FERN’s Friday Feed: Predator or prey
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
‘I still want to feel each meal … each body I absorb into mine’
Longreads
“I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou. I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes,” writes Diana Saverin. “Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive … Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting. I was becoming a hunter.”
Good fences make bad ecosystems
bioGraphic
“Although fence ecology is nascent—the paper that coined the discipline was published in 2018—its practitioners have already generated a profound insight,” writes Ben Goldfarb. “Among all the forms of infrastructure with which humans have fettered the planet, few have changed our landscapes more, with less fanfare, than the humble fence. Fences truncate and direct animal movements, shape the distribution of native and invasive species, and dictate interactions between predators and prey. They control the spread of disease and the flow of genes; they alter soil and vegetation and water. Yet for all that, scientists know little about precisely how many are out there, or where they’re located—though their construction is booming around the world. You might even say we’re living in the Wirocene, the age of the fence.”
New research suggests that pesticides are as bad for you as smoking
The Lever
“A new study found the amount of pesticides used on farms was strongly associated with the incidence of many cancers — not only for farmers and their families, but for entire communities,” writes Lois Parshley. “It comes on the heels of substantial lobbying by the pesticide industry this spring to limit its liability from lawsuits over their products’ health impacts. The just-released analysis showed that ‘agricultural pesticides can increase your risk for some cancers just as much as smoking,’ says co-author Isain Zapata, an associate professor of research and statistics at Rocky Vista University in Colorado. For example, living in places with high pesticide use increased the risk of colon and pancreatic cancers by more than 80 percent, results that surprised even the researchers.”
There are no good options left with bird flu
The Atlantic
“Since the current strain of bird flu, known as ‘highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1,’ began spreading around the world in late 2021, it has become something like a ‘super virus’ in its spread among animals,” writes Yasmin Tayag. “Wild birds have been decimated, as have poultry farms … H5N1 has been around for longer than 25 years, but only recently has it regularly jumped to mammals, infecting cats, sea lions, and bears. In March, it was detected for the first time in American cattle and, since then, has already spread to 163 herds in 13 states.All of that would be worrying enough without reports of people also falling sick … each additional case makes the prospect of another human pandemic feel more real … It’s a possibility, although not the likeliest one. For now, the virus seems poised to continue its current trajectory: circulating among wild birds, wreaking havoc on poultry farms, and spreading among cattle herds. That outcome wouldn’t be as catastrophic as a pandemic. But it’s still not one to look forward to.”
The rise of the influencer chef
The Nation
“With followers in the multimillions on TikTok and Instagram, [Owen] Han represents the vanguard of a new breed of culinary abbreviators, who are united in their commitment to an increasingly compressed and assaultive style in food TV,” writes Aaron Timms. “Many of these influencer chefs also produce, in varying quantities and with varying frequency, older-fashioned cooking videos with straight-to-camera exposition and more of food TV’s historical chattiness. But long-form is not where their true talents lie. The setting in which they’re most at home, and from which they exert their black-gloved grip (the gloves in these productions are always black) over the Internet’s collective culinary consciousness, is the reel, a short video—usually less than a minute in length—that dispenses with the conversational throat-clearing of traditional TV and gets straight to the action. Explanations, descriptions of ingredients, pauses to allow the viewer time to catch up and understand each step: The reel dispenses with them all. These chefs love the quick cut, the chopping-board close-up, and the high-definition kitchen sound effect almost as much as the food itself.”