FERN’s Friday Feed: Sheepherders in peril
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The brutal existence of seasonal sheepherders
FERN and High Country News
“Sheepherders are a fixture in the West’s remote corners, working long, lonely hours on the open range. The nation’s small sheep industry relies on immigrant workers who enter the country under the federal H-2A program for seasonal guest workers,” writes Teresa Cotsirilos. “[A]t any given time, there are anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 H-2A herders in the U.S. While ranchers acknowledge the job can be difficult, many insist that abuse allegations are overblown. “But the industry is beset by a level of abuse that even seasoned farmworker attorneys, government officials and human-trafficking experts find extreme. ‘These are actually the most scared workers I’ve ever encountered,’ said David Seligman, the executive director of the labor rights nonprofit Towards Justice, which has sued herding-industry trade groups on workers’ behalf.”
A baker’s secrets
The Baffler
“In the annals of food and memory, I know of no story so peculiar as the mysterious disappearance—now more than three decades ago—of the Guerrilla Cookie from the shelves of Midwestern food co-ops. A confection with a cult following, it rose to popularity in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1970s. Then,” writes Dave Denison, “sometime around 1990, it was gone … I’ve come to accept that the recipe is probably now lost forever. But for many years, I thought I was the one who could crack the mystery. I had carried around one of those yellow labels from the package through many moves after leaving Madison. I remember sticking it into a cookbook. The label would at least give me the ingredients list. But by the time I went looking for it, it was gone. It probably fell out of the book and got swept away. Still, I had another advantage: I had firsthand knowledge of how the cookies were made. I had worked for Ted Odell during a summer in the early years of my college life. I was his baker’s assistant.”
The people’s fish
Gravy, from Southern Foodways Alliance
“For a fish little known to Americans outside the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Mugil cephalus carries a lot of names: striped, black, gray, flathead, sea, popeye, or—on account of its predilection to leap—jumping mullet. Some folks in Mississippi call it Biloxi bacon, a name that signifies how the species has kept hunger at bay during high times and low,” writes Michelle Zacks. “Along with its many names, mullet holds deep meanings for Southerners who catch and eat this inshore fish … Mullet feeds on detritus, and all the saltwater carnivores feed on it: sharks and seatrout, great blue herons and brown pelicans, porpoises and people … Mullet has always been a low-cost species, selling for well under a dollar per pound through much of the twentieth century … Many mullet-eating folks describe their love of the fish by explaining how it kept their families fed during times of deprivation. As Bud [Albury] put it, ‘They say when there ain’t no mullet, your belly’s pinching your backbone.’”
A gourmand’s dream—and nightmare
The Washington Post
“Robert Frost gave us so little choice when he wrote, ‘Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.’ What about plague, flood, zombies, killer robots, ocean acidification, nuclear accident and alien invasion? Fortunately, in these latter days before climate collapse, our apocalyptic literature comes in a grim smorgasbord of flavors,” writes Ron Charles. “And now we have an apocalyptic novel that is all about flavors. Land of Milk and Honey, by C Pam Zhang, is the haunting story of an ambitious chef desperate to keep cooking even as 98 percent of the commercial crops fail and the world’s store of food dwindles to gruel. The narrator, unnamed, is in her 20s when a mysterious smog arises from Iowa and blocks out the sun around the world. ‘Biodiversity fell. Wildlife and livestock perished for lack of feed,’ she remembers. ‘What it amounted to was skies that were gray and kitchens that were gray. You could taste it: gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the tart green kind … no saffron, no buffalo, no polished short-grain rice.’”
What industry knew about the perils of PFAS
Undark
“Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, have been produced since the 1940s and are used in consumer products such as nonstick cookware, stain-resistant carpets, and waterproof clothing,” write Tracey J. Woodruff and Nadia Gabor. “Many studies have shown that PFAS persist in the environment and have contaminated drinking water, soil, and peoples’ bodies. The early producers of PFAS — 3M and DuPont — promoted them as a miracle of modern science. They have made billions of dollars producing millions of pounds of these chemicals. But these companies knew something long before the public did: PFAS are highly toxic.”