FERN’s Friday Feed: Palm oil booms, health crisis looms
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Global glut of palm oil adds to India’s health woes
FERN and The Nation
Rates of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases have soared in India and other developing countries in recent years, coinciding with a flood of palm oil. Consumption of the saturated fat has soared as companies like PepsiCo, Nestlé and McDonald’s have made inroads with snack and fast foods, Jocelyn Zuckerman writes. But it’s not just multinational giants at work. Street vendors and home cooks have also turned to the cheap oil to fry up samosas, poori and other foods, with devastating consequences to health, according to the latest story from FERN, published with The Nation.
‘Everything you know about obesity is wrong’
Highline
“For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved,” millions of lives,” writes Michael Hobbes. First, diets don’t work. And second, weight and health are not perfect synonyms. “The terrible irony is that … we’ve approached the obesity epidemic like a fad dieter: If we just try the exact same thing one more time, we’ll get a different result. And so it’s time for a paradigm shift. We’re not going to become a skinnier country. But we still have a chance to become a healthier one.”
FERN Talks & Eats is coming to Brooklyn on October 1st!
Join us for an engaging panel discussion that will delve into the #MeToo movement and issues of equity and inclusion in the restaurant business. Amanda Cohen, chef at Dirt Candy and one of our panelists, wrote an essay about this in Esquire, highlighting the media’s neglect of women chefs until the current scandals. “Women may not have value as chefs, but as victims we’re finally interesting!” she wrote. We’ll hear about the ways that #MeToo intersects with race, gender, class and identity politics – ultimately influencing the food on our plates. We’ll hear personal stories, discuss the problematic past, and reimagine a future restaurant culture. It’s a discussion that’s nothing if not timely. We hope you’ll join us. Tickets available!
Before food trucks, there were ‘night lunch wagons’
Atlas Obscura
In 1872, Walter Scott, a street vendor in Providence, Rhode Island, set up shop in a wagon outside a newspaper office, serving sandwiches, pie and coffee to journalists when they got off work at night. “It wasn’t just journalists who stayed up late, though,” writes Anne Ewbank. “Night shift workers wanted a meal when they punched out, and party-goers wanted grub when they emerged from the bar.” Soon, factories were turning out fancy “lunch wagons” with “[e]tched-glass windows and colorful exteriors,” and shipping them across the country.
The long fight for environmental justice in NC’s hog country
Scalawag
As Hurricane Florence wreaks economic and ecological havoc in eastern North Carolina’s hog country, Sol Weiner tells of the story of a community’s long fight for justice against state regulators and Big Ag in Duplin County. “Activists and journalists have long called attention to the industry’s and state’s discrimination in waste management practices,” he writes, “primarily that hog facilities are located disproportionately in black, Latino, Native, and working-class communities.”
Perdue’s purchase of virtuous meat companies is paying off
Bloomberg
When chicken giant Perdue scooped up Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Foods, skeptics assumed it was simply to cover all bases in a shifting food market. But the values of these boutique brands are slowly changing the parent company, writes Deena Shanker: “Perdue’s organic brand is its fasting growing. It now slaughters one million organic birds each week out of 13 million. Niman just committed to doubling its farmer network in the next 10 years. Coleman’s pork division alone reports a sales jump of $30 million in 2011 to $111 million this year so far.”