FERN’s Friday Feed: The story of a controversial fruit
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Tell me why the watermelon grows
FERN and Switchyard
“The watermelon is a generous fruit: the flesh of one can feed a dozen people and can parent hundreds of melons with its seeds,” writes Jori Lewis. “Cultures throughout the ages have, and still do, interpret the watermelon as a symbol of good luck and fertility, a plant whose great fecundity might be shared with you. But in the United States, more than a century of racial denigration has cloaked and clouded this primordial symbol of solidarity, generosity, and abundance, transforming it into something almost unpalatable for many Black people. Of course, the watermelon itself is not to blame, but throughout its botanical, cultural, and social history, it has been a vehicle for our ideas about community, survival, and what we owe the future.”
The commodification of Vietnam’s national dish
Stranger’s Guide
“Unlike some Vietnamese specialties that were once regarded as extravagant residues of the colonial era,” writes Nguyen Truong Quý, “phở had long been plebeian, shabby; to be right, it had to be a little shady. And thus it remained for a whole century. But then came Phở 24, followed by Square Phở. The dish became more expensive and refined and was sold at phở shops that double as relaxing places to sit and be served. You can now buy all the things you were unlikely to get from shoulder pole-phở, furnace-phở, coal-phở or wood stove-phở—temperature control, hygienic surroundings, a suitable ambiance for a date, maybe even a restroom. My sister is relieved that she can now take foreign guests to taste Hanoi’s specialty dish without having to visit squat, damp shops with mismatched chairs, moldy walls and slimy stoves, not to mention a stream of invective from surly shop owners. But Phở 24 has no flavor, you say? What do Westerners know about phở? All they want is to try it.”
Goodbye mortadella and other deli meats I have loved
Taste
“I have kicked cigarettes. I am 13 years sober. But I am struggling to quit deli meats, specifically mortadella, the fatty, buttery, pistachio-studded deli meat from Emilia-Romagna that I enjoy eating directly from the white butcher paper where it was gently laid after slicing,” writes John Devore. “My grocery store deli counter guy in Park Slope, Brooklyn, knows I like my mort sliced nice and thin. We don’t even have to communicate verbally anymore. We make eye contact, and everything is taken care of.”
Can NYC’s giant wholesale market retain its relevance in a Costco world?
Ambrook Research
The Hunts Point market “is the first stop for much of the produce that is bought, sold, and eaten in New York City,” write Nadia Berenstein and Lila Barth. “The market is also, in many ways, a relic. When it opened in May 1967, the publicly financed facilities were state-of-the-art, and a huge leap forward from the shambling, traffic-clogged marketplace that persisted in downtown Manhattan for more than a century. But now, nearly six decades later, the market’s infrastructure is creakily out of date, with consequences for the wholesalers who do business there, the stores and consumers who depend on them, and the residents of Hunts Point … As the market embarks on a campaign to rebuild — the price tag on necessary upgrades and a hoped-for expansion runs upwards of $600 million, about half of which has already been pledged by federal, state, and city officials — it’s worth considering how Hunts Point came to be the reservoir for New York City’s fresh food, and what its future may hold.”
Change comes to Europe’s last wilderness
The Dial
“In summer 2020, the waning days of the midnight sun, the photographer Carleen Coulter and I traveled across Troms og Finnmark, Europe’s northernmost county, following reindeer herders during their calf-marking season,” writes Ben Mauk. “The county is curved like the blade of a knife, tracing the edge of a belt of land that crosses Norway, Sweden, and Finland into Russia’s Kola Peninsula. The region — known as Sápmi to the Sámi people who are its most longstanding inhabitants — is sometimes called Europe’s last wilderness. It is a rare sanctuary in the northern world, one where a lynx, stoat, or salmon might emerge into being, live out its hungry life, and die without encountering any evidence of humankind. This wildness is now threatened, not only by climate change but by some of the very forces developed to combat that existential peril.”