Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Ronald McDonald was past his sell-by date
Vice
“The 58-year-old always knew how to stand out from the crowd: bright red hair, a painted face, long shoes,” writes Amelia Tait. “In 2004, a small sample of children found him to be more recognisable than Founding Father George Washington and Jesus Christ, the son of God himself. But no one raised the alarm when he stopped appearing on British TV screens. No one wept when his cardboard cut-outs were shoved into the stockroom next to the spuds. When was the last time you sat on a bench with his cold plastic arm stretched stiff behind your back, a rictus grin frozen on his face? Ronald McDonald has been missing for seven years.”
Filling in the pollinator data gap, one bug at a time
The New York Times
Given the attention devoted in recent years to the loss of pollinators, there is a surprising dearth of data on the actual numbers of these crucial insects, reports Oliver Whang. “Bees are the most robust pollinators in North America. But in the United States, the only longstanding research on bees has been on the genus Bombus, the bumblebee, and it is difficult to know whether these data are relevant to the hundreds of other groups of bees in the country. No state, except for Pennsylvania, has even a partial list of its native bee species.” Some researchers are trying to change this by counting bees, one by one.
When dining among the dead was a national pastime
Atlas Obscura
“During the 19th century, and especially in its later years, snacking in cemeteries happened across the United States. It wasn’t just apple-munching alongside the winding avenues of graveyards,” writes Jonathan Kendall. “Since many municipalities still lacked proper recreational areas, many people had full-blown picnics in their local cemeteries. The tombstone-laden fields were the closest things, then, to modern day public parks.”
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The best sake outside of Japan is made in Holbrook, Arizona?
Smithsonian Magazine
“Atsuo Sakurai, 41 years old, greeted me at the front door wearing a tweed sport coat, jeans and a Route 66 baseball cap,” writes Richard Grant. “He didn’t strike me as an eccentric, although he agreed that Holbrook, Arizona, was a very odd place for a Japanese sake master to ply his trade. There were a few Japanese expats married to Americans in northeast Arizona, he said, but no Japanese community. As far as he knew, he was the only certified first-grade sake brewer in the United States, and he felt very fortunate to live in tiny Holbrook, because this is where his American dream came true.”
Empire building at the Iowa Farm Bureau
Investigate Midwest and Watchdog Writers Group
“Through expanded investments, [the Iowa Farm Bureau] has reaped massive profits,” write Sky Chadde, Eli Hoff and Mark Ossolinksi. “Over the past decade, its total revenue has increased about 200%. And, lately, about 80% of it comes from investments, according to tax documents. No other farm bureau even approaches that ratio. The Iowa Farm Bureau recently reported total revenue of about $100 million, the most of any farm bureau by far and nearly three times that of the influential national umbrella group, the American Farm Bureau Federation. Today its investment portfolio is worth more than a billion dollars. Executive compensation is in the high six figures.”