Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The healing harvest
FERN and NPR’s The Salt
In Tucson, the Iskashitaa Refugee Network is helping refugees heal from trauma by gleaning fruit from backyards across the city. “Iskashitaa — which means ‘working cooperatively together’ in Somali Bantu, the ethnicity of many early volunteers — provides more than just healthy food,” writes Jonathan Bloom in FERN’s latest story, published with NPR’s The Salt. The project is a source of healing for people who have seen terrible violence. Every year, Iskashitaa saves more than 50 tons of fruit from going to the landfill or rotting on the ground, “but that’s only about 10 percent of what’s locally available. (Nationally, about a third of fruit and vegetables are lost or wasted along the food chain),” explains Bloom. The refugees and other volunteers turn that fruit into marmalade, syrups, pickles and juice, which they share with their families and sell at farmers’ markets.
Where did California’s salmon go?
Edible San Francisco
Duncan MacLean used to be able to pull in 525 salmon a day tooling his boat under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Today he’s lucky if he can get three. “The obvious culprit is the drought, but less conspicuously at fault is the sphinx-like web of regulations and sordid backroom deals that have left California’s water rights in the hands of old and righteous agribusiness royalty,” says Edible San Francisco. Take for example, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, whose “$4.2 billion nut and produce empire in the Central Valley, the second-largest produce enterprise in the country, drinks up more water some years than every home in Los Angeles and San Francisco combined (swimming pools included).” But there also are numerous dams, which have cut off 90 percent of spawning grounds and often hold too much cool water back, boiling salmon eggs before they can hatch. And additional water is sidetracked by Gov. Jerry Brown’s controversial tunnels, piping water from the Sacramento River to the Central Valley.
The country’s largest urban farm is in Pittsburgh
Mother Nature Network
“Pennsylvania’s second largest city — once a soot-smeared and smog-shrouded coal-mining capital referred to as ‘hell with the lid taken off’” — will soon be home to the country’s largest urban farm, writes Matt Hickman. Coming in at around $10 million, the future Hilltop Urban Farm is the work of the nonprofit Hilltop Alliance. The space will take up 107-acres, representing “complete with 23 acres of farmland, a fruit orchard, greenhouses, stormwater mitigation ponds, a community garden, an on-site composting facility, a youth education center, a farmers market area and an event space housed in a 5,000-square-foot barn,” says Hickman.
Why is FEMA handing out junk food to Puerto Ricans?
The Washington Post
“These are the White House approved ‘meals’ FEMA reportedly is handing out in Puerto Rico … Vienna sausages, a Nutrigrain bar & f’n Skittles,” sports journalist Josh Sánchez tweeted after Hurricane Maria, prompting more than 19,000 retweets. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz tossed a box full of chocolate pudding and other snacks to the side in disgust at a public appearance. FEMA says it has provided more than 2 million nutritionally balanced meals per week on the island of 3.4 million people. The agency insists it doesn’t expect anyone to subsist on Cheez-It crackers alone, but even natural disasters call for snacks.
If anyone cared, we wouldn’t let slaves catch our fish
New Food Economy
Since 1930, U.S. law has been very clear: it’s illegal to import items produced by forced labor. And yet, from salmon fillets gutted by enslaved North Koreans in China to shrimp peeled by kidnapped Burmese workers, much of the seafood on shelves can be followed back to brutal, coercive conditions. You could blame the fact that it’s extremely hard to trace an item caught in remote oceans and passed through multiple international buyers. But perhaps apathy plays the biggest role. “If Europe and America actually cared enough to understand where their seafood was coming from and some of the conditions in which it’s being produced, we could probably change things overnight,” says Alfred Cook, an oceans conservationist expert at the World Wildlife Fund. “We’re talking about murders at sea that nobody is ever held accountable for. We’re talking about people being abducted from their homes in Southeast Asia and conscripted on board these vessels and not allowed to touch land for two years. There’s a collective responsibility on the part of humanity to actually care, and I don’t see that happening enough.”
Join us 11/9 for FERN Talks & Eats SF
We hope to see you at our upcoming FERN Talks & Eats event in San Francisco on the evening of 11/9, at the Ferry Building. In partnership with CUESA — the organization that operates the world-renowned Ferry Plaza Farmers Market — we’ll present “The Empty Plate: Fighting Hunger in the Age of Trump,” a spirited panel discussion about the state of hunger and food security under the current administration and what individuals, activists, and communities are doing to address it. Come to the panel and afterward enjoy a reception with bites from the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. There is also a VIP dinner the night before! Buy tickets now!
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