FERN’s Friday Feed: The slow death of a family dairy farm
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Abe Voelker (blog)
Voelker, who grew up on a small dairy farm in Wisconsin, charts the rise of CAFOs, and the environmental and economic devastation they wrought, through the slow death of his family’s farm. “For a taste of what the near future looks like, Walmart already began bottling their own milk, shutting down over 100 dairy producers in the process,” he writes. “As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega-corporations dictate production and the ‘farmers’ are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation.”
Topic
“Policing taste crimes has become a subset of call-out culture,” writes John Birdsall. “The late Anthony Bourdain often blasted people who ate atrocious things for their moral failings. In 2016, in a seven-point list of food crimes that included truffle oil…brioche burger buns, and Chicken Caesars, Bourdain suggested that the real perpetrators of crimes against food aren’t chefs but diners, the people too ignorant, disrespectful, or vain to notice that what they’re eating is shit.”
Restaurant criticism needs Soleil Ho
The Washington Post
“Soleil Ho is here, and everyone knows it,” writes Maura Judkis. The new food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle is a young, queer woman of color who is “uniquely positioned to tackle some of the most pressing issues in the food world, some of which were themes in her first reviews: What’s the difference between appreciation and appropriation? What’s the true cost of food and the labor to produce it? How do we make the restaurant industry more equitable, more accessible, more just?”
How Tunde Wey became our most provocative food critic
GQ
The Nigerian-born chef is a traveling truth-teller, using “a hybrid of political action, performance art, revolutionary rhetoric, impish provocation, and other assorted acts of public intellectualism” to critique the American way of eating,” writes Brett Martin. “In New Orleans … he opened a lunch stall at which white people were asked to pay two and a half times more for a plate of food than people of color, the rough equivalent of the income disparity between the two groups. In Ann Arbor, white customers lined up to experience the highs and lows of random wealth distribution at Wey’s food truck, which utilized an elaborate algorithm to choose which diners would receive lunch for their money and which would get stuck with empty boxes.”
Ashtin Berry is taking on inequality in the hospitality industry
Eater
“Inequality is built into the structure of the hospitality industry. Historically, restaurants have thrived on the efforts of invisible labor, while only a few — the head chefs and restaurateurs — gain power and recognition,” writes Monica Burton. That’s why activists like Ashtin Berry, who spoke at our FERN Talks & Eats event in October, are convening spaces to address those issues. “Berry leads workshops and appears on panels to discuss how businesses can structure their operations to foster inclusivity. She speaks at conferences, like at Portland Cocktail Week where she taught a class on ethics for bartenders considering consulting careers. She also does consulting work herself, often delivering trainings or advice to bars that want to know how to make their spaces safe and welcoming for all genders and people of color.”