Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Vox
“Almost 90 years after the end of Prohibition, some 2,000 jurisdictions — towns, counties, and more — are dry, typically meaning you can’t legally buy alcohol,” writes Matthew Zeitlin. “Besides this obvious form of alcohol control, there are still often byzantine laws that govern how and when alcohol can be bought and sold that vary widely state to state and have unclear, if any, empirical connection with public health.”
Here are the rural residents who sued the world’s largest hog producer over waste and odors – and won
FERN and The Nation
Mostly black rural residents in North Carolina took on the hog industry’s biggest producer, Smithfield, and won multimillion-dollar verdicts against pollution, reports Barry Yeoman in FERN’s latest story, published with The Nation. But Yeoman notes that these judgments are far from certain, as an appeal gets underway early next year.
Why don’t we know how much livestock farms pollute the air?
FERN and The Nation
America’s thousands of confinement livestock operations pollute the air every day with chemicals like ammonia, methane, and hydrogen sulfide. Yet no one tracks exactly how much air pollution these farms produce, according to another new FERN story by Leah Douglas, published with The Nation.
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A growing trend of urban foraging
Next City
“[A] growing group of practitioners is dedicated to reintroducing the ancestral knowledge of foraging. Connecting to the natural world through foraging establishes valuable ties to the past and urges an investment in our shared future,” writes Valerie Vande Panne. “Once that connection is intimately made, the specter that a natural space may be destroyed — because of climate change, other man-made environmental catastrophe or forced erasure of knowledge — can inspire a shift in the relationship between urban residents and the natural world.”
Women in Japan return to sake brewing
Atlas Obscura
A new generation of women sake brewers in Japan is blazing a trail in the male-dominated industry. “Out of Japan’s approximately 1,500 licensed sake breweries, fewer than 50 are run by women,” writes Reina Gattuso. “This reflects the workplace challenges women face in Japan, and indeed worldwide. But it also reflects cultural taboos specific to the production and consumption of the rice-based drink.”
What will become of Bangkok if officials ban street food?
The New York Times
“[S]reet food vendors — with their pungent salads, oodles of noodles and coconut sweetmeats — have lately become the target of some of the capital’s planners,” writes Hannah Beech. “To them, this metropolis of 10 million residents suffers from an excess of crowds, clutter and health hazards. The floods, the heat, the stench of clogged canals and rotting fruit, the pok pok pok of that pestle — it’s all too much.”
What one dairy’s collapse meant for a tight-knit Mennonite community
The Washington Post
“As Trickling Springs grew from a small local company to one that sold to chefs, coffee shops and markets all along the East Coast, from Connecticut to Florida, the creamery became something rare: a multimillion-dollar enterprise in a Mennonite community, where people usually work with their hands on farms, in cabinet shops and at other modest, family-run businesses,” writes Tim Carman. “But even before the creamery closed, state and federal officials were looking into its business affairs, including the unorthodox ways the company raised capital … Their investigations coincided with a rising fear in the Mennonite community that Trickling Springs was not as stable as it appeared.”