FERN’s Friday Feed: Forbidden fruit
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The anti-avocado militias of Michoacán
Harper’s Magazine
“Michoacán, where around four in five of all avocados consumed in the United States are grown, is the most important avocado-producing region in the world, accounting for nearly a third of the global supply,” writes Alexander Sammon. “This cultivation requires a huge quantity of land, much of it found beneath native pine forests, and an even more startling quantity of water. It is often said that it takes about twelve times as much water to grow an avocado as it does a tomato. Recently, competition for control of the avocado, and of the resources needed to produce it, has grown increasingly violent, often at the hands of cartels.”
Inside the life of an Instacart shopper
The Washington Post
“At 5:50 a.m. on a Wednesday in late June … Larry Askew woke up in the front seat of his Nissan Sentra. The Sentra was parked where it is every night: in a lot across from Wegmans on Wisconsin Avenue in D.C. And once he woke up, Askew did what he does every morning: stuck on his black plastic glasses — missing an arm because he’d accidentally sat on them — drove across the street to the Wegmans parking garage, opened the Instacart app on his phone and started scrolling. Askew, 45, is a professional shopper — and a highly dedicated one,” writes Britt Peterson. “From 6 a.m. until 3 p.m. every day of the week, he shops for Instacart, bagging groceries mostly at this Wegmans and driving them around the city in his Sentra. In the afternoon, he turns on the UberEats app and delivers takeout until about 11 p.m. Then he goes to the gym to shower, drives back to the Wisconsin Avenue parking lot, reclines the front seat and falls immediately asleep.”
Who’s afraid of a spatchcocked chicken?
Eater
“In England, in modern English, a living cow arrives on the plate as ‘beef,’ a calf as ‘veal,’ a sheep as ‘mutton,’ and a pig is transmuted into ‘pork,’ which is also called, prettily, the other white meat. The names of the living animals have Anglo roots,” writes C Pam Zhang, “whereas the names of the ingredients came from the French — a trademark of Norman conquerors who, in the 11th century, hoped to subjugate the ‘savage’ Natives of the British Isles. ‘Beef,’ ‘veal,’ and ‘pork’ were words of the ruling class, imbued with sophistication and cultural superiority, far removed from living animals with their guts and blood and shit. These words, it occurred to me in 2010, were a form of hypocrisy.”
Shipping food is dirty business. Can sailboats fix it?
Ambrook Research
“Transportation is responsible for nearly one-fifth of all the carbon emissions in the food system, and between 75% and 80% of all goods are transported via sea freight, which typically relies on container ships powered by dirty bunker fuel,” writes Whitney Bauck. “Despite international agreements forged this summer to slash global shipping emissions by at least 20% by 2030, the past 10 years have shown ‘no progress in terms of actual emission reductions’ from the industry. What’s the solution? According to brothers Olivier and Jacques Barreau, the answer is simple: Bring back sailboats.”
How a California tribe won back ancestral lands and saved sacred salmon
Vox
“For millennia, the [Winneman Wintu] tribe ensured the safe travel of the Chinook upstream to colder waters, so the fish could reproduce,” writes Izzie Ramirez. “Then came the Shasta Dam. Up until the 1930s, many Winnemem Wintu lived on the lands surrounding the McCloud River without legally owning it … The plan was to flood the immediate area to create a reservoir with the waters of the upper Sacramento, Pit, and McCloud Rivers. Tribal members were displaced, and hundreds of ancestral Winnemem Wintu villages, sacred sites, and burial grounds now sit underwater at the bottom of the reservoir. The dam also blocked the salmon from being able to return to their spawning grounds, leading their population to decline.” But last week “the tribe purchased 1,080 acres of their ancestral lands. More than $2 million in private donations were used to fund the sale. What was left over, as well as separate grant funding, will support the construction of an eco-village, which will marry Indigenous living traditions with future-forward land management practices.”