FERN’s Friday Feed: Tinned fish has jumped the shark
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The tinned fish backlash has arrived
Taste
“Eight years ago, when I first started to pitch publishers on the idea of a cookbook about fish in cans, the response was a resounding, diplomatically phrased iteration of ‘Ew.’ … One pandemic, a Times Square sardine store, and many memes later, the tides have changed. Depending on who you ask, we are finally living in tinned fish heaven—or tinned fish hell. Now,” writes Anna Hezel, “[i]t’s hard to walk down the grocery store aisle or a city street without spotting a sign of tinned fish’s grip on the culture, whether it’s a new twee can design for a mass-market product or a dedicated tin menu at a small-plates wine bar. … In other words, the backlash was inevitable. Cue the tweets and TikToks about tinned fish having a disheartening ‘recession energy.’ Cue the simultaneous groans about the shocking $20 to $50 price tags on many imported conservas (and the resulting markups for those premium products at bars and restaurants).”
How Trump’s immigration raids hurt summer pleasures, from berries to barbecue
The Guardian
“Trump’s administration knows that targeting workers in the food chain is the easiest way to reach [homeland security adviser Stephen] Miller’s quota of 3,000 arrests a day,” writes Lori Flores. “ICE agents are rushing into fruit orchards, vegetable fields, dairy barns, processing plants and restaurant kitchens to arrest people on the spot. The consequences of these raids will be profound in our food labor system and greater society. First and foremost, these raids are traumatizing people. Many arrestees are ‘disappeared’, their locations unknown by loved ones and lawyers. Second, the raids will affect summer food chains and other industries throughout the year. The juicy watermelons and peaches, berry pies, barbecue, ice-cream and lobster rolls we are currently enjoying come from the labor of a heavily immigrant workforce. Almost every bit of American food and drink passes through the hands of an immigrant, and the DHS is denying this reality while terrorizing food workers with brutal efficiency.”
The true story of a sandwich
Belt Magazine
“My family has a sandwich named after us. It’s called the Parker Sub. It’s not on the menu of Pizza Plus, a central Michigan pizzeria about an hour from Traverse City, but if you order it, they’ll know who it’s for. It’s what my dad always ordered when we visited. It’s just a good sandwich, he said, his mouth full of ground beef and bread, swigging a can of Pepsi. I’ve never really felt like I fit in with my family. My father disliked the way my sister and I grew up. He called me fancy, often, tossing it out like a swear. I don’t know that I disagree with him, but we all know what fancy means,” writes Lauren Parker. “He’s diagnosed with brain cancer in March 2023. I try to make the sandwich in my California apartment kitchen, a world away from the intersection with the swinging traffic light that’s named after a timber baron. We’ve never gotten along, me and my dad, me and the sandwich, and for the first time in ten years he and I are talking and I have a craving.”
A conservation problem from hell
Anthropocene Magazine
“We usually think conservation means saving animals. But its history is tinged with blood. John Audubon, a patron saint of the American conservation movement, killed hundreds of birds, partly for sport and partly for specimens to pose for his paintings. Aldo Leopold, a father of ecological science, endorsed killing wolves to increase deer populations. Today,” writes Warren Cornwall, “as climate change pushes animals into each other’s overlapping territories and humans drive ever more species to the brink of extinction, the pressure to reach for a gun to help save one animal from another is stronger than ever. In recent years, the federal government has shot Arctic foxes to guard the nests of rare Steller’s eider ducks. In Texas and Oklahoma, hunters blast cowbirds that take over the nests of endangered black-capped vireos. Sea lions have been put to death for the sake of salmon on the Northwest’s Columbia River.”
What your favorite grocery store says about you
The Atlantic
“The supermarket is now a brand unto itself, not just the building that houses the other brands, and its shoppers aren’t just brand-loyal—they’re fanatical,” writes Ellen Cushing. “Maybe this was inevitable. Over the past two decades, after all, fandom has escaped sci-fi conventions and high schools to become the animating force in cultural and political life. Fans drive what art gets created, what products get made, who gets canceled, and who gets venerated. … Susan Kresnicka is an anthropologist who now studies fandom on behalf of corporate clients; she told me that in surveys, some 85 percent of Americans consider themselves a fan of something—a film franchise, a product, a music group, an influencer. … Political and cultural affiliation have declined, and the internet has enabled a new kind of community building and identity signaling, one that is anchored to consumption rather than creed. … All culture is consumer culture now, and the grocery store is the physical store that the most people go into most often—a place that Americans visit more often than church.”