Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
White food revolutionaries didn’t invent artisanal food
Eater
“Craft culture looks like white people,” writes Lauren Michele Jackson. “The founders, so many former lawyers or bankers or advertising execs, tend to be white, the front-facing staff in their custom denim aprons tend to be white, the clientele sipping $10 beers tends to be white.” But what craft culture — the keeper of “the authentic, the traditionally produced, and the specific” — misses or blatantly ignores is that the artisanal techniques it hawks to mostly white people were largely developed by brown people. From barbecue and small-batch whiskey, both of which were the purview of slaves in the American South, to coffee — “every $5 cup is dosed with a whiff of philanthropy” — the movement fails to acknowledge its roots.
Please stop smooching your hens
New Food Economy
Backyard chickens are spreading salmonella, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which now blames the birds for sickening 961 people and killing one person so far this year. People are “getting sick the classic way: Bird poop gets on their hands, and then their hands wind up in their mouths,” says New Food Economy. The CDC now warns poultry enthusiasts to avoid cuddling their ducks and chickens, kissing them and by all means bringing them into the house, especially the kitchen. But part of the problem is that most chicks are hatched in cramped, industrial operations, and so they arrive to their new backyard existence stressed and contagious.
A new book by the man who discovered the Pacific Garbage Patch
The New Republic
When Marcus Eriksen sailed through the North Pacific subtropical gyre in 1997, he was the first to find the so-called Pacific Garbage Patch — a slowly swirling mass of mostly plastic thrown away by humans all over the world. In his new book Junk Raft, Eriksen explains that the gyre isn’t made up of whole objects — as is often suggested in media accounts — but tiny pieces and shreds of degraded plastic, which easily work their way into the food chain, turning whales into hermaphrodites, filling the bellies of fish and making it harder for sea turtles to lay eggs because of all the plastic in their bloodstream. Traveling back to the gyre on a raft made of trash, Eriksen argues that it’s a cop-out for companies to pressure consumers to recycle, when companies should be responsible for producing products — and systems — that promote re-use.
Climate change couldn’t be more real for this Hmong farmer
The New York Times [Video]
“My whole family has farmed for four generations, and until now nothing has changed,” says a Hmong farmer in Sapa, Vietnam, an area known for its rice terraces. But now the region’s farmers are struggling under climate change. The rains fail to come in spring and summer, parching the rice. And “in the wintertime, the cold kills the crops and the cows die too,” says the farmer. Her children have left to find work elsewhere, but she wishes the rice harvest was rich again, so that they could come back and “farm as a family.”
Walmart tackles farming’s biggest greenhouse gas problem. But can it make a dent?
NPR
Walmart announced last year that it would cut its greenhouse-gas emissions by a billion tons before 2030 — that’s nearly as much carbon as all the cars and trucks in the U.S. emit in a year. But when the company started looking into where it — or more specifically the firms that supply it — could make improvements, Walmart found an unexpected culprit: nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizer. “According to one study, carried out by the consulting group Deloitte, greenhouse emissions from fertilizer are the biggest single piece of the global warming price tag for almost half of the top-selling items on the shelves at Walmart,” says NPR. Nitrogen-based fertilizer not only requires huge amounts of fossil fuel to produce and causes dead-zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico, but it also releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Now Walmart is trying to help farmers curb their use of synthetic fertilizer, including through computer programs that tell them exactly how much they’ve applied and the addition of chemicals that keep nitrogen from washing into waterways. But even for the retail giant, it’s a massive task.
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