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.
This fall, the number of chinook salmon making their way from the ocean up the Klamath River in California’s far north is the lowest on record. That’s devastating news for the Yurok tribe, which has lived along and fished the Klamath for centuries. Salmon’s essential to Yurok ceremonies, for food, and for income.
Trinity County doesn’t get in the news much, unless it’s wildfire season. It’s a beautiful, remote, and rural. It’s also one of the state’s most food insecure places, where many people don’t know where their next meal is coming from. The county’s food bank director delivers food to the most isolated — and hungry — residents in Trinity.
Between Sacramento and Redding, Highway 5 cuts through the middle of rice country. Right next to rice fields outside the town of Willows, there’s a restaurant popular with travelers, farmers, truckers, and pilots: Nancy’s Airport Cafe. It’s just across a chain-link fence from the local tarmac. Most people leave with pie to go.
You might expect the winners of a California high school culinary competition to come from one of the state’s restaurant destinations like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Sonoma County. In late March, though, top prize went to tiny Greenville High School in Plumas County. There are only 11 students in 2017’s graduating class.
President Trump’s “travel ban,” and his proposed Muslim registry, reminded Japanese Americans of their wartime incarceration 75 years ago. I joined a busload of people traveling to the former Tule Lake Segregation Center, and learned about the role of agriculture in Japanese American incarceration.
Every year, 80,000 people flood Yuba City to watch a parade, filled with floats, motorcycles and martial artists. They’re celebrating a Sikh holiday, the 500-year old religion from India’s Punjab region. This colorful gathering is the largest of its kind in the U.S., because Sikhs have lived and farmed in this community for over 100 years.
Few growers have a legal obligation to house employees. Little state and federal money is earmarked for worker housing. In barely-affordable Salinas Valley there’s not enough decent housing for all the people needed to pick crops like lettuce and strawberries. Which all lead to development, and tension, in Spreckels.
If you’re driving along Highway 395, chances are you’ve come to fish for trout in the alpine lakes. Fishing is synonymous with life in communities here, luring nearly half of all tourists to Inyo and Mono counties. But there’s almost nothing natural about trout in the Eastern Sierra. Why are we so crazy for trout in the West?
Napa Valley tourists visit exclusive wineries and fine restaurants, but locals love a more humble dish, born out of Napa’s deep Italian history, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and a fortuitous mistake. Malfatti’s a spinach and cheese dumpling, smothered in sauce. The most famous malfatti comes out the back of Val’s Liquor.
2015’s Butte Fire may be a barely-remembered headline, but residents of Calaveras County feel its impacts every day. Volunteers helped rebuild the soil they know is essential to their own, and their neighbors’, survival. That’s how I ended up on a scorched hill, with farmers and ranchers tossing straw on the ground.
