Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Eater
Why are we so obsessed with what candidates eat on the campaign trail? “It’s not especially difficult for a skilled politician to disguise their true beliefs, even over the course of multiple elections, with hundreds of policy plans, thousands of speeches, tens of thousands of handshakes or babies kissed,” writes Meghan McCarron. “But it’s much more challenging to mask true disgust while eating or drinking something — say, a food or beverage that is deeply meaningful to you and your community. So it’s maybe not so surprising that one authenticity test, for many voters, is how a candidate eats.”
Are there ‘forever chemicals’ in America’s milk?
When a dairy farm in New Mexico was shut down last year due to contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of chemicals that have been linked to reproductive and developmental problems as well as cancer, it revealed how little federal and state regulators know about the presence of these chemicals in our food supply, according to FERN’s latest story, published with HuffPost.
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Just don’t call it a ‘Ginaissance’
The New Yorker
“Not that long ago, gin was for squares,” writes Anthony Lane. “Maybe your parents drank it, and your grandparents before them. Gin: the very word was plain and unexciting … And now look. Gin is on the rise and on the loose. It has gone forth and multiplied … There are now gins of every shade, for every social occasion, and from every time zone. The contagion is global, and I have stumbled across gins from Japan, Australia, Italy, and Colombia.”
The ecological potential of abandoned agricultural land
Yale Environment 360
“Abandonment of rural lands has become one of the most dramatic planet-wide changes of our time, affecting millions of square miles of land. Partly it’s a product of rural flight, and the economic, social, and educational appeal of cities. Partly it’s about larger forces like climate change and globalization of the food supply chain,” writes Richard Conniff. Now, some researchers believe that “a more aggressive—and evidence-based—approach to restoring abandoned lands could bring about major progress in both the climate and extinction emergencies.”
‘3 kids. 2 paychecks. No home.’
California Sunday Magazine
In California’s Salinas Valley — “The Valley That Feeds The Nation” — “91,000 farmworkers live with stagnant wages (the median pay for farmworkers is $12.79 per hour) and the constant threat of ICE (the majority of these laborers are undocumented),” writes Brian Goldstone. “By far the greatest difficulty facing Salinas families, though, is the disappearance of affordable rental housing.”
A ‘paper genocide’
Rewire.News
In a two-part series, Jen Deerinwater investigates the chronic undercounting of Native people in the census. “The erasure of Native people from the U.S. census and tribal rolls amounts to paper genocide, a systematic destruction of Native identity by reclassifying people into non-Native racial groups on government records,” Deerinwater writes. “By erasing our existence via the census, our treaty rights are further ignored and funding streams for our tribal nations are gutted. What’s worse, the details surrounding the 2020 census suggest there is no real change in sight.”