Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Remembering Jonathan Gold
The New Yorker
The Pulitzer-winning food critic Jonathan Gold passed away July 21 at the age of fifty-seven. “Gold wrote not so much in sentences and paragraphs as in litanies: cascades of facts, of visual and tactile sensations, of wild references that ricocheted from the toffee-nosed to the profane,” writes Helen Rosner. Unlike many critics, “the bulk of his attentions were directed at L.A.’s sprawling, decentralized grid of neighborhoods—often, immigrant enclaves, where the neighborhood restaurants cooked not for the fussy palate of a glossy-magazine critic, or for the see-and-be-seen automata of the city’s celebrity economy, but for the needs (and nostalgia) of the restaurateurs’ own closely-knit communities.”
Understanding immigration through the lens of NAFTA
The New Food Economy
The North American Free Trade Agreement has had enormous impact on its participants. “Our southern neighbor stocks the fresh produce sections of our grocery stores, and we send them in return 6 million tons of subsidized corn annually. This relentless deluge of cheap, commodity corn has been disastrous for Mexican heirloom corn producers,” writes Renee Alexander. Unable to compete with cheap corn, “an estimated 2 million farm workers abandoned the Mexican countryside for the big cities, looking for work. Unable to find jobs in their country, half-a-million Mexicans a year migrated to the U.S., contributing to a 75-percent increase in illegal immigration from Mexico in the five years after NAFTA took effect.”
When the spigot runs dry
The New York Times
When the Paup family moved to Sulphur Springs Valley in Arizona, from Pennsylvania, they asked about water quality. What they didn’t ask about was water quantity—and soon it was running out. Other homeowners as well as farms in the area were also going dry, as big corporate farms moved in and drilled deep into an ancient aquifer. “Suddenly, the very qualities of the valley that had nurtured generations of family agriculture—its cheap ground, its lack of groundwater regulation—seemed to threaten its existence,” Noah Gallagher Shannon writes. The story may be a marker for the future of the West, for like mining, the overuse and collapse of aquifers may turn farming regions into ghost towns.
The untold story of the Malheur occupation
High Country News
The Bundy occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge drew national media attention in 2016 and lasted six weeks. But what isn’t well known is that the rancher-federal standoff was an aberration in Harney County, Oregon, where multiple parties in the ranching-wildlife divide have been collaborating for 15 years. At the heart of the effort is the High Desert Partnership, which might hold “lessons for other counties where public-lands extremists seek to bring division,” writes Tay Wiles. “Put another way, as one local rancher said: High Desert Partnership’s methods were ‘what inoculated us from the Bundy disease.’”
14,000-year-old bread rewrites history of baking
KQED
The discovery of ancient breadcrumbs by archaeobotanist Amaia Arranz-Otaegui at a site in Jordan has upturned the commonly accepted timeline of grain cultivation. “The established archaeological doctrine states that humans first began baking bread about 10,000 years ago,” writes Lina Zeldovich. “But Arranz-Otaegui’s breadcrumbs predate the advent of agriculture by at least 4,000 years. That means that our ancestors were bakers first—and learned to farm afterwards.” One possible explanation for this new timeline is our ancient ancestors’ desire to be able to reduce the labor intensity of baking bread for special occasions. “Baking bread could have been reserved for special occasions or to impress important guests. The people’s desire to indulge more often may have prompted them to begin cultivating cereals.”