FERN’s Friday Feed: The fear is real
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
For undocumented restaurant workers, everything is in question
Eater
“Though undocumented immigrants make up just 5 percent of the labor pool, they make up 16 percent of food supply chain workers, from fruit pickers to slaughterhouse workers to chefs, and these threats to undocumented immigrants are rattling the industry,” writes Jaya Saxena. “Workers face the discontinuation of employment as more restaurants use the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ E-Verify tool to vet employment eligibility. There are threats of ICE raids and deportation, and even fewer paths to citizenship. As CNN reports, managers are advising restaurant workers in Chicago to carry their work permits and any other documentation. In New York, Seaport Entertainment Group surprised workers at the Tin Building with mandatory background checks just prior to the inauguration, discontinuing the employment of many undocumented kitchen and custodial staff.”
Hunting with dolphins
Orion Magazine
“It is the final week of February 2017, the last of the dark nights in the hunting season on the Brahmaputra. The sun is down, leaving behind a rose-pink sky that fades to purple, then indigo which ultimately turns an inky black. We can’t see a thing. Not the horizon, nor the moon, the stars, not even a hand held in front of our faces. It is as if the world were doused in Japanese ink,” writes Arati Kumar-Rao. “My friend and I are inching up the massive river with two fishermen, Lekhu and Ranjan, in their long, low-slung dinghy. It is the dry season; the river’s shallow course here is braided with sandy shoals. Lekhu and Ranjan are among the last of their tribe in Assam — handheld harpoon fishermen who fish on the blackest nights of the dry season, when the river runs clear and low. What makes them special is that they fish alongside the Gangetic dolphins.”
Citrus greening is an existential threat to the orange juice industry
The Atlantic
“[O]range juice was always on the breakfast table when I was growing up. It was affordable, delicious, and full of vitamin C,” writes Yasmin Tayag. “But orange juice isn’t so cheap anymore. Tropicana, for instance, has shrunk its bottles and raised prices in recent years. And since 2019, the price of concentrate has increased by about 80 percent. … Some of this is because of inflation. And if President Donald Trump ever goes through with the tariffs he has threatened against Mexico and Canada, orange juice—which once came to Americans from Florida, but now is generally made from a mix of international oranges—could become even more expensive. Yet orange juice also is facing a grander existential problem than the economy. The world’s biggest orange producers aren’t growing as much fruit as they used to. As orange availability slides, the era of orange-juice ubiquity is rapidly coming to an end.”
After the raid
Texas Monthly
“Two weeks before Christmas in 2006, roughly 10 percent of the residents of Cactus disappeared. That sort of calamity would devastate any place, but its impact was especially visible on the tiny, windswept town an hour north of Amarillo on the plains of the Panhandle. That’s because movements in the town were governed by what workers at the largest employer there called the chain. Cactus was then—as it is now—a meat-packing town. Life operated around the conveyor system inside the giant Swift and Co. slaughterhouse on the northwestern edge of the city,” writes Jack Herrera. “ICE ultimately arrested 297 workers. Cactus wasn’t the only plant the agency hit—it raided five other Swift facilities across the country, arresting almost 1,300 immigrants …. The 2006 Swift raids provide a model for the immigration enforcement that many of [Trump’s] supporters have been clamoring for …. But the aftermath offers a less tidy example.”
Scientists say new strain of rice cuts methane emissions 70 percent
Grist
“[L]ivestock is responsible for 30 percent of humanity’s methane emissions,” writes Matt Simon. “Rice cultivation, surprisingly enough, accounts for another 12 percent …. “Growing rice requires flooding fields … with staggering quantities of water. Microbes known as archaea multiply in the wet, oxygen-poor conditions, releasing methane. One way to reduce those emissions is to inundate the fields less often, but that’s not always feasible given local irrigation infrastructure, and less water can lead to reduced yields … Now though, scientists have gone to the source, announcing a breakthrough in breeding a variety of rice they say reduces methane emissions by 70 percent—while delivering yields nearly twice the global average.”