FERN’s Friday Feed: The great grocery squeeze
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How a federal policy change in the 1980s gave us food deserts
The Atlantic
“The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they can’t overcome a racist pattern of corporate redlining. But these explanations fail to contend with a key fact: Although poverty and ruralness have been with us forever, food deserts arrived only around the late 1980s. Prior to that, small towns and poor neighborhoods could generally count on having a grocery store, perhaps even several,” writes Stacy Mitchell. “A slew of state and federal programs have tried to address food deserts by providing tax breaks and other subsidies to lure supermarkets to underserved communities. These efforts have failed. More food deserts exist now than in 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession. That’s because the proposed solutions misunderstand the origins of the problem.”
Can a wearable sensor save farmworkers from heat injuries?
Ambrook Research
“The Sunshine State is the hottest in the nation, bearing down on residents with scorching temperatures and stifling humidity alike. Outdoor workers, including the roughly 150,000 agricultural workers seasonally employed every year in the state, are especially vulnerable,” writes Ula Chrobak. “Summer months on Florida farms are ‘almost like a sauna,’ said Roxana Chicas, a registered nurse and assistant professor at Emory University … Chicas is working on a solution — a biometric device that warns the wearer they are at risk of heat injury. Researchers at Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the Farmworker Association of Florida are now testing wearable sensors on outdoor workers to better understand heat risks and to develop algorithms that predict the onset of heat-related illness.”
The entangled garden
Noēma
“Gardens aren’t quite like other human spaces. They’re hybrids: possessed, designed and managed by one species but occupied by myriads more,” writes Richard Mabey. “We like to think we are in harmonious communion with these organisms — ‘reconnecting with nature’ — but in reality, we are controlling them. A garden is a piece of personal territory, a finite patch of a finite planet for us to do whatever we like with, free of the kinds of restrictions that apply beyond its boundaries … But it is possible to take a conscious, ethical step back, to allow a garden’s native citizens a chance to make their own choices about where and how to live. To even up the power balance a little. Gardens are often presented metaphorically as theaters where the gardener acts as a combined writer, director and set designer. Couldn’t they also be open, improvisational stages, where wild and transitory inhabitants become part of the production team?”
The case for not going viral
Taste
“A few months ago, I had one of the best bites of my life. It was japchae, the Korean sweet potato noodle dish, eaten out of a takeout container, peppery and stuffed to the brim with julienned carrots, roasted shiitake mushrooms, marinated onions, and fresh arugula … And I’m not going to tell you where I got it,” writes Shaan Merchant. “I bought it from a big white farmhouse … somewhere between New York City and Albany. There, a 70-year-old former translator who wishes to be known only by her first initial, ‘I,’ has converted her garage into a vibrant farm stand … Her cooking is craftsmanship, with keen and careful attention given to every ingredient. For now, I isn’t looking for more of anything. ‘I can barely keep up with my usual clients,’ she says … She isn’t looking to grow her business, and, of course, she does not have to contend with the burden of New York City rent or sustaining a workforce. But in today’s food world era of abundant options and opinions—restaurants thirsting to go viral, and social media creators eager to share their ‘discoveries’—there’s a constant, buzzing churn toward more … It makes I’s desire to fly under the radar feel welcome, even noble.”
The island where environmentalism implodes
The New Yorker
“In 2000, a team of scientists argued, in Nature, that defending New Caledonia and other biodiversity hot spots could be a ‘silver bullet’ for environmental conservation,” writes Ben Crair. “For years, the Earth has been in the midst of a mass extinction inflicted largely by humans; the paper’s authors, among others, argued that safeguarding the world’s most biodiverse places can slow the crisis down. But as nickel gains a reputation as a remedy for another crisis—climate change—two strands of environmentalism are coming into conflict. In New Caledonia, the quest to save species is at odds with the mission of protecting the climate. Mining companies extract the nickel from New Caledonia’s soil by razing the forests that evolved on it; the engines of the so-called green transition could leave Earth’s most verdant corner in tatters.”