Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The Outline
Is all the discussion of fighting food waste a waste of time? “In many ways, the undue attention to food waste is its own kind of pampering. It is a corporate handout that comes at the expense of the people who bear the disproportionate brunt of food systems harms, especially along lines of race and class,” writes Austin Bryniarski. “Perhaps the time has come to retire food-waste panic — to stop giving cover to powerful agrifood interests — and consider how people in food systems are treated as disposable. Anything else is just a waste of time.”
Meet Pared, the Uber for chefs
The Washington Post
What Uber and Airbnb did to public transit and rents, the gigging app Pared is doing to kitchen labor. One experienced chef in New York City catalogued three weeks as a Pared worker, during which time he averaged $17.64 an hour. “Planned-ahead gigs are less attractive to cooks because they offer minimal payouts. And day jobs are difficult because the gigs demand cooks be on-call at all times,” writes Richard Morgan. “Pared is not Uber for kitchens; it is Uber surge pricing for kitchens. It’s a system that, whatever Pared’s intent, seems to prioritize desperation and urgency for both management and labor.”
Feeding the land vs. feeding oneself
The Counter
Rancher Ariel Greenwood reflects on how her passion for the land hasn’t always resulted in a healthy life balance. “When I consider the particular form of connection I had with nature back then, and perhaps still do today, the best I can describe is some sort of one-way psychic enmeshment,” she writes. “I identified with the land on a fundamental level. But what good is it to feel one’s identity bound up in some vaguely defined expanse, if that expanse can’t really feed me, not completely?”
Slate
The seas are rising. Covid-19 is spreading across the globe. And now, Rebecca Onion reports, “[b]ad news from the foodie frontlines: The apparently endless war over recipe headnotes—those introductory riffs of varying length that often appear before the “ingredients” list, chatty versions of which are a hallmark of online cooking blogs—has flared up again.”
Mac ’n’ cheese came from … France?
1843 Magazine
“Thomas Jefferson developed a taste for the dish while living there in the 1780s,” writes Josie Delap. “So impressed was the future president that he imported the necessary tools to recreate it, including a pasta machine, and served mac ’n’ cheese at a state dinner in 1802. Some fellow diners were sceptical. Manasseh Cutler, a congressman who attended, dismissed it as tasting overly strong and “not agreeable.” Despite such misgivings, the dish’s popularity spread. Slaves cooked it in plantation kitchens and it has since become a mainstay of African-American soul-food.”