Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The ‘isolated, frustrating’ world of the Instacart shopper
Mother Jones
“I will never forget the day when I was at Costco and it was a two-customer trip. I knew that the tip total was $30 but I didn’t know the breakdown of who had tipped what. The customer with the smaller order asked if I could add on 15 cases of water while I was there. That changed the whole experience. I had to change carts and it’s very heavy. They were the first customer and I saw I was going to an apartment. My stomach sank. It was freezing cold outside. It took me forever to find their place. They lived on the third floor. Of course I never saw them face to face. Later in the day, I found out that they had given me a $1 tip. It felt like a slap in the face.”
Low-carbon beef? Compared to what?
Wired UK
“In November,” writes Matt Reynolds, “the US Department of Agriculture approved a program that will open a path for beef producers to market their meat as low-carbon.” But “[a] steak labeled as low-carbon is likely to have produced many times more emissions than other foods that a shopper might reach for as an alternative, says Matthew Hayek, an environmental scientist at New York University. ‘The point of a label is to precisely communicate something to consumers,’ he says. A low-carbon label ‘implies that it’s lower carbon than something else that they could pick up right there.’ Most of the time, for beef, that simply won’t be true.”
Campbell Soup, accidental seed-saver
Modern Farmer
In 1934, Campbell Soup released the Rutgers tomato, a hybrid it had developed for processing, and by the 1950s an estimated “72 percent of commercial growers in the United States … planted the Rutgers tomato,” writes Jeff Quattrone. “But not long after … tomato farming practices started to change. As harvesting became more mechanized, the thin-skinned Rutgers tomato plummeted in popularity with farmers, who were looking for heartier tomatoes that would last longer.” In 2010 “a team of researchers started working on the Jersey Tomato Project in an effort to revive the Rutgers variety, which was believed to be lost to history. They soon learned, however, that Campbell’s still had some seed stocks used to develop the original Rutgers variety stored away in a vault.”
Synthetic palm oil faces questions about sustainability, scaling up
Yale Environment 360
“Palm oil production is a primary driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in the tropics. These and other problems … such as exploitative labor practices, have for years driven interest in more sustainable options,” writes James Dineen. Now, a number of startups are creating synthetic palm oil, joining “other synthetic biology companies … that aspire to solve environmental problems but share similar challenges scaling up production and demonstrating their approach is in fact more sustainable than the problem they’re trying to solve.”
How a mythical soup took root in the English psyche
Atlas Obscura
“Brown Windsor soup’s fame extends far beyond the hijinks of The Goon Show. Cookbooks including The Daily Mail Modern British Cookbook typically describe the ‘thick meat soup’ as a popular dish in Victorian times, with some recipe authors going so far as to call it ‘Queen Victoria’s favorite.’ The dish is so synonymous with traditional Victorian-era gastronomy that recipes for it appear in The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook and The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook. Characters dine on brown Windsor soup in a 1994 episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, just as they do in the 2021 television adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days. ‘Everybody in England was brought up believing in brown Windsor soup,’ says Glyn Hughes, author of The Lost Foods of England.” There’s just one problem: It was a “hilarious lie.”