FERN’s Friday Feed: Ice melts, new food emerges, angst grows
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
GQ
“As the ice sheet that covers 80 percent of the island had begun to melt, tubers had begun to appear again from the dirt of old Norse farms,” writes Michael Paterniti. “There were more potatoes and a celery-like herb called angelica. There were turnips, carrots, and even juicy strawberries … With global warming, the whole fundamental idea of Greenlandic cuisine was in the throes of reconsideration and change. If food is identity, one of the urgent questions in Greenland these days seemed to be, how, exactly, are you supposed to approach and create and ingest that identity as it melts into some new form?”
A food writer fantasized about his kids’ eating habits; then they were born
The Washington Post
He’d heard about the phase in which kids eat only pasta. “So while my kid might insist on noodles, I would work within that limit to inspire his juvenile palate with all manner of glutenous delights,” writes J.J. Goode. “Garganelli with ragu, penne with pesto, orecchiette with sausage and kale. Now, I have two kids, a 5-year-old and an almost 2-year-old. Come dinnertime, I boil plenty of water, salt it lavishly, and consider tossing my caviling kindergartner and terror of a toddler right in.”
FERN Talks & Eats NYC – Surf ‘n’ Turf
Panel: Can our seafood survive Big Ag and climate change?
As oceans warm, our major fisheries are shifting. At the same time, farm runoff is contributing to dead zones from the Gulf of Mexico to Long Island. Both of these issues – climate change and farming practices – affect the health of ocean ecosystems and, ultimately, the seafood that winds up on our plates.
Come to our panel discussion Feb. 10, 2020, 7:30 p.m., at Subculture in New York City. VIP reception with drinks and bites beforehand. Information and early bird tickets here (early bird pricing ends Feb. 3).
Eater
The dinners organized by queer cooking collective Spiral Theory Test Kitchen “operate in a playful sort of suspended reality, one where guests are instructed to dissect their meals with their hands and feed one another, and where it is normal to dine alongside a pet eel or a performer playing a 17th-century stringed instrument,” writes Isabel Ling. “STTK’s pop-up dinners reimagine a future through a shared meal where change isn’t lonely, where possibility still lies in the unfamiliar.”
The saving grace of ‘mall chicken’
Thrillist
“Loosely called ‘chicken teriyaki,’ mall chicken bears little resemblance to what you’d get at a Japanese sit-down,” writes Su-Jit Lin. Yet “[t]his whitewashing made it so that mall chicken didn’t feel like a shameful secret food item to like. It was inoffensive and non-threatening, its transparent preparation saving American kids from having to ask questions and feel defensive about their ignorance. Its banality became its — and my — saving grace, de-exoticizing it and rescuing me from the suburban micro-racism that made people assume I was going to gravitate toward it just because of the way I look.”
The problem of nitrogen fertilizer
Center for Public Integrity
“In America’s Corn Belt and around the world, some of the fertilizer applied to fields escapes the soil in new forms that contaminate and warm the planet,” writes Joe Wertz. “Some of these compounds enter the atmosphere as a potent greenhouse gas that’s now at its highest concentration in the last 800,000 years, helping fuel climate problems like the flooding that upended farmers’ lives last spring … Trouble was anticipated decades ago. But in the U.S., legislators and regulators alike have avoided confronting the problem directly.”