FERN’s Friday Feed: Red plate, blue plate
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How food became a weapon in the culture war
FERN and The Nation
“It would have been easy to dismiss this new food fight as little more than a fashionable twist on routine political posturing. But as the conversation around food got bigger in the ’90s, the stakes also got higher,” writes Brent Cunningham. “Mounting evidence that the American way of eating was causing serious health problems spurred talk of reform. Obesity, which had risen sharply over the previous decade, was deemed a national crisis. Rather than engage with reformers, however, the right simply broadened its culture war around food, politicizing the debate in ways that had significant consequences, not only for public health but, eventually, for the nation’s response to climate change. Indeed, the weaponization of food would escalate beyond partisan name-calling, becoming a matter of life and death.”
How drought forced change on a powerful California farming district
FERN and The California Report (audio)
“For decades, Westlands Water District has led the fight against environmental rules that restrict the flow of water from California’s rivers to its farmers,” explains Dan Charles. But this fall, mounting frustration in the face of historic drought produced a slate of reform candidates for the district board, and the reformers “swept aside the old guard” at the farmer-run organization. “The winning candidates, part of a self-described Change Coalition, are demanding that the district spend less time fighting legal and political battles and more time figuring out ways to live with less water.”
The extraordinary shelf-life of the deep-sea sandwiches
Wired
In the late 1960s, a cable lowering a submersible named Alvin into the ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard snapped. The crew escaped, but Alvin plunged, hatch ajar, and settled in the seabed some 4,500 feet below. As Gregory Barber explains, when it was retrieved 10 months later, researchers marveled at the state of the lunch left behind by the crew. The sandwiches, thermoses of soup, and apples looked, smelled and tasted fresh. “Over time, the question at the heart of the preserved-lunch mystery has become more urgent as scientists have come to understand the role that the oceans play in sequestering carbon.”
Unearthing the original Mediterranean diet
Hakai Magazine
“[Dimitra] Mylona is a zooarchaeologist—a specialist in the study of animal remains of ancient societies. Through the close observation of bones, shells, and other finds, zooarchaeologists try to re-create a picture of the way humans hunted, husbanded, ate, and more generally interacted with the animals around them,” writes Paul Greenberg. “Traditionally, zooarchaeologists in the Mediterranean have focused on goat and sheep and other forms of terrestrial protein as the go-to meat sources for Greece and other Mediterranean countries. Back in 1991, as a new graduate student, Mylona thought no differently, imagining herself picking through the remains of livestock. But during one of her first digs, in the same Palaikastro she now surveys, the presence of an entirely different find captivated her—fish bones.”
Mapping the last of Calabria’s mystical white-olive trees
Atlas Obscura
“Calabria, the southernmost region of the Italian peninsula, is the birthplace of some of the world’s most well-known myths, such as the terrifying tale of Scylla and Charybdis immortalized in the Odyssey. Yet one local curiosity remains in obscurity,” writes Elena Valeriote. “Wander through the gardens of Calabrian churches or abandoned farmland in late autumn or early winter and you may glimpse it—a tree that appears to be strung with pearls. But this tree is no myth.”