Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The military’s culture of eating disorders
Task & Purpose
“The Army’s height and weight requirements are laid out in Army Regulation 600-9, the guidance for the Army Body Composition Program, which dictates how much a soldier should weigh depending on their gender, height, and age,” writes Haley Britzkey. Though health experts say the standards are “antiquated,” to meet them “service members often adopt unhealthy behaviors like starving themselves, working out excessively, taking diet pills or laxatives, or sitting in saunas for prolonged periods of time to drop weight quickly. An Army major who struggled with bulimia for years said taking drastic measures ahead of weigh-ins is ‘so common that nobody looks at it as weird.’”
How conservative Christianity shaped American fast-food
The Washington Post
It isn’t just Chick-fil-A. “The quest for spiritual freedom and the search for the nearest drive-through may seem like two disparate experiences, but they have long intersected in the United States,” writes Marcia Chatelain. “Although companies such as In-N-Out and Chick-fil-A are increasingly identified with other national and global big brands rather than their founding families, the religious roots of fast food remain evident in their philanthropic and political activities as well as their packaging.”
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Can farmers convince rural America to get vaccinated?
NPR
“Boosting COVID-19 vaccination rates in rural America is now less a problem of access and more an issue of trust,” writes Christine Herman. “It’s why farmers and ranchers need to speak openly about why they’ve chosen to be vaccinated, says Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer with the National Rural Health Association. ‘One of the hardest things about the vaccination effort is that it really, at this point, is almost down to those one-on-one kinds of conversations,’ she says.”
Why the U.S. is still plagued by salmonella infections
The Guardian
“Salmonella is the second leading cause of food poisoning in the US, making an estimated 1.35 million Americans sick annually, and leading to about 26,500 hospitalisations and 420 deaths,” writes Teresa Carr. “Current regulations for salmonella in poultry are ‘antiquated,’ says Brian Ronholm, director of food policy for the US non-profit organisation Consumer Reports … The current system treats all salmonella equally, even though most human illness is caused by only a handful of more than 2,500 identified strains.”
My mother, meat alternatives, and me
Gravy
“My mother’s hard pivot to vegetarianism presented something of a quandary for me,” writes Latria Graham. “I never thought that I would put the words ‘vegan’ and ‘barbecue’ side-by-side in a sentence. I realized that this shift in the way we ate was probably permanent, and I would no longer come home with a cooler full of barbecue as an expression of love. The prospect of letting my appreciation of the barbecue tradition languish filled me with grief. Barbecue is part of my family history, an integral component in my core memories, and part of my Blackness. I couldn’t change my definition of it so easily.”