-market commodity and yeast suffered a similar fate, plunging homebound bakers into the confusing world of sourdough fermentation. While that craze has mellowed some (when was the last time you fed your starter?), another baking bubble has yet to burst—and that’s indie flour milling.”
Ag runoff, climate change and Turkey’s sea-snot crisis
The Atlantic
“Slime in the sea is not inherently unusual,” writes Sarah Zhang. “But in healthy waters, mucus doesn’t amass to epic proportions. The current sea-snot outbreak can be blamed on phytoplankton, a type of algae that produces the small bits of mucus that turn into flakes of marine snow. When these phytoplankton receive an infusion of imbalanced nutrients from fertilizer runoff or untreated wastewater, they make an overabundance of mucus … For months, this foul mucus has blanketed the Sea of Marmara … It’s smothering shellfish, clogging nets, and destroying the fishing industry.”
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Meet the New Food, same as the Old Food
The Nation
“If our food system is broken, it’s because we have industrialized food, processed food, snack foods, fast foods—all of the things that underpin how we eat today versus how we ate 100 years ago,” says Larissa Zimberoff in this Q&A about her new book, Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat. “New Food—as I call it in my book—is technology, and it’s going to be used to industrialize, process, and further distill these ingredients into single items. They’re not changing the food system; they’re just replacing one industrial product for another. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book.”
About that paleo diet…
Nature
Over the past four years, discoveries at Göbekli Tepe, a vast archeological site in southern Turkey, suggest “that the people who built these ancient structures were fuelled by vat-fulls of porridge and stew, made from grain that the ancient residents had ground and processed on an almost industrial scale,” writes Andrew Curry. “The clues … reveal that ancient humans relied on grains much earlier than was previously thought — even before there is evidence that these plants were domesticated.” This “work is part of a growing movement to take a closer look at the role that grains and other starches had in the diet of people in the past … shred[ding] the long-standing idea that early people subsisted mainly on meat.”
How the need for water shaped human evolution
Scientific American
“Throughout history people have drastically engineered their environments to ensure access to water,” writes Asher Y. Rosinger. “Without enough water, our physical and cognitive functions decline. Without any, we die within a matter of days. In this way, humans are more dependent on water than many other mammals are. Recent research has illuminated the origins of our water needs—and how we adapted to quench that thirst. It turns out that much as food has shaped human evolution, so, too, has water.”