“What happens when a vegetarian moves to the last frontier?” This may sound like the introduction to a wry joke, but in this case the answer I am looking for is not “they become fair game like the rest of the herbivores.” Rather, this is the question that filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein uses to frame her latest documentary, “Eating Alaska,” a semi-autobiographical film about a reforming vegetarian and Alaska transplant learning to eat locally and connect with her new neighbors. A self-described “former city dweller now living on an island in Alaska, married to a fisherman and deer hunter,” Frankenstein’s latest film tells of her journey into the lifestyle that epitomizes all we love about life in this fine territory. She takes us on a culinary tour of Alaska, and introduces us to all manner of fine people, in her attempt to answer one question: how best to eat in the state, in moral as well as nutritious and economic terms. Read the rest of this entry »

As my wife and I got ready to mount a return trek to Alaska from our sojourn into the desert, I found that there was one final dispatch I wanted to record in my Ester Republic column, ‘Outpost Agriculture,’ one lesson that I had repeatedly missed, though it was regularly (and quite literally) staring me right in the face. (reprinted here from the April 09 issue of the Ester Republic).

“… That lesson is the practical elegance of raising chickens. Many people here in the Southwest raise their own chickens, especially across the border, where roosters generally roam free through the streets of the small Ejidos. And this is not a uniquely rural enterprise—friends here report that many people raise chickens in the dense residential areas of Tucson, keeping a small coop with two to four chickens behind a garage or beside a swingset in their humble backyards. Indeed, households with chickens were so common a part of my experience in Mexico that I completely overlooked the phenomenon’s relevance.

Why wouldn’t a family raise chickens? It is easy, cost-effective, and provides a degree of food security you certainly cannot obtain at Fred Meyer. Read the rest of this entry »

As much as we might hope otherwise, we here in the Interior will not, at least anytime soon, be growing all of our food. I report this finding following a truly excellent presentation given last month by soon-to-be-Dr. Alison Meadow, of the UAF Anthropology Department. Alison has put together some truly cutting edge research on the Fairbanks North Star Borough food system, part of which estimates that it would take just under 30,000 acres of new crop land to meet the caloric requirements of our population on a diet of just potatoes, closer to 80,000 acres to provide a more realistic, nutritionally-sound, and far less boring menu. There is indeed sufficient arable land available, but the complete social, economic, and ecological transformations that would be necessary to realize such a thing are almost too radical to imagine. Whatever the future of our food system will look like, Alison reminds us, it will only come about through frank and open discussion and debate. After all, these radical dreams that many of us have for the future of food are as steeped in world view and ideas about morality as are the notions of food preference and entitlement that drive so many others to eat foods that are not sustainable, and nourish neither their bodies nor their souls. Read the rest of this entry »

Republished with permission from the January issue of the Ester Republic.

This January marks the third calendar year that I’ve written the column for the ER, and though I have often mentioned or drawn upon the writings of others, I have never come right out and provided a legitimate, start-to-finish book review. It always seems a bit pedantic when a columnist chooses to write a book review solely for the sake of, well, writing a review. Book reviews should be transparent, authorless, written only for one of two reasons: either for the purpose of making more people aware of a work that might change the way they think about the world, even if just a very small piece of it (like the one I review below), or to provide a counter-perspective on a work that, if left unchallenged, might do real damage through misinformation (think Michael Crichton’s State of Fear). Of course, inescapable are the assumptions by the writer that 1) people care what they think and 2) they are qualified to identify books that should be suggested and books that should be challenged. But, I figure if you are reading this column, then you have already admitted a marginal interested in my opinion, and that being the case, I imagine you will allow me some liberty on number 2.

Where our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine, by Gary Paul Nabhan, is the gift I wish to share with you this month. Read the rest of this entry »