FERN’s Friday Feed: Grapefruit, friend or foe?
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
No one can decide if grapefruit is dangerous
The Atlantic
“[F]or every grapefruit evangelist, there is a critic warning of its dangers—probably one with a background in pharmacology. The fruit, for all its tastiness and dietetic appeal, has another, more sinister trait: It raises the level of dozens of FDA-approved medications in the body, and for a select few drugs, the amplification can be potent enough to trigger a life-threatening overdose,” writes Katherine J. Wu. “But that leaves grapefruit in a bit of a weird position. No one can agree on exactly how much the world should worry about this bittersweet treat whose chemical properties scientists still don’t fully understand.”
A frontline city’s last food stand keeps the pizza coming
The New York Times
“It takes just over a minute to microwave the mini pizza that Andriy Shved sells in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In that same amount of time, a high explosive shell could land, shattering windows, maiming customers or demolishing his snack stand in a neighborhood increasingly bombarded by Russian artillery,” write Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak. “But despite the risks that come with any order, the oblong cheese, meat and dill pie is a top seller among the Ukrainian soldiers and residents who make up the dwindling customer base. Mr. Shved thinks his food stall is the last one open in the battered city, a pivotal battleground in the nearly 10-month old war.”
Finding inspiration in the world’s largest menu collection
Taste
“[A]fter a lunch of mulligatawny soup and roast mutton on a wintry New Year’s Day in 1900, Miss Frank E. Buttolph struck upon a novel idea. ‘I stopped in the Columbia Restaurant for lunch and thought it might be interesting to file a bill of fare at the library,’ Buttolph wrote in a letter dated February 14, noting the restaurant that was located in Manhattan’s Union Square. ‘A week later the thought occurred, why not preserve others?’ Buttolph — whose given name was Frances but who preferred to be addressed as Frank — was already an avid collector of postcards with pictures of lighthouses,” writes Adam Reiner. “Preserving menus suited her penchant for collecting unique and colorful ephemera.”
Killing the Colorado River
ProPublica
“[T]he Colorado River system is in a state of collapse. It is a collapse hastened by climate change but also a crisis of management,” writes Abrahm Lustgarten. “In 1922, the seven states in the river basin signed a compact splitting the Colorado equally between its upper and lower halves; later, they promised additional water to Mexico, too. Near the middle, they put Lake Powell, a reserve for the northern states, and Lake Mead, a storage node for the south. Over time, as an overheating environment has collided with overuse, the lower half — primarily Arizona and California — has taken its water as if everything were normal, straining both the logic and the legal interpretations of the compact. They have also drawn extra releases from Lake Powell, effectively borrowing straight out of whatever meager reserves the Upper Basin has managed to save there.”
All together now: clean drinking water is a human right
Esquire
“[T]hings fall off the radar. I get that. And the technology of the radar is so accelerated at this point that something can fall off before any of us notice that it’s on the radar in the first place,” writes Charles P. Pierce. “The only way it can get back on the radar, and this is usually a longshot, is if a situation either recurs, or it gets worse. Let us return, then, to Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, where people either never got clean drinking water back, or they lost it again. On December 23, it got cold in Jackson and the pipes froze and failed, and this was on the same day that the president signed a bill that would provide $600 million to repair the entire water system.”