FERN’s Friday Feed: The crab kings
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How Stalin, Putin, and climate change created Norway’s crab kings
FERN and Bloomberg Businessweek
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. banned the import of Russian seafood, stifling the booming market for red king crab, which Russia dominated. But, as Andrew S. Lewis explains, it created an opening for Norway’s most economically desperate fishing village. “In Bugøynes there’s no longer talk of a mass exodus. Its fishermen, including [Leif] Ingilæ, describe a comfortable life complete with annual vacations to the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. Whatever doesn’t get exported forms the backbone of a growing crab-themed tourism industry. For Ingilæ the turnaround has yielded a rare sight among fishing towns everywhere these days: Both his son and grandson work on his boat. Today his younger peers can scarcely imagine a time without the crabs. There are, however, some signs that they might have to.”
The U.S.-Mexico corn fight spotlights the health risks of popular herbicide
FERN and The Nation
“Defending food supplies is an ancient cornerstone of the social contract, one enshrined in 21st century trade pacts including the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to NAFTA. In December 2023, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invoked this right when he banned genetically modified corn for human consumption and phased out the use of glyphosate, GM corn’s signature herbicide, which the World Health Organization calls ‘probably carcinogenic to humans,’” writes Alexander Zaitchik. “If GM corn and glyphosate pose health risks to humans, as suggested by a growing body of research, then those risks are magnified in Mexico, where the national diet revolves around minimally processed white corn, especially in the form of its iconic flatbread, the tortilla. Corn meal accounts for more than 60 percent of the average Mexican’s daily calories and protein, which is roughly 10 times the US average and puts Mexicans at 10 times the risk.”
The bee whisperers
bioGraphic
“Like most rainforests in the world, the Atlantic Forest where the Guarani live has been threatened for centuries. European colonizers cleared it for mining and coffee plantations starting in the 16th century. More recently, real estate development has begun to encroach. Hoping to help reverse the tide of loss, Marcio Verá Mirim is one among an increasing number of South American Indigenous people who have adopted beekeeping techniques to support native bees and the forests where they live as well as to preserve their own cultures and livelihoods,” writes Sofia Moutinho. “The bees are fundamental to pollinating forest plants, and the forest keeps the bees alive by supplying the nutrients they need, Verá Mirim says. ‘There is no reforestation project good enough without beekeeping.’”
This restored hatchery sells trout to Michelin-starred chefs across the East Coast
Atlas Obscura
“[T]he Walkers’ Smoke In Chimneys fish farm is actually a restored 1930s U.S. Department of Interior trout hatchery and research center that sits in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the edge of the George Washington & Jefferson National Forest. Here,” writes Eric J. Wallace, “there are no electric pumps, water filters, aquaculture tanks, mechanical agitators, antibiotics, oxygen monitors, or chemical additives. Impoundments are gravity-fed by water from an artesian spring that surges from the limestone bedrock at a rate of 2,000 gallons a minute. Swift-flowing, two-foot-deep raceways mimic currents in steep mountain streams and help fish develop strong musculature. Packed, flow-through, shale-bottom ponds lined with aquatic plants, grasses, pollinator gardens, and nearby forests act as living ecosystems replete with naturally occurring microbes, insects, amphibians, and crustaceans.”
The Grub Street Diets of your favorite fictional characters
Literary Hub
“Fiction and fine dining are having a moment,” writes Brittany Allen. “In April, New York magazine put out a nostalgic ode to scene-y restaurants known for their literary patrons. And seemingly on the same tide, the novelist Gary Shteyngart wrote a much-circulated New Yorker piece about his quest for the perfect martini (among other vittles). But appetites and art regularly collide—for a certain milieu anyway—in the Grub Street Diet. For the uninitiated: in this vertical, celebs who are Having a Moment painstakingly narrate a week’s worth of their edible intake. Some Diets are flexes, hinting at lives of epicurean splendor on par with Shteyngart’s. Others may bum you out with their commitment to a leftovers-based naturalism. Either way, the Diet’s a pretty fun slice of life. Inspired by the trends (and a recent high density of writers accepting the Grub Street challenge), I’ve been dreaming up some hypothetical food diaries for the fictional.”