Fresh Take: California’s Extreme Heat, Cooking With Lynja On Forbes Top Creators, And A Game-Changer For Fast-Food Workers

It may be back to school, but summer’s heat is far from over. Horrifying temperatures have been hitting California, particularly. In downtown Sacramento on Tuesday afternoon, a 100-year-old record was broken when thermometers registered a new all-time high of 116 degrees.

The state’s electric grid has so far avoided a blackout. But it may not last much longer. And who’s to say if the infrastructure will hold out during the next extreme heat wave.

The United Nations released its latest global food and agriculture report this week and the prognosis isn’t pretty. There’s little room to expand farming and human-induced soil degradation is impacting more than a third of all agricultural land. Water scarcity is also threatening some 3.2 billion people living in areas of farming.

Many residents across America — from Jackson, Mississippi, to Flint, Michigan — already know what that’s like. When will industry accept this wake-up call once and for all?

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

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What’s Fresh

Why AB257 Could Be Life Changing For California’s Fast Food Workers. California’s AB257, The FAST Recovery Act, has been passed by the state legislature. The groundbreaking bill would enable fast food workers to participate on an industry-wide wage and standards setting council, writes Errol Schweizer.

Why Is Something So Compelling Also So Contentious? Agroecology can promote diversity, resilience, social values, cultural practices, and circularity. Why is it so contentious, Danielle Nierenberg asks?

Online Grocer Misfits Market To Acquire Competitor Imperfect Foods So-called “ugly” produce and surplus grocery provider Misfit Market plans to acquire fellow Forbes Under 30 company Imperfect Foods with the hopes of making sustainable shopping profitable. An IPO could be on the horizon, reports Olivia Peluso.

VIDEO: TikTok Famous At 66: How Lynja Got 11 Million Followers In Her Second Career Youth may be wasted on the young, but TikTok is not—as proven by Lynja. At 66 years old, Lynn Yamada Davis, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a civil engineering degree and Columbia University with an M.B.A. and an M.P.H., went viral for her—you’ll never guess—cooking. It’s weird because she says she was never that good at it. But when her videographer son uploaded a special-effect-laden video of her making a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich to TikTok in July 2021, she blew up. Now her simple cooking with Jurassic Park-level effects have won her deals with Amazon, Chobani and McDonald’s, among others.

Forbes Top Creators 2022 These 49 social media savants—and one dog—are redefining celebrity for our connected age, reported and edited by Alexandra Sternlicht.

PowerPlant Partners Closes Third Fund With $330 Million PowerPlant Partners will shift from investing in early-stage consumer businesses to growth-stage companies in consumer technology, service and enablement upon closing a $330 million third fund, Douglas Yu reports.

Optimistic ‘Longtermism’ Is Terrible For Animals Before we start pouring time and resources into colonizing the universe, let’s sort out our relationship with animals first, Brian Kateman writes.

Chobani Plans Curdle: Once-Hyped IPO Dropped Amid Cooling Market The yogurt maker, once reportedly valued at over $10 billion, deals the latest blow to the comatose IPO market, Derek Saul reports.

My Labor Day Weekend featured a wonderful trip to City Island, Bronx for the best fried seafood around. This spread includes scallops, shrimp and even some lobster tails. Not pictured: many strawberry daiquiris.

Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat , will publish in December 2022 with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her eight years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha, and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in Northern France.

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