FERN’s Friday Feed: For a healthy gut, get dirty
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Gut check: Shoring up the microbiome
Cooking Light and FERN
The majority of the trillions of bacteria living in and on us—our microbiome—are in our guts, “where they are capable of influencing virtually every aspect of our health,” writes Rene Ebersole in FERN’s latest story, published with Cooking Light. The importance of a healthy microbiome has fueled a $37-billion industry in supplements and probiotic foods. But experts say that, rather than popping pills for better gut health, we should play in the dirt. Diet matters, but our overall lifestyle may matter more. “Urbanites live and work in sterile houses and offices,” Ebersole writes, while hunter-gatherer communities like the Hadza, in Tanzania, who have the most diverse microbiomes in the world, sleep on the ground, drink unfiltered water, and cook over a fire.
Construction companies lean on lower-wage agricultural visas
In These Times
In recent years, a growing number of immigrant H2A visa workers have been hired by construction companies to build large-scale industrial hog farms. But the visas aren’t intended for construction — they’re meant for agricultural workers, while construction workers can file for H2B visas. So why the spike? “H2A’s rates are based on low farmwork wages rather than higher construction pay,” write Stephen Franklin, Kristine Sherred, Jessica Villagomez, Zhejun Wang, Joseph Bullington, and Kari Lydersen. “Unlike H2A, H2B mandates overtime pay, requires that employers pay into Social Security and Medicare, and has annual caps.”
The collapse of America’s breadbasket
The New Food Economy
A fourth-generation Kansan on both sides, Corie Brown returned home to figure out where, exactly, all the people had gone. “Everywhere, I felt the absence — of people, of commerce, even of sound. The silence was broken only by a vintage pickup truck pulling up to the Downs [population, 844] grain elevator, huge mounds of excess grain piled high on the ground all around it,” Brown writes. “That image — abundance at the center of a depopulated landscape — sums up the reality of rural Kansas. Yes, the harvest continues to be bounteous. But it masks a harder truth: Kansas’s plentiful grain crop has come at the expense of nearly everything else.”
Rome’s Jews debate the artichoke
The New York Times
Rome’s 2,000-year-old Jewish community is embroiled in conflict. Some rabbis have determined that the community’s quintessential dish, carciofo alla giudia — a twice-fried artichoke — is not kosher because “a packaged version was found to contain worms and other parasites — creatures considered trayf, or nonkosher,” writes Jason Horowitz. “The fear was that because the artichoke is fried whole, it cannot be opened and properly cleaned, and so pests can penetrate the petals and infest its tender heart.” But artichoke lovers disagree, arguing the artichoke’s structure makes it impossible for insects to get inside. “At the most, a little ladybug,” one supporter said.
Memphis, 1892: A black-owned grocery becomes a ‘threat’
JSTOR Daily
Thomas Moss, the founder of The People’s Grocery, and two of his employees, were lynched outside Memphis on March 9, 1892, by a mob that feared and resented the grocery’s success in a mixed-race neighborhood. “The grocery not only brought capital to the black Memphians in the community, but also a sense of pride,” writes Damon Mitchell. Even nearly 30 years after the Civil War, “racial tensions in the South remained high. As blacks began to rid themselves of debt, white Southerners turned to racial violence, targeting blacks who they perceived as having too much ambition, property, talent, or wealth.”