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Food and Environment Reporting Network
Want farmers to protect the environment?
Like a reveler who chases each of many tequila shots with a seltzer, U.S. farm policy consists of comically clashing impulses likely to result in a nasty hangover. The Department of Agriculture doles out substantial subsidies each year to entice farmers to maximize production of corn and soybeans. These commodities account for about 60 percent of U.S. farmland, are used to fatten animals on factory farms, and deliver many of the sugars and fats in our ultraprocessed diets. Unsavory side effects of their production include planet-warming emissions, soil erosion, and polluted waterways.
Buzzkill
A bee researcher's colonies kept dying, and she couldn't figure out why. Then, she looked at the ethanol factory down the road.
What good is beef?
At the age of twelve, I parted ways with my religion. All it took was a sandwich. I broke the news to my father in the evening. He had just come home, early for a man who often stayed at work until 8 p.m., and he was reading the newspaper in a leisurely manner. “From this day forward, I am no longer a Hindu,” I said. It seemed like an important moment, and I spoke with some formality.
A conversation with The Sioux Chef
This article is part of FERN’s series Switchyard-FERN Special Food Issue 2023. Chef Sean Sherman arrived at Owamni, which received the James Beard Foundation Award for the Best New Restaurant in the country in 2022, dressed in blue jeans, black leather clogs, and a slightly faded T-shirt. It was late September but still warm, especially by Minneapolis standards, so he only needed an unzipped hoodie on top. He kept his long, straight hair tied in two neat braids, parted in the middle. His plaits reached nearly to his waist. His voice was a calm, clear baritone that he used to speak in full, studied paragraphs. It was clear from our conversation that he is practiced at long, expansive conversations, but he showed no evidence of tiring of his subject: to acknowledge and understand the cuisine and foodways of this continent’s Indigenous peoples.
Tom Colicchio: A chef’s journey
Three o’clock in the morning, I’d wake to the smell of peppers and onions frying, my grandfather in the kitchen. Then the sound of sizzling, him adding eggs for the sandwiches we’d eat later when we were out on the water. I grew up in a four-family...
A tell-tale tragedy
By the time the sun came up over the rolling green hills of Harrells, North Carolina, on June 23, 2021, a charred metal platform was all that remained of the old trailer. An investigation by the local fire department determined that the fire started at the electric stove in the kitchen. From there, it climbed the cabinets, spread to the living room, and tore through the two bedrooms. Within 30 minutes, the entire structure had been consumed by flames. A photo taken of the aftermath showed a pile of blackened debris, the charred coils of a mattress the only thing that suggested people lived there.
Alone on the Range
The job was Gustavo’s idea, and the escape was his idea, too. “If he kills us, he kills us,” he told his kid brother, Iván, one night after work in October 2019. They had spent the day in the ranch’s corrals, selecting the best lambs for slaughter. Their boss, they said, carried a gun at all times.
Why are we paying for crop failures in the desert?
In mid-July in Phoenix, a man demonstrated to a local news station how to cook steak on the dashboard of his car. The city sweltered through a nearly monthlong streak of 110-degree temperatures this summer, while heat records are tumbling across the Southwest. But despite the signs that this is...
Can Biden’s climate-smart agriculture program live up to the hype?
A new kind of food may soon be arriving on grocery store shelves: climate smart. Under the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a nascent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, this amalgam of farming methods aims to keep the American agricultural juggernaut steaming ahead while slashing the sector’s immense greenhouse gas footprint.
Can mushrooms prevent megafires?
If you’ve gone walking in the woods out West lately, you might have encountered a pile of sticks. Or perhaps hundreds of them, heaped as high as your head and strewn about the forest like Viking funeral pyres awaiting a flame. These slash piles are an increasingly common sight...
A police killing on the packing line
David Alvarez couldn’t stop shivering. As he pulled out of the parking lot at the Seaboard Foods pork processing plant outside of Guymon, Oklahoma, and accelerated down Route 54, it was just after 7:30 on the morning of January 10, the temperature still around freezing. This part of the panhandle is ironing-board flat, and at that time of year, the Southern sun reduces the landscape to a faded-denim sky stretched over expanses of washed-out yellows—fields of corn stubble, dead grass, dirt. The plains are windswept and frozen, but Alvarez wasn’t cold. His chills were the buzz of adrenaline. “I couldn’t process what I had just witnessed,” he said later. As he drove along the edge of Guymon, past the roadside hotels, the diners and taco stands, past the gas stations and the farm supply store, his mind raced. “I was replaying the sound of all the screaming,” he said, “and then the gunshot.”
Peach farmer ‘Mas’ Masumoto talks about farming with ghosts
David “Mas” Masumoto says he farms with ghosts. On his family’s organic peach, nectarine and grape farm south of Fresno, he points out pruning scars from long-time workers, and walks down rows of trees he planted with his father. He says the labor and lessons of his ancestors are in the soil and the grapevines and orchards, and he’s passing these on to the next generations.
Our mango republic
I first met Jones Carme on an evening in March 2022. He was in front of his apartment on the outskirts of Tapachula, Mexico, a tropical city of some 350,000 people in Chiapas, just 20 minutes from the border with Guatemala. Tapachula was founded by the Aztecs in the 15th century, and just as it was then, the region today is an agricultural hub and a major producer of crops like corn, coffee, mangoes, and bananas. I’d come to this neighborhood to talk to migrants working in local agriculture, and this cluster of worn stucco apartments was a short walk from a massive mango plantation and packing house.
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