The coronavirus reminds us of another public health crisis when the federal government was slow to respond and communities had to take care of each other: the AIDS epidemic. One woman who became an unexpected caregiver is Meridy Volz. Starting in the 1970s, she ran a bakery called Sticky Fingers Brownies. Her daughter Alia — whose memoir Home Baked came out in April, 2020 — narrates.
When cannabis was 100% illegal, the price per pound was high. Since 2016, when Californians passed Prop 64 legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, the economy in the northern part of the state has been in limbo, impacting far more than the cannabis industry. Restaurant owners and farmers are seeing changes, too.
Downtown Jackson is pretty quiet, except when you walk into Rosebud’s Cafe which shouts its values from its walls: bright green paint, huge family portraits, tons of flyers for arts events, local homeless initiatives and LGBTQ rights. Rosebud’s has become a refuge for people who don’t always feel accepted, including the family that runs it.
In Redding, there’s a hamburger joint that’s been making its signature item the same way since the 1930s — a burger so thin it gets crispy on the edges, and never, ever comes with a tomato. Damburger helped fuel one of California’s most impactful engineering feats — the Shasta Dam — by nourishing the workers who built it.
Jim and Mary Rickert came together because of cows. They fell in love at Cal Poly. Within a decade, they were managing a ranch just below the Oregon border in Siskiyou County. It was a struggle. But their lives, and the business, changed when they got a really weird offer, and they said yes.
Merced County is California’s sweet potato capital. In this story, Angela Johnston and I meet a sweet potato farming family that’s facing a crisis that could wreak havoc on the entire agricultural industry. It’s the non-native nutria, a 20-pound rodent with orange bucked teeth that can eat a quarter of its body weight a day.
When you camp in parks with bears, you can’t leave food out on the picnic table or in your car. Anything with a scent has to go in bear-proof containers. Marissa Ortega-Welch joins me to report on this problem of bears wanting to eat human food, a problem we humans created.
Former farmworker Rosa Hernandez co-owns Colectivo Sabor a Mi Tierra in the back of a market in the town of Madera. She cooks food from her native Oaxaca, and says, the key to cooking mole is patience and love. “You can’t make mole in a rush.”
Over 90%. That’s how much native wetland California has lost due to agriculture and other development. That dramatic change in the landscape may sound grim, but in the Sacramento Valley, California’s rice country, some strange bedfellows are working together to address the historic loss of wildlife habitat, and to insure rice farming is part of the solution.
Recently, I visited a kind of factory I’d never seen before. I got suited up in safety gear — smock, rubber gloves, a hair net — not to protect me, but to protect the product made here. It’s in almost every convenience store, college dorm, school cafeteria, and in thousands of family freezers around the country: the frozen burrito.
