Thinly sliced: The organic feud between Clif Bar and Kind Bar is “straight-up marketing”

This is the web version of a list we publish twice-weekly in our newsletter. It comprises the most noteworthy food stories of the moment, selected by our editors. Get it first here.

Bye Bye Batali. Mario Batali, the restaurateur accused by multiple women of sexual harassment and assault in 2017, has sold his stake in a major restaurant group, The New York Times reports. Apparently, a new venture will be created to replace Batali & Bastianich, the hospitality group that Batali co-founded with fellow restaurateur Joe Bastianich. Up next? Batali is reportedly divesting from Eataly, a chain of high-end Italian markets.

Fake feuds. The day after the Organic Trade Association announced Clif Bar’s significant investment in a program to train more organic grain farmers, the California-based snack company took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, asking Kind Bar, its corporate-owned competitor, to “do a truly kind thing” and start sourcing organic ingredients. “Maybe a move to organic would even inspire your part-owner Mars to take its entire line of candy organic,” the ad read, eliding the fact that such a move would allow Clif to get its money’s worth. Outside magazine says it’s “straight-up marketing.”

Fisherwho? Last week, we reported that seafood operations have been steadily moving north due to fish migration linked with climate change. Shortly afterward, Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel shared the story while proposing an end to the use of “fishers” as a gender-neutral replacement for “fisherman.” Her tweet solicited a wide range of “fisher” alternatives, including “fisherpeople,” “fisherfolk,” and “fisherx,” to name a few. Anyway, now we’re trawling around for a better term—one that everyone can agree on. What say you, reader?

Trash, not treasured. China, once an ideal destination for recyclables, is a year into its ban on imported waste, creating quite an inconvenient reality for the 75 percent of United States recyclables formerly sold to China. As reported in Yale Environment 360, experts say this shift could have an eventual upside: better solutions for managing global waste. Until then, it’s small towns and rural recycling operations in the states that have taken the biggest hit, with many operations paused or shut down completely.

Just get takeout. No one can make a home-cooked meal every night! There, we said it. Actually, three sociologists said it, in a new book titled Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It. The researchers followed nine mothers as they tried to keep food on the table, ultimately concluding that just about everyone struggles to live up to their own expectations. Vox has a great interview with the authors this week.