Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
A Georgia farmer’s quest to match Spain’s jamón ibérico
Eater and FERN
Spain’s high-end ham market was hit hard when the global economy tanked in 2008, prompting the government to allow the renowned Iberian pigs to be shipped outside the country for the first time, reports Maryn McKenna, in FERN’s latest story, published with Eater. Now Will Harris, who owns White Oak Pastures in southwestern Georgia, is “wagering hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a good portion of” his farm’s “reputation, on a long-odds bet that his foreign pigs could do at least as well in exile as they ever had at home, and make a product at least as delicious. And maybe more.”
Why a Kansas farming town shrugged off its nitrate-polluted water for decades
Harper’s and FERN
Fertilizer from the farms surrounding Pretty Prairie, Kansas, is what pushed nitrate to illegal levels in the tiny community’s drinking water, reports Elizabeth Royte in a new FERN story. But, as “Bob Krehbiel, who grew up drinking nitrate-heavy water on his family’s dairy farm,” made clear: “If farmers quit fertilizing, it would destroy the community … We are too small a town to have these battles. Our friends and neighbors are farmers. And that’s why we’re ignoring fertilizer on the ground, and the city is charged with taking it out.”
Mystery, tragedy, and bees at a Brooklyn cherry factory
The New Yorker
Arthur Mondella ran a successful maraschino cherry company in Red Hook, Brooklyn, until his sudden death in 2015. “One might not expect that Mondella’s death also would have saddened many of New York City’s beekeepers, but it did,” writes Ian Frazier, in a fascinating story that juggles foodie culture, marijuana cultivation, entrepreneurship, and, yes, beekeeping. “In fact, the complications in Mondella’s life that led to his demise had a minor but significant bee component.”
You don’t know as much about food as you think you do
The Conversation
A new survey from researchers at Michigan State University finds that wealthier Americans think they know more about food and nutrition than the average person, when in fact they don’t—and actually sometimes know less. “We also observed that even though higher earners have more access to information about food,” write Sheril Kirshenbaum and Douglas Buhler, “they are also more likely to be influenced by misinformation and pseudoscience.”
The strange tale of an underground Arkansas nightclub
Gravy (podcast)
Plenty of nightclubs have a cave-like feel, but in Arkansas, an actual cave became home to a popular nightclub in the 1930s. The Wonderland Cave Nightclub served up alcohol during Prohibition, and for dinner, chop suey was the dish of choice. “Though the nightclub is long gone,” says producer Robin Miniter, “it begs the question: how did Chinese food end up on a menu in a nightclub in an Arkansan cave that is hundreds of millions years old? And whose idea was this?”