FERN’s Friday Feed: The ‘plastic pandemic’
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Rolling Stone
A battle shaping up in Congress pits a handful of lawmakers against “some of the most powerful corporate interests on the planet,” writes Tim Dickinson. “Big Plastic isn’t a single entity. It’s more like a corporate supergroup: Big Oil meets Big Soda — with a puff of Big Tobacco, responsible for trillions of plastic cigarette butts in the environment every year. And it combines the lobbying and public-relations might of all three.”
The ‘financial curse’ that hollowed out rural America
The Nation
“From the 1960s to the ’80s, about a third of each dollar American shoppers spent on groceries went back to farmers; in 2016, according to the Farm Bureau, that has fallen to less than 13 cents per dollar,” writes Nick Shaxson. “Given total US food spending of about $1.7 trillion each year, that falling share suggests that the changes in the food system could be costing US farmers at least $150 billion a year—certainly many times the $18 billion in federal farm subsidies that were paid to them in 2018. Where is all this hidden money going, and who benefits?”
The curse of the ‘organic child’ ideal
Aeon
“Today’s caregivers,” write sociologists Kate Cairns, Norah MacKendrick, and Josée Johnston, “are expected not only to make sure kids eat their vegetables, but also to read labels, research omega-3 to omega-6 ratios, and think about the plastic packaging of Organic Cheddar Bunnies … The organic child ideal suggests that children are best protected through the (conscientious and expensive) practices of parents, and especially mothers. It’s a bad ideal, impossible to fully attain.”
Vox
These days, “[w]e’re steeped in discussions of sober curiosity, soberishness, and hip sobriety, terminology that all spears the same fish: Drink less,” writes Derek Brown. “This is spawning both a philosophical movement whose adherents have holidays (Dry January and Sober October) and is creating an industry through sober influencers; nonalcoholic beer, wine, and ‘spirits’; dry bars; dry events; and sophisticated cocktails without alcohol. Let’s call it mindful drinking.”
Does ‘rewilding’ mean the end of farming as we know it?
The Guardian
“Over the past 20 years or so … ad hoc coalitions of politicians, activists and conscience-stricken billionaires … have rewilded millions of acres of mostly failed agricultural and grazing land,” writes Christopher de Bellaigue. “Their guiding philosophy … upends the long dominant view that land should be cleared, ploughed and wrung ever more efficiently for food.” But “[t]his is the proposition that is now poised to determine the future of farming.”