FERN’s Friday Feed: Sweet pain

Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.


How my trip to quit sugar became a journey into hell

The New York Times

“At 3 a.m., I bolted awake, clutching a cold, wet towel to my abdomen: my ‘liver wrap,’ applied at bedtime per the instructions on my printed schedule. A faint signal like a just-rung bell — the clapper stilled, but the note fresh in the mind — pulsed through my body: candy time! If I’d been home, I would have tiptoed out of bed and quickly had a Fruit Roll-Up or four before falling back asleep,” writes Caity Weaver. “I braced for cravings to rend my thoughts, but experienced only mild dread. The primordial parts of my brain, I suspected, had not yet comprehended that the regular candy deliveries had been canceled. I didn’t want to be there when they realized.”

Gen cheese

Taste

“Avery Jones, 20, grew up among the clatter of cheese carts and the nutty scent of aging rooms, the rhythm of her parents’ creamery in Paso Robles, California, woven into her childhood. From the time she could walk, she helped package cheeses and played in the shadow of her family’s ambition. But for much of her adolescence, Jones’s dreams drifted elsewhere—she spent her nights stargazing, imagining a world far beyond the farm,” writes Mehr Singh. “Jones changed her mind in 2019 when her father, Reggie, identified a gap in the local market: Alpine-style sheep’s milk cheese, which requires eight months of aging. The few other creameries in the area avoided sheep’s milk and leaned toward cheddar and brie-style cheeses, which have a comparatively larger yield and a less meticulous aging process. Jones, then only 15, started making harder-to-come-by cheeses herself to help pay for college … [W]hile the average American cheesemaker is 41 years old and male, a growing wave of 20-somethings is reshaping the ancient trade by making and selling cheese—blending sustainability, accessibility, and the energy and eccentricity of an increasingly online age.”

The scramble to keep Lake Tahoe’s invaders at bay

Bay Nature

“Aquatic invasive species have been making trouble for Lake Tahoe’s ecosystem ever since people started sticking them in there in the mid-1800s,” writes Sonya Bennett-Brandt. “Invasives crowd out native plants, starve out or prey upon native animals, and kick off disastrous ecological cascades. Increasingly, limnologists are finding alliances like that of clam and algae—in which aquatic invasive species create conditions that help other undesirables spread. They’re aided by a third accomplice: climate change. Warmer waters are worse for native species, and better for invasives and potentially harmful algae. At Lake Tahoe, native fish stocks have declined, toxic algae alerts have closed down beaches, and the celebrated waters are about 30 percent murkier than they were 50 years ago. The lake’s ecosystems, along with its multibillion-dollar tourism industry, rely on clear, clean, cool water. Tahoe … is at risk.”

How MAHA poisons the food movement

Mother Jones

“The Kale Caucus won some cultural cachet, but it never built enough clout to challenge the hegemony of the Vilsackian Agribusiness Brigade. This power imbalance has created a void through which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has barreled, seizing the banner as the nation’s predominant food system critic,” writes Tom Philpott. “Now that Trump has tapped him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, my fear is that Kennedy’s reckless anti-vaccine stances, conspiracy theorizing, and love of some of the internet’s most unhinged ‘wellness’ bunkum will make legitimate critiques of the ways we grow and process food appear equally crackpot—affirming a narrative that Big Ag and Big Food have promoted for decades. In this way, rather than pushing food production in a healthier direction, Kennedy’s ascent could bolster the status quo.”

Is Norway’s effort to beat back an invasion of pink salmon futile?

BioGraphic

“Though Russia and Norway jointly manage the river, only Norwegian officials worry about the Grense Jakobselv’s pink salmon. Native to the Pacific Ocean, pink salmon arrived in the Barents, a sea in the Arctic Ocean that the two countries border, via a Soviet-era Russian hatchery program launched in 1956 to create a new regional food source. The hatcheries succeeded spectacularly,” writes Jude Isabella. “In 2021, the Norwegian Environment Agency pronounced the invasion a likely ecological catastrophe for the country’s precious Atlantic salmon, whose numbers had already dropped 50 percent since the 1980s due to habitat destruction, salmon farming, and climate change. To save Atlantic salmon, the agency initiated a program to kill thousands of uninvited pink salmon and control their influx into Norway’s rivers. Russia’s government, on the other hand, is fine with the status quo, so Norway’s efforts are barred from the Grense Jakobselv. This makes the shared river a perfect site for a cross-border environmental experiment. And in a changing climate that seems to favor non-native pink salmon over struggling Atlantic salmon, it may also make the Grense Jakobselv a portal for viewing the future.”


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