FERN’s Friday Feed: Wild rice futures
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The unlikely alliance that could save wild rice
FERN and The Nation
“The daughter of ethnic Chinese immigrants, [Crystal] Ng arrived at the University of Minnesota in 2014 with degrees from Harvard and MIT but little experience interacting with Native Americans, who have a far larger presence in the upper Midwest than in the Northeast. Three years later, Ng won a $720,000 grant to study wild rice, but she had only a dim awareness of her employer’s egregious record when it came to the Ojibwe and their sacred plant. When tribal members reacted with anger to news of her award, she felt whipsawed. ‘I had the grant. I could have just gone ahead and done the research,’ she says. ‘But they’ve been through so much trauma. I knew I couldn’t add to that.’”
The ‘upside-down river’ reminds us of its power
High Country News
“The Salinas River is … central to California’s history and critical to the state’s $50 billion agricultural industry. And yet, few words have been written about the ‘upside-down river,’ so called because it runs underground for long distances through a valley so thoroughly beaten into agricultural submission that it has come to be known as the nation’s ‘salad bowl,’ writes Jeremy Miller. “This winter … a series of atmospheric river storms transformed the Salinas River into a torrent. Fed by precipitation that, over the course of one month, dropped an estimated 30 trillion gallons across the state, the Salinas swelled to become, briefly, one of the largest rivers in the state. Despite our best efforts to engineer it out of existence, the Salinas’s brief and violent reanimation is a reminder that … we are not in control. When the next major storm comes — next year, next decade or next century — the river will again become a destroyer.”
How White House dinners shape policy
Literary Hub
“[T]he president is both a symbol of the nation and a flesh-and-blood human being, and his food choices bridge those disparate roles,” writes Alex Prud’homme. “What he eats determines his health and sets an example for the nation. How his food is prepared, by whom, and the context of his meals semaphore his priorities. His policies and the way he pulls governmental levers influence the flow of goods and services to millions of Americans and to billions of people around the world. His messaging about food touches on everything from personal taste to global nutrition, politics, economics, science, and war—not to mention race, class, gender, money, religion, history, culture, and many other things. Hardly frivolous, a meal at the White House is never simply a meal: it is a forum for politics and entertainment on the highest level.”
The problem with the ‘lunchbox moment’
Catapult
“For most of my childhood, the only representation of China that I saw was limited to food,” writes Angie Kang. “Throughout the past decade, it’s been a battle to feature stories about the wider Asian diaspora. One of the stories that made it to TV was 2015’s Fresh Off the Boat, a sitcom inspired by comedian Eddie Huang’s memoir about growing up as a Taiwanese American … In FOTB’s first episode, Eddie has a ‘Lunchbox Moment,’ a term that describes the experience of an ‘ethnic’ student bringing a packed lunch to school, only to have white peers disgusted at the look, smell, or idea of the dish … While the ‘Lunchbox Moment’ began as an earnest account of lived discrimination, it now dominates the Asian American narrative, drowning out other experiences of violence, particularly in regard to class or economic background. Without varied stories of injustice and joy, the ‘Lunchbox Moment’ and similar food narratives simplify what shouldn’t be simplified.”
This Native tribe is taking its water backstment in agricultural innovation
Smithsonian Magazine
“This desert tableau is at once modern and ancient. Modern because the arrow-straight canal, lined with concrete and designed with turnouts that divert water to flood the field, is the last leg of a state-of-the-art irrigation system here on the Gila River Indian Community, an Indian reservation in southern Arizona,” writes Jim Robbins. “Ancient because Camille is a member of the Akimel O’odham, or River People, also called Pima. For centuries her ancestors practiced irrigated agriculture across this vast desert, digging hundreds of miles of canals that routed water from the Gila and Salt rivers onto planted fields of maize, beans and squash, the ‘three sisters’ that fed a huge swath of prehistoric America.”