FERN’s Friday Feed: Sacred cows
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
In India, vegetarianism has become a tool for punishment
The Baffler
“Junaid Khan’s lynching is one of several incidents of its kind that have frequently occurred in India over the last decade. They are commonly referred to as ‘cow-related violence,’ a subsection of crime in which those under suspicion of eating, selling, or transporting beef are searched, humiliated, mauled, and even killed for supposedly violating a cow, an animal which Hindus consider sacred,” writes Sharanya Deepak. “A 2019 report titled ‘Violent Cow Protection in India’ notes that, between May 2015 and December 2018, at least forty-four people were killed in such attacks … In most cases, attackers in these incidents were gau rakshaks, or self-styled cow vigilantes.”
As the pandemic raged, a huge egg farm kept running on prison labor
Cosmopolitan
“It was March 25, 2020, and the world outside was plunging into crisis. COVID-19 was a deadly new pandemic. At Perryville, lockdowns were rapidly taking effect … Then came rumors that prison officials would be shutting down all jobs beyond prison walls … All the outside jobs, that is, except for those at Hickman’s Family Farms, one of the Arizona prison system’s biggest clients,” writes Elizabeth Whitman. “Shutting down all prison work crews would have been uniquely devastating to Hickman’s, which had more than 200 incarcerated women and men making up at least a quarter of its total workforce. The farm, one of the largest egg producers in the country, depended on the cheap, readily available labor it got through Arizona Correctional Industries (ACI) … In the frantic weeks of March 2020,” officials “hastily engineered a work-around to the looming COVID lockdowns. Hickman’s could continue using incarcerated workers on one extraordinary condition: Those workers would be housed outside the prison, at Hickman’s itself.”
The sugary cereal industry cries ‘free speech’ over FDA rules
The Intercept
“The makers of Fruity Pebbles, Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, and other popular cereal brands are bitterly lobbying against a new Food and Drug Administration proposal that would prevent them from labeling their products as ‘healthy,’” writes Lee Fang. The companies claim that the rule “‘would be open to legal challenge in that it violates the First Amendment by prohibiting truthful, non-misleading claims in an unjustified manner and also exceeds FDA’s statutory authority in several ways.’ The idea of a legal challenge may not be an idle threat. The public comment docket includes a filing from the Washington Legal Foundation, a shadowy nonprofit that litigates esoteric and often controversial business interests.”
The convergence of global diets puts us all at risk of disruption
Bloomberg Green
“A combination of rising incomes, the impact of Western culture and industrial farming focused on specific crops means we are all eating increasingly alike. And that means more of us than ever depend on imported food. Wheat, now an integral part of most diets, is produced predominantly by just a handful of countries. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted trade, global prices spiked almost 40% … [E]xtreme weather — growing more frequent with climate change — and currency fluctuations can also wreak havoc. While these are issues for everyone, it’s poorer countries that are most exposed. The upheaval has reawakened interest in neglected traditional foodstuffs and prompted some countries — including Indonesia, the world’s second-largest importer of wheat — to start attempting to shift things back.”
Can AI perfect the IPA?
Experience Magazine
“Beer is about as low-tech as it gets. The oldest surviving beer recipe was unearthed in Mesopotamia, from 1800 B.C., when the Sumerians made a divine drink from fermented barley bread soaked in water with yeast. About 3,000 years later, Benedictine monks in a Bavarian abbey outside of Munich recorded the addition of hops as a bittering agent and preservative. From that day on, those four ingredients — water, fermentable starch (such as barley malt), yeast, and hops — have been the base for just about every beer ever quaffed by humankind,” writes Tony Rehagen. “But today, as nearly 10,000 U.S. craft breweries jockey for attention and market share, they’re producing more technological innovations in beer-making than the industry has seen in millennia. An innovation race in brewing hardware, ingredients, and recipes aims to help smaller companies brew the same quality beer, batch after batch.”