FERN’s Friday Feed: The global pint
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How the pub became one of Ireland’s greatest exports
Smithsonian Magazine
“The Burren is one of the most recent projects of the Irish Pub Company, a Dublin-based design group that has created upwards of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries on every continent except Antarctica,” writes Liza Weisstuch. “Germany is its biggest European client, and Switzerland is a close second. In Russia, it has established three venues in Moscow, one in Sochi and one in Novosibirsk, in Siberia. The company’s handiwork is also found in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Japan, Nigeria and Mauritius, and at the New York-New York Hotel in Las Vegas. A project is currently underway in a new high-end shopping center in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.”
Can public groceries help solve America’s food-desert problem?
FERN and The New Republic
“A novel solution to give Americans better access to fresh food is picking up steam across the country: government-owned, government-operated grocery stores. Such stores are touted by proponents as a way to provide groceries to so-called food deserts, communities that have been abandoned by for-profit stores that decided it wasn’t worth the investment,” writes Bryce Covert. “But to succeed they have to find ways to compete with the big chains that dominate the industry, keeping costs and prices low. The problem these stores are meant to address is massive: According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 53.6 million people, or 17.4 percent of the population, live in low-income areas with low access to grocery stores—defined as a half mile in urban communities and 10 miles in rural communities. As consolidation continues to shrink the grocery sector, the number of people without easy access to a store is likely to increase.”
The cult of the American lawn
Noēma
“‘The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,’ Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book ‘Lawn People,’ told me. ‘There becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure you’re not letting down the neighborhood — you’re keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.’ This devotion has turned the U.S. into the undisputed global superpower of lawns,” writes Oliver Milman. “Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the nation. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn. Each year, enough water to fill Chesapeake Bay is hurled collectively onto American lawns, along with more than 80 million pounds of pesticides, in order to maintain the sanitized, carpet-like turf. In aggregate, this vast expanse of manicured grass rivals the area of America’s celebrated national parks.” (For more on lawns and biodiversity, check out this episode of FERN’s new podcast Buzzkill.)
America is done pretending about meat
The Atlantic
“For more than a decade, cutting down on meat and other animal products has been idealized as a healthier, more ethical way to eat. Guidelines such as ‘Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.’ may have disproportionately appealed to liberals in big cities, but the meat backlash has been unavoidable across the United States,” writes Yasmin Tayag. “Now the goal of eating less meat has lost its appeal. A convergence of cultural and nutritional shifts, supercharged by the return of the noted hamburger-lover President Donald Trump, has thrust meat back to the center of the American plate. It’s not just MAGA bros and MAHA moms who resist plant-based eating. A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat.”
Ultraprocessed foods are ultracomplicated
Taste
“UPFs are more than just the sum of their ingredients—they are the boxed mac and cheese that stretches a week’s grocery budget, the tub of ice cream that provides consolation after a stressful day, and the nostalgic breakfast cereals that accompany weekend cartoons,” writes Sumera Subzwari. “These foods hold a specific cultural resonance, tied deeply to memory and comfort. Some food advocates are increasingly complicating the perception of UPFs as one-note villains by telling stories about survival, memory, and systemic inequality.”