FERN’s Friday Feed: Worried about food prices? Break up the U.S. meat cartel.

Brent Cunningham

Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.

“Americans are spending a greater portion of their income on food than they have in decades. In the past few months, the growing outrage over price hikes has been expressed in a spate of lawsuits by mega-retailers — most recently, McDonald’s — against giant meat producers, accusing them of price-fixing and other monopolistic practices. But even if those lawsuits are settled,” writes Ted Genoways, “it won’t be enough to bring prices at restaurants or grocery stores back in line. Domestic cartels have a stranglehold on what we eat unlike anything we’ve seen in more than a century, and the federal government needs to enforce antitrust laws to break them up.”

How an app that set out to fight pesticides wound up helping peddle them

FERN and WIRED

“[B]y the time [Simone] Strey faced those investors in London, she was describing a very different vision for Plantix. No longer did she speak about saving the environment or using fewer chemicals: Now, she said, ‘We want to start a revolution in the agri-supply chain.’ This subtle shift spoke volumes about what was happening behind the scenes,” writes Stephen Robert Miller. “During the three intervening years, Strey and her team had reshaped Plantix from a tool they hoped would help reduce global pesticide use into an app that would make it easier for farmers to buy pesticides. What Strey left out of her pitch was that developing such powerful AI is expensive, and Plantix was in stiff competition with other agritech startups for limited funding from venture capital investors who wanted surefire profit. A brilliant idea beautifully executed wasn’t enough to win them over—Plantix would have to recast itself into something purpose-built for fast capital.”

The life and legacy of an infamous cook: Typhoid Mary

Literary Hub

“Mary Mallon, the woman who came (to her everlasting displeasure) to be known as Typhoid Mary, was a cook. Much has been written about Ms. Mallon over the years. There have been sensational newspaper accounts, plays, works of fiction, the predictable feminist reevaluations depicting her as the sad victim of an unfeeling, racist, sexist society bent on bringing a good woman down—her persecution and incarceration the result of some gender-insensitive Neanderthals looking for a quick fix to an embarrassing public health problem. And there is an element of truth in almost all these characterizations,” writes Anthony Bourdain. “She was a woman. She was Irish. She was poor. None of these, listed on a resume in 1906, was going to put you on the fast track to the White House or a corporate boardroom or even a box seat at the opera. Because, first and foremost, Mary Mallon was a cook. And her story, first and foremost, is the story of a cook. While that may not explain everything about some of the troubling aspects of her life, it explains a hell of a lot.”

A radical approach to flooding in England: Give land back to the sea

The New York Times

“As sea levels rise and extreme weather becomes more common, experts say that Britain’s traditional defenses — sea walls, tidal barriers and sandbanks — will be insufficient to meet the threat,” writes Rory Smith. “It is not alone: in September, deadly floods in Central Europe led to the deaths of at least 23 people. But on a tendril of land curling out from the coast of Somerset, in southwestern England, a team of scientists, engineers and conservationists have embraced a radical solution.In a project costing 20 million pounds (around $26 million), tidal waters were allowed to flood the Steart Peninsula in 2014 for the first time in centuries.”

Restaurants struggle to sell sustainability without preaching

Eater and Civil Eats

“Climate change has marked effects on the restaurant industry. Changing temperatures and weather patterns mean ingredients that were once common are now harder to come by, and sourcing ingredients from sustainable farms can often be more expensive. Some restaurateurs hope that by championing things like locally sourced produce and sustainable seafood, diners will understand what a climate-friendly diet looks like. But while speaking about the environment is important, ‘preaching,’ as [Jonah] Goldman [co-founder of PLNT Burger] puts it, is a turn-off, especially in hospitality, an industry that consumers rely on to provide, among other things, a good time… without interruptions,” writes Jaya Saxena. “This puts restaurateurs in a precarious position of having to communicate choices and challenges without sullying the fun of eating out. Climate messaging can’t work if customers are too put off to walk through the door once, let alone habitually.”