FERN’s Friday Feed: Not holding Big Beef accountable
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
U.S. beef industry ‘relatively unscathed’ by Biden’s climate pledge
The Guardian
“Biden’s November pledge to reduce methane included … only voluntary actions for an agricultural sector the Environmental Protection Agency says contributes more than one-third of the country’s emissions. In a November interview … agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said he trusted the agriculture industry to do the right thing in response to federal incentives. But those at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) annual trade show in Houston last month heard industry leaders express relief about the administration choosing to incentivize rather than force ranchers and feedlots to reduce emissions. ‘We were really excited to get out of that relatively unscathed,’ Mary-Thomas Hart, NCBA’s environmental counsel, told a sustainability forum at the conference.”
U.S. water policy excluded Indigenous nations by design
High Country News
“U.S. water policy, like the reservation system, was crafted to eradicate Indigenous ways of life and people. As reservations confined tribes to one location, forcing them to transition to agrarian lifestyles, the federal government, as their trustee, failed to build or provide funds for up-to-date water infrastructure, allowing the U.S. to effectively control Indigenous water access,” writes Pauly Denetclaw. “In 1867, two years after CRIT’s modern reservation was established, the Bureau of Indian Affairs authorized $50,000 for building the Colorado River Indian Irrigation Project. The project was ultimately never finished, a recurrent theme when it comes to Indigenous water infrastructure.”
Who are we without meat?
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
“So meat was both sustenance and symbol. To eat it was to announce one’s mastery of the world,” writes Ligaya Mishan. “No wonder, then, that the citizens of a newborn nation, one that imagined itself fashioned on freedom and the rejection of Old World hierarchies, should embrace it. ‘Americans would become the world’s great meat eaters,’ the former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin writes in ‘The Americans: The Democratic Experience’ (1973). And the meat that would come to define Americans was beef: a slab of it, dark striped from the grill but still red at the heart, lush and bleeding, leaking life.”
FBI alleges ‘massive’ food-aid fraud
The New York Times
“In court filings, the F.B.I. said it had discovered a “massive fraud scheme” among groups that Feeding Our Future was supposed to oversee, saying they siphoned off tens of millions of dollars by charging taxpayers for nonexistent meals,” writes David A. Fahrenthold. “[T]he case has highlighted how the government’s reliance on nonprofits to help carry out an array of programs can increase vulnerability to fraud — a problem that only increased over the past several years, as Washington pumped trillions of dollars into pandemic aid packages.”
Will baking make you happy?
Eater
“Though it was a trope long before the pandemic began, an interesting side effect of many people discovering baking in recent history was the idea that the hobby could cure, or at the very least forestall, the pandemic-induced or exacerbated depression lurking in so many of our minds,” writes Dayna Evans. “In the earliest days of quarantine, the luckiest among us could pretend this was a jaunty little sleepover: What homesteading projects could we take on and talk about together? How could this help us process these collective big feelings? Would baking this loaf of sourdough make us angry, sad, happy, or blissfully ignorant of the mess all around us? Grocery stores had flour and yeast shortages as baking became the prescription for all that ailed us emotionally. But a few years later, in reflection, it’s time to ask: Did it work?”