FERN’s Friday Feed: Reviving the Grange
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Home on the Grange
FERN and KQED’s The California Report
“Grange halls, like the one in the Anderson Valley in California’s Mendocino County, have been around for more than 150 years. The Grange began as a fraternal organization for farmers, reaching its peak in the 1950s, with more than 850,000 members. In the decades since,” explains Lisa Morehouse, “Grange membership dropped dramatically, along with the number of working farmers, even as many rural towns continued to rely on Grange halls as community centers. In recent years, that decline has reversed, as the National Grange has seen its membership grow incrementally — a sign that in some rural communities, at least, people are seeing the Grange as a way to connect with and support one another.”
Decline and fall of the spinach kings
Literary Hub
“My London-born great-grandfather, Arthur P. Seabrook, emigrated to the United States at the age of five … in January 1859. Over the next three generations, Arthur’s fifty-eight acres of vegetable and produce fields in southern New Jersey became the largest farm in state history. At its peak, in the mid-1950s, Seabrook Farms owned or controlled fifty thousand acres in the southwestern corner of the Garden State, employed up to eight thousand people or more at one time, and grew and packed about a third of the nation’s frozen vegetables,” writes John Seabrook. “The Seabrook Farms brand stood for family, freshness, and domestic modernity. … As a 1959 Seabrook print ad blared ‘Food Miracle Frees Wife … Delights Husband!’ Seabrook Farms Frozen Creamed Spinach, sold in the boil-in-the-bag Mylar Miracle-Pack, became the brand’s signature product, known and sought after up and down the East Coast. Seabrook’s cutting-edge packaging materials lent a space-age feel to its wares. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Floyd, one of the astronauts, is briefly glimpsed sucking from a meal of Seabrook Farms Liquipacks—a liquified carrot, fish, and leafy vegetable—while transiting to the moon.”
MAHA has a pizza problem
The Atlantic
“Many of the food reforms pushed by RFK Jr.’s movement are popular. Doing away with artificial food dyes, for example, is far more sensible than Kennedy’s conspiracist views about vaccines. But in the case of banning most school pizza,” writes Nicholas Florko, “RFK Jr. could be facing a tougher sell. MAHA’s vision for food is about to run headfirst into a bunch of hungry kids in a school cafeteria. Even though Domino’s school pizza is delivered by Domino’s drivers carrying Domino’s pizza boxes, the company’s Smart Slice is different from what would arrive at your door should you order a pie for dinner tonight. Cafeteria pizza has to abide by nutrition standards for school meals that the Obama administration spearheaded in 2010. The overly cheesy rectangular pizza with a cracker-like crust that you might have eaten in school no longer cuts it. Consider Domino’s Smart Slice pepperoni pizza: It’s made with mostly whole-wheat flour, low-fat cheese, and pepperoni that has half as much sodium than typical Domino’s pepperoni. It’s not a green salad by any means, but school Domino’s is far from the worst thing kids could eat.”
How Pakistan learned to love sushi
The Guardian
“When the 17-storey Avari Towers opened in Karachi in April 1985, it was the tallest hotel in the city,” writes Sanam Maher. “By December 1986, this … building had another novelty to offer – Fujiyama, a Japanese restaurant at its summit … In the late 80s, a Japanese restaurant like Fujiyama was an expensive proposition: foreign chefs had to be hired, staff trained, and ingredients, from wasabi to rice, constantly imported. Sushi – raw fish – in a country where daal roti is a staple and vegetables are often cooked down until they lose their crunch: who would take such a risk? … While much of it may not be good – with gummy rice or chalky, bland wasabi – it’s clear today that Pakistanis want sushi. It is on the menus of fine dining restaurants in hotels, and in the many pan-Asian restaurants that have mushroomed across Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. By the time I encountered ‘chapli sushi’ (a chapli kebab and cucumber maki roll) at a restaurant in Lahore, I wondered: how did we get here?”
On learning to hate chickens
The European Review of Books
“In Living Things, the most horrible night in the life of its protagonist is one in which he and his friends are stuffing chickens into a cage without appropriate gear — six hundred chickens in an hour and a half. Their eyes water, their arms are being pecked bloody by tough, pointy beaks and their shoes are getting stuck in chicken shit. The protagonist of Ferymont, by contrast, doesn’t single out one most gruesome event. She simply describes her days in suffocating detail: picking strawberries in a tunnel, heat rising under its plastic roof, air so thick that opening her mouth to breathe feels like biting into warm cotton wool,” writes Tania Roettger. “The two short novels — Lorena Simmel’s Ferymont … and Munir Hachemi’s Living Things … are two versions of a similar story. In each, a middle-class writer signs up for a summer agricultural job — harvesting crops, handling chickens — one in Switzerland, the other in France. … They come to this work as observing outsiders, questioning how the sometimes unbearably horrible things they see relate to themselves: the sort of people who usually don’t do the work, but only consume the labor’s fruits.”