With “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more!” the California Conservation Corps puts young adults to work outdoors. In Marin, the “Cs” have the tough job of building and maintaining world-class trails. These young people burn thousands of calories a day…and their menu has barely changed since the 30s.
Cistercian monks have made wine in Europe since the 12th century. In California, they’re turning to those traditions to try to survive in the 21st. The monks of New Clairvaux have a website, a Facebook page, a PR guy. They host wine release parties. They engage with the outside world all so they can pray in peace.
The most notable regional cuisine in the city of Mexicali, Mexico isn’t street tacos or mole. It’s Chinese food. Just north of the border in Imperial County, the population’s mostly Latino, but Chinese restaurants are super popular, too, serving some dishes you won’t find anywhere else. Why? How? The Chinese Exclusion Act.
The Capay Valley is pretty serene, except for the cacophony inside its most lucrative business: the Cache Creek Casino. Up to 2,000 visitors a night swell the valley’s population and traffic, causing tension between local farmers and the tiny tribe that runs it. In this story we ask: do farming and gambling mix?
Coffee’s been grown and loved around the world since at least the 13th century. As a serious fungus threatens the crop worldwide, scientists are mapping the coffee genome to learn more about this plant. Though it’s not coffee’s natural growing environment, California’s playing a role in the future of this beloved and lucrative crop.
Making license plates is the stereotypical job for a prisoner, but there’s a group of inmates in the Central Valley have very different work. They supply milk to almost all the prisons in the state system. The low hourly wages may shock some people on the outside, but for this story I talked to inmates who say the job gives them something else.
The thru-hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail start in Mexico, traversing 2650 miles into Canada. The lazy among us might have just read Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s PCT memoir. But the hikers, their toenails fall off, and their feet can swell whole sizes. They say the only thing they talk about more than their feet is food.
What do baseball, a little-known religious group and a land-use fight have in common? Nuts. Almonds are Stanislaus County’s top crop, bringing in a record-breaking $1.125 billion in gross income in 2013. Walnuts came in third (after dairy). Nuts aren’t just an economic driver, though. They’re also key to the story of this region’s past, and future.
San Bernardino’s Mitla Cafe is proof that sometimes a restaurant is more than just a restaurant. Since the 30s, it’s borne witness to — and played a role in — political change, from desegregation to “urban renewal” to fast food. It also happens to be an unlikely inspiration for how mainstream America sees — and eats — Mexican food.
It’s said that date palm trees want their feet in water, and their heads in fire. It makes sense, then that more than 90% of U.S. dates grow in the irrigated Eastern Coachella Valley, with 120+ degree temperatures. This is a story about agricultural explorers, racist agri-tourism, and the palmeros, palm workers, who tend the trees.
