The Eastern Sierra town of Independence –population: 600 — is home to a destination restaurant, the Still Life Cafe. A local favorite for nearly 30 years, Mt Whitney hikers and Mammoth skiers also tell their friends about the French Bistro and North African dishes they can look forward to.
David “Mas” Masumoto and his family run an organic farm south of Fresno, growing luscious peaches and nectarines. Mas is an author, too. In his new book, Mas writes about the shock of a newly uncovered family secret. He tells me what he learned about this hidden story, and how he rediscovered just how resilient his farming family is.
On the edge of the town of Marysville in Yuba County, there’s market with an inventory that would rival Asian grocery stories in big cities. In the back corner, you’ll find a small, bustling kitchen in the back corner. That’s where I became a fan of the dishes made here, and the woman behind them.
Dennis Tamura never set out to be a bird-watcher. He’s been an organic farmer for over 35 years outside Watsonville. But, with more than 30 bird boxes around the perimeter, birds have become a part of the farm’s ecosystem. New research shows just how much those birds help agriculture.
I’ve met some amazing people reporting for California Foodways. At the end of 2020, I learned that three of those people passed away: Amigo Bob Cantisano, Marshall McKay, and Mohinder Singh Ghag. KQED’s California Report Magazine invited me to talk with host Sasha Khokha about three food pioneers, and remind us of their legacies.
Trinity County is mountainous, and remote, and when I visited in 2017 I learned that it’s also one of the state’s most food insecure places. Many people don’t know where their next meal is coming from, even in the best of times. But the spring of 2020, with the state under shelter-at-home orders because of the coronavirus, is clearly not the best of times. I check in with Jeffry England at the county’s food bank.
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.
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.
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.
