February 2: A lot of thought-provoking food news this week, FoodAnthro readers! As always, if you have a link you’d like to share, please email it to LaurenRMoore@uky.edu
First, congratulations to our own David Beriss for being picked up by NPR’s The Salt: New Orleans: A City In The Grip Of King Cake Madness
The National Resources Defense Council wrote about recent research suggesting that, despite media celebration of women in agriculture, there has been stagnation in female farm ownership and income over the last several decades: The Endangered Female Farmer
Civil Eats reported on California’s Grand Plan to Fight Climate Change on the Farm, which includes funding for farmers who implement measures to “contain soil nutrients, sequester carbon, and decrease greenhouse gases.”
From anthropologist Gary Nahbhan, some thoughts on what it means for Tucson to have been named the first UNESCO City of Gastronomy in the United States: What Will a UNESCO City of Gastronomy Do for Tucson and for Other Cities?
The New York Times published an editorial condemning North Carolina’s “ag gag” law that went into effect Jan 1. It is the most extensive of such laws in the nation, banning whistleblowers at workplaces across the state: No More Exposés in North Carolina
Brentin Mock over at CityLab wrote about history of environmental racism in the United States, and how the crisis in Flint, Michigan is not an isolated incident: If You Want Clean Water, Don’t Be Black in America
Anthropologist Gregory Button follows up on his FoodAnthropology posting on the Flint crisis by putting the water scandal there in the context of other disasters that have impacted food and water: The Flint Water Crisis is Not Within Parallel in Michigan History
There was a lot of controversy recently about a column at The Washington Post arguing that the leaders of the U.S. “food movement” are out of sync with what consumers actually care about: The Surprising Truth About the Food Movement
Civil Eats profiled Dr. Joe Leonard, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the USDA, and how he promotes equality “within a government agency that was built on institutional racism”: The Man Working Behind the Scenes to Bring Racial Equality to the Food System
Following up on a recent story about the fallout surrounding Mast Chocolate, The New Yorker wrote about a growing suspicion of craft food and the people behind it: The Way Forward for Hipster Food
BBC News reported on an interesting study in Israel, showing how different people’s bodies respond differently to the same foods: Why Do People Put On Differing Amounts of Weight?
In a similar vein, Gastropod put out a podcast about The End of the Calorie, which was paired with an article in The Atlantic on the same topic: Rethinking the Calorie
From the Baltimore City Paper, a really moving tribute to Sidney Mintz: The Anthropologist: Sidney Mitz: 1922-2015
Finally, drawing on work by anthropologists (most notably Stephen Le) and other scholars, this article raises some good questions about how we talk about ancestral foods, why we might want to pay attention to historical environmental/human adaptations, and why meals are probably a better to think about than nutrients. Don’t be fooled by the headline, this is neither a call to eat like your actual grandmother, nor like someone’s paleo ancestor: Eat like your grandma: Why you should skip the kale salad
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