FERN’s Friday Feed: Women, booze and defiance
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The long history of attempts to keep women and booze apart
London Review of Books
“Recalcitrant women in the 14th century could achieve a degree of economic independence by keeping a cauldron of beer bubbling, flavored with bog myrtle, horseradish, juniper, caraway, yarrow, sycamore sap, ivy or acorns,” writes Sophie Lewis. “Today, witch costumes for Halloween look the way they do because alewives in England, O’Meara explains, ‘wore tall, sometimes pointed, hats in order to distinguish themselves and stand out in a crowded marketplace’ … The local aletaster policed the alewives and enforced regulations … The persecution of Europe’s witches, by this account, becomes in part a way of disciplining a class of semi-autonomous beer producers into accepting the work and gender order of the domestic household.”
The story of the ‘obesity paradox,’ and the firestorm that followed
Scientific American
“In December 1994 then former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop launched a national weight-loss campaign at a White House press conference, stating that obesity had become the country’s second-largest cause of death, ‘resulting in about 300,000 lives lost each year.’ This marked the beginning of a long, influential life for the statistic,” writes Kelso Harper. “After a decade the number had ballooned to nearly 400,000 deaths … with predictions that it would soon reach half a million—about 20 percent of all annual American deaths. But by 2005 these seemingly staggering numbers were overturned. The statistic slayer was Katherine Flegal, then a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”
Curb your food-tech enthusiasm
Wired
“While politicians, tech-boosters, and eco-modernists love to champion an exclusive focus on reducing emissions in food systems, and tend to suggest that technology by itself is the way to get there, this approach misses the bigger ethical and political questions of what sort of food system we should be using technology to build,” writes Jan Dutkiewicz. “This also conveniently allows politicians, companies, and think tanks to sidestep the issue of fundamentally unsustainable systems and habits, like our global meat addiction, that no amount of technology, no matter how sophisticated, will ever be able to correct for.”
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The Native American pantry is broad and deep
High Country News
Wahpepah’s Kitchen, Oakland, California’s first sit-down Native American restaurant, is “part of a movement to reclaim — and redefine — Indigenous cuisine,” writes Brian Oaster. “Many of the world’s favorite foods today are Indigenous to the Americas: Italian tomatoes, Irish potatoes, Thai chilis, Belgian chocolate and French vanilla are all actually Native American foods painstakingly cultivated by Indigenous agricultural geniuses while Europe was struggling through the dark ages gnawing hard bread and, who knows? Possibly eating plague rats.”
The meal of the future left me hungry
Grist
“Waking up to a crushing headache, I found myself wondering whether I had misunderstood what the Eleven Madison Park bar tasting menu was even supposed to be,” writes L.V. Anderson. “Is it possible it was meant to be a two-hour, six-course, $270-per-head snack? Should I have scheduled in time to get a cheese-stuffed mushroom burger at the Madison Square Park Shake Shack afterwards? I wanted to ask [chef Daniel] Humm, but he declined an interview via a publicist, who didn’t respond to my email asking what Humm thinks about the role of protein in the plant-based menu.”