FERN’s Friday Feed: Garbage diet
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Is junk food bad for wild animals?
The Atlantic
“As cities have grown and green spaces have shrunk, many wild animals, especially those in the Western world, have adopted diets that look an awful lot like ours. Squirrels snarf hard taco shells [and] subway rats chow down on pizza. For at least some creatures, the menu changes seem to come with consequences. Raccoons that spend their days feasting on trash have higher blood sugar, heavier bodies, and crummier teeth than their wilder counterparts; bears that forage on human food hibernate less and show signs that their cells may age atypically fast,” writes Katherine J. Wu. “Maybe, in inheriting our mediocre diets, wild animals are picking up a bunch of our health problems too. But laying down such a verdict is trickier than it might sound.”
A Ukrainian garden tells the story of a violated country
New Lines Magazine
For the organizers, ‘What Does Not Burn,’ an exhibition last summer at the Hampton Court Flower Show in the U.K., “celebrated ‘the spirit of a people deeply connected to their land who are willing to sacrifice what is most sacred to remain an independent nation.’ One element that struck me as charged with meaning is barley,” writes Dina Gusejnova. “As the most resilient of the edible crops, it symbolizes both the fertility of Ukrainian soil and its traumatic past. During the 1920s and ’30s, a combination of Soviet central planning, deportations and social engineering brought about a famine … Ukrainians, with their fertile chernozem soil and developed farming, were harmed by these policies more than any other ethnic group … In the 21st century, Ukraine remains one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of grain, including basic commodities such as wheat, corn, sunflower oil and barley. Before the escalation of the current war, Ukraine was exporting between 13% and 17% of the world’s barley.”
The monopsony problem
Washington Monthly
“For years, the only supermarket serving the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota was run-down and a threat to public health,” writes Phillip Longman. “So leaders of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were thrilled when, in 2018, they persuaded [R.F. Buche] an experienced grocer to buy the store and commit to running it right … But two big problems remain. The first is affordability. To stock his store, Buche has to pay wholesale prices that are often nearly double what Walmart pays and must pass on much of that cost to his customers. The second is that when national shortages of critical items like baby formula emerge, Buche [is] often the hardest hit … Yet while these problems may be extreme on the Pine Ridge reservation and in other very poor places, Americans everywhere are also harmed in serious ways by the zombie policy idea that has created these inequities.”
Toxic chemical burn has Ohio farm owners on edge
The New York Times
“When the Norfolk Southern freight train careened off the tracks this month and left a fiery heap of wreckage on the outskirts of East Palestine, Ohio, a town of roughly 4,700 people, it upended an area where generations of families could afford to buy acres of land, raise horses and plant gardens, hunt deer and birds and build lives undisturbed by the chaos of bigger cities nearby,” writes Emily Cochrane. “Although farming provides only a small number of jobs in the immediate area, many residents say that raising livestock and working the land are profoundly important to their way of life.”
In cod’s shadow, redfish rise
Hakai Magazine
“In the North Atlantic, the trajectory following fisheries collapse has not been forgiving. Even decades after overfishing drove seemingly inexhaustible species like Atlantic cod off a precipice, many populations—most notably, of Atlantic cod—have remained stubbornly low. But in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, an exception to the rule is emerging from the depths,” writes Moira Donovan. “[S]tocks of redfish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that were once fished so intensively they were put under a moratorium are now making a heroic—if mysterious—comeback: a return measured not in one fish or two fish, but in the millions of tonnes.”