Originally published in Sierra. Last year on August 24, Ernest Alfred, an elementary-school teacher and hereditary chief from the ‘Namgis, Lawit’sis, and Mamalilikala First Nations, boated out to Swanson Island, British Columbia, and began to set up tents with a small group of other First Nations activists. A few days earlier, Alfred had been sitting… Continue reading Salmon Rebellion
Category: Food
Where Have All the Salmon Gone?
Originally published in Sierra. To get to the largest surviving population of wild spring Chinook salmon on the Klamath River, I drive farther north than I’ve ever been in California, then turn right. Gradually, the highways disappear, and the roads narrow. Commerce becomes more improvisational. Grocery stores and restaurants disappear and in their place there… Continue reading Where Have All the Salmon Gone?
Why Are Other Cultures Better at Eating Bugs Than We Are?
Originally published at Grist. In 1845, John C. Fremont was exploring the state that would later come to be known as California. He met a man who had been traveling with a group of trappers, who told him a story. The trappers had run out of food, and decided that the best way out of… Continue reading Why Are Other Cultures Better at Eating Bugs Than We Are?
How the Bay Area’s Last Slaughterhouse Dodged the Axe
Originally published at Grist. An hour north of San Francisco is where you’ll find the last slaughterhouse in the Bay Area. I drove right by it at first — it’s just a low-slung collection of one-story rectangular buildings and prefab trailers behind a high fence. It was sandwiched between a Bikram yoga franchise, a block… Continue reading How the Bay Area’s Last Slaughterhouse Dodged the Axe
The Uses of Whale
Originally published in Meatpaper, Issue 19, (aka “The Fissue”) In 2011, Japan killed 266 minke whales and one fin whale during hunting season in the Antarctic. It had hoped for 900, but whaling boats were followed by anti-whaling boats. The anti whaling boats threw ropes into the whaling boats’ propellers. The whaling boats shot at… Continue reading The Uses of Whale
Slouching Toward Bananapocalypse
Are we still heading toward bananapocalypse? Or has it been cancelled?
Farmworkers Climbing the Organic Food Chain
Published in Grist, January 2011 The strawberries, purchased in November, in a rainy parking lot behind a community clinic, feel like they’ve traveled in time from summer to here. Out of season, strawberries usually taste like rainwater. These have a taste that is sharp and unexpected. The North Oakland farmers market is almost deserted —… Continue reading Farmworkers Climbing the Organic Food Chain
Hunting Wild, Mission Snails
In the Pleistocene era, if you were a resident of the Mission you would hunt sabercats, dire wolves, sloths, mastodons, bears, mammoths, and prehistoric camels
To Eat Local, Kill Local
They see it as a prototype for a new movement—let a thousand slaughterhouses bloom, if you will.