FERN’s Friday Feed: Jacques Pépin considers the chicken
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Coq au Pépin
The New York Review of Books
“More than almost any other public culinary figure, in his career [Jacques] Pépin has followed the trajectory of twentieth-century scientific development, as if he had been planned ahead of time as a shorthand for modernism,” writes Daniel M. Lavery in an essay on Pépin’s new book, Art of the Chicken. “He went from learning to slaughter chickens efficiently and humanely as a child in his mother’s backyard, holding the head down carefully over a bowl after severing the jugular vein to ensure the bird bled out quickly, to mastering oeufs à la neige at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée as part of a forty-eight-chef brigade … to poaching a thousand chickens simultaneously in an enormous commissary kitchen.”
How roads have fundamentally changed the natural world
Modern Farmer
“Less than one percent of the US is covered in pavement. Although it may feel like roadways, highways, back lanes and city streets are omnipresent—inevitable, in some ways—they actually cover a shockingly small portion of the country. But the impacts of roads? Those go on for miles. As Ben Goldfarb writes in his new book, Crossings, the ‘road effect zone’ covers about 20 percent of the country,” writes Emily Baron Cadloff. “Goldfarb traveled across the country, and the globe, to learn more about how roads have shaped not just our communities but the natural world around us. Animals, both on land and in the waters, have a harder time migrating to food or to mate when surrounded by roads. Road salt is leaching into our water, contaminating the streams. The noise pollution from roads has changed the way birds and insects interact with neighboring forests.”
Can we let nature retake control of the Mississippi — just a little?
Yale Environment 360
“After the lower Mississippi began pouring through and enlarging Neptune Pass in 2019, sediment began flowing into a sand-and-silt-starved Delta bay. Now the Army Corps of Engineers — breaking with tradition — is considering letting at least part of the river have its way.” As Andrew S. Lewis writes, “Not long ago, the Corps would have treated Neptune Pass as a simple problem with a simple solution: It was a hole that needed to be sealed off. But in its many attempts over the last century to keep the Mississippi glued in place for flood control and navigation, the agency’s actions have rippled through the Delta and its ecosystems. Once-regular infusions of sediment-rich spillover from the Mississippi — which built and nourished the Delta — have been severed. With less sediment flushing into its wetlands, the Delta has broken down, and great swaths of it have been consumed by the rising Gulf. The land that is left is often too weak to survive hurricanes.”
How Bill Gates and Big Ag are throttling Africa’s small farmers
The Nation
“Under a pending draft protocol on intellectual property rights, the [global free trade regime] seeks to lock all 54 African nations into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia,” writes Alexander Zaitchik. “A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs … [T]he new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. The resulting seed economy would transform African farming into a bonanza for global agribusiness, promote export-oriented monocultures, and undermine resilience during a time of deepening climate disruption.”
Searching for America’s first chicken finger
Taste
“It’s different from fried chicken, which has a complicated history all its own and is much scrutinized by restaurant critics and food writers. No one can say who the first people were to fry chicken, because every culture did it, hundreds of years ago,” writes Ellie Skrzat. “But chicken fingers alone are a simpler, milder pleasure. Associated with kids’ menus, picky man children, and drunk food, they are an American staple. I urge you to find a state fair or a roadside diner that doesn’t serve them. The simultaneous ubiquity and inconclusiveness of the chicken finger jumped out at me. Not quite a tender, not quite fried chicken, it sounds like a nickname John Hughes would give a nerd, and still: one 2023 consumption report I found stated that 34% of restaurants in the United States have chicken fingers on their menus. I had to know who the first person was to look at a boneless, battered twig of fowl and say, ‘That’s a finger.’”