Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Can Syrian seeds save American wheat?
Yale Environment 360 and FERN
The Midwest wheat crop is being hit by new pests and diseases, caused by the changing climate. In FERN’s latest story, Mark Schapiro explains how the ancient seeds of wild wheat relatives, rescued from a seed bank in war-torn Syria, have become part of a breeding project in Kansas designed to imbue U.S. wheat with the resilience of its ancient relatives.
In Brazil, the fight for a million-dollar cow
The Guardian
Brazil is a global powerhouse in beef production, hoping to soon attain 40 percent of the international beef market. This effort has spawned a marketplace in the country for elite bulls, the result of extensive genetic selection whose offspring sell for high sums at auction. Beef magnates hope “to increase Brazil’s power in the international meat industry, even to the point of producing animals to be resistant to changes brought about by global warming,” Naomi Larsson writes.
Moving from ‘food desert’ to ‘food apartheid’
Guernica
In an interview with Anna Brones, activist and organizer Karen Washington discusses why the phrase “food desert” isn’t the most accurate way to describe neighborhoods that lack access to healthy food. Instead, she uses “food apartheid.” “‘[F]ood apartheid’ looks at the whole food system, along with race, geography, faith, and economics,” she tells Brones. “You say ‘food apartheid’ and you get to the root cause of some of the problems around the food system. It brings in hunger and poverty. It brings us to the more important question: What are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?”
How Big Pharma became dependent on blood from a living fossil
The Atlantic
For decades, horseshoe-crab blood, which is hypersensitive to bacterial toxins, has been used by pharmaceutical companies “to test for contamination during the manufacture of anything that might go inside the human body: every shot, every IV drip, and every implanted medical device,” writes Sarah Zhang. But this mass bleeding of the crabs—an estimated 50,000 die in the process each year—coupled with habitat loss, pollution and overfishing is finally forcing the risk-averse industry to embrace a man-made substitute for the blood that has been around for 15 years.
In France, the country’s best bread is baked by immigrants
The New York Times
France’s Grand Prize for Best Parisian Baguette has gone to immigrants for several years running. “Last year’s best baguette winner, Sami Bouattour, is also the son of a Tunisian immigrant,” writes Adam Nossiter. “Three years ago it was a baker of Senegalese origin, Djibril Bodian, a two-time winner. Two years before that it was another Tunisian.” This year, it’s the son of a Tunisian immigrant, Mahmoud M’seddi. “At a moment when President Emmanuel Macron is taking a toughening line against immigration, Mr. M’seddi’s triumph challenges the very notion of what it means to be French.” As the winner, his boulangerie also delivers baguettes each day to Macron at the Élysée Palace.