FERN’s Friday Feed: The noisy world beneath our feet
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
‘Thrumming,’ ‘chirring,’ ‘scraping’—the sounds of life in the dirt
Knowable Magazine
“Ecologists have long known that the ground beneath our feet is home to more life, and more diverse life, than almost any other place on Earth … a labyrinthine landscape of tunnels, cavities, roots and decaying litter. In just a cup of dirt, researchers have counted up to 100 million life forms, from more than 5,000 taxa,” writes Ute Eberle. “Today, in a relatively new field known as soil bioacoustics — others prefer terms such as biotremology or soil ecoacoustics — a growing number of biologists are capturing underground noises to open a window into this complex and cryptic world.”
The quest for fatter, faster-growing bugs
Wired
“The booming insect farming industry is becoming extremely interested in what makes some larvae grow faster and fatter than others. In 2021, Picard became one of the lead researchers at the Center for Environmental Sustainability Through Insect Farming, a new US-based research center that wants to make farming insects much more efficient. Although the industry is growing, by pure numbers it is still relatively puny,” writes Matt Reynolds. “These small production numbers keep the price of farmed insects high. One way to solve the problem is to selectively breed fatter and faster-growing bugs—the same approach that the livestock industry has used for centuries to make farm animals more productive.”
The food system’s labor problem summed up in a chicken sandwich
Mother Jones
“Eating in the United States represents one of the world’s great bargains,” writes Tom Philpott. “We consume the most calories per capita and don’t spend much cash to do so. Food’s claim on disposable income has fallen, from 17 percent in 1960 to less than 10 percent in 2019. Consider the wildly popular fast-food chicken sandwich. A typical one delivers 700 calories for about $4. But its once-abundant secret ingredient—the cheap labor that fuels our entire food system—is suddenly in short supply. Here’s why.”
The woman who fed 100,000 Londoners during the pandemic
The Guardian
“[Michelle] Dornelly became a community activist because she had to do something with all of her despair and frustration. It was consuming her. Her sons were getting attacked in the street. (She is a single parent to a daughter and three sons; all of her sons have additional needs.) The boys were continually harassed by the police … ‘I was the angry black mother,’ she says. ‘Angry at the world.’ When the pandemic hit, “Dornelly pivoted to providing food to the ‘at-risk’ families she had been supporting for years,” writes Sirin Kale. “She is always keen to stress that she runs a food hub, not a food bank, meaning that she doesn’t require people to have referrals when accessing support: anyone can walk up. ‘We have loads of clients coming to us with horror stories about food banks,’ she says.”
Redesigning the supply chain for sustainability rather than profit
The American Prospect
“Risks to the supply chain, established through decades of perverse policy decisions made by both parties, will always be with us, unless there’s a course correction,” writes David Dayen. “[V]irtually any well-timed disruption can cut off a vital source of components or finished goods. It’s an engineering flaw, where single points of failure cascade all the way to store shelves. You solve that only by … taking down the policy tyrannies that have forced reliance on faraway manufacturing plants, self-interested ocean shipping oligopolies, overwhelmed ports, deregulated trucking and rail systems, and retail giants and middlemen that see these cumulative problems as an opportunity to raise prices well above increased input costs.”