FERN’s Friday Feed: Immigrants on the line
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The world’s largest meatpacker promised them jobs. Now Trump wants to deport them.
FERN and Mother Jones
“Remy went home and cut together a montage of his footage from inside JBS and around Greeley and recorded a voiceover with the information from Ebah. This isn’t a job for lazy people, he says in Creole. But you don’t need to know English. And, if they came, Remy told his followers, he knew places they could stay. ‘Those apartment is pretty close from the job,’ he told me later, translating the voiceover. So if you’re interested? ‘You can text me, tell me when you want to come.’ He posted the video that night and went to bed. The next morning,” writes Ted Genoways, “he checked TikTok. Most of his videos only got a few dozen views, but this one had been shared by a Creole-speaking influencer who often went by the handle JeanJean Biden—and it had gone viral. It was already at 35,000. Remy’s phone started blowing up, flooded with direct messages from people who wanted to know more.”
In an era of collapse, the ‘savior’ fish keeps returning
BioGraphic
“On the Nass River, in the lands of the Nisg̱a’a Nation along British Columbia’s northern coast, the ropes holding two aluminum skiffs strain as the ocean yanks back its tidal waters. Hidden beneath the turbulent surface, thousands of smelts known as eulachon, each about the size of the blade of a chef’s knife, jostle in the rushing water. If the night ahead goes as one local fishing crew hopes, the racing water will sweep some of those fish right into the gaping steel-frame mouth of their submerged net,” writes Shanna Baker. “The annual return of spawning eulachon to the Nass River from the sea, where they spend most of their lives, often coincides with winter’s last blast. Some years fishers have to drill boreholes in a thick cap of ice; other years they dodge icebergs as big as bears that can capsize a boat or destroy a net. Traditionally, Nisg̱a’a and other Indigenous peoples relied on the eulachon spawn to deliver them from hunger at winter’s end, earning the fish the heady titles of ‘savior’ or ‘salvation fish.’”
How Covid changed our relationship to food and dining
Eater
Five years after Covid was declared a pandemic, many of the shifts in the world of food and dining have taken root, for better and for worse: We have a greater appreciation for the precarity of the restaurant business; delivery is now the name of the game; pop-ups are still popping; outages and supply chain challenges mean higher prices; parking lot patios continue to be a silver lining; QR codes have replaced many menus; home cooks became the big food stars; everyone’s cooking at home more; some people are still growing scallions in their windowsills.
Tariffs are likely to make Americans eat a less healthy diet
The Atlantic
“Nearly 60 percent of the fresh fruit in the United States is imported, as is more than one-third of the country’s fresh vegetables. Most of that travels in from Mexico, but Canada also plays a part in America’s food supply. Twenty percent of the country’s vegetables, by value, come from our neighbor to the north. For all the debate around what people should eat, one thing pretty much everyone agrees on is that fruits and veggies are good for you,” writes Rachel Sugar. “Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on a campaign to “Make America healthy again,” has promoted numerous dangerous ideas about the American diet—but he’s right that Americans aren’t eating enough greens. The tariffs will worsen the problem. “People are going to immediately eat less fruits and vegetables, and will more likely rely on processed foods,” Mariana Chilton, a public-health professor at Drexel University … told me. A direct consequence of Trump’s tariffs could be pushing Americans to eat worse than they already do.”
We can’t feed the world without phosphorus. Do we have enough?
The New York Review of Books
“[R]esearchers have attempted to define a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ by delineating nine global processes that are ‘critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of the Earth system as a whole’ and setting safety thresholds for each. Transgress those boundaries, they warn, and we risk a breakdown of our planet’s fundamental life-enabling systems,” writes Jonathan Mingle. “Of the nine processes, we’ve already crossed into the danger zone for six … The boundary we have overshot the furthest is the one that arguably gets the least attention: nutrient flows. That is the term these scientists use for the spillage of nitrogen and phosphorus from our agricultural and industrial processes into our ecosystems. Both nitrogen and phosphorus are “limiting factors” essential for plant growth … We waste a staggering amount of both critical nutrients. Nitrogen and phosphorus are now flowing into the environment at up to three times the rate at which they can be absorbed.”