“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. (more…)

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. (more…)