California Foodways

There’s just something about cherries. They’re small, sweet and crunchy, with an early harvest that tells us summer’s coming. Right now, though, this beloved fruit is a bit of a canary in a coal mine. Since the drought, experts have looked to cherry harvests for warnings about climate change and its impact on future tree crops.

What do Jimmy Buffett, Jay-Z and Kenny Rogers have in common? They’ve all parlayed their fame to sell food, in restaurants and chains. In Orange County, there’s a banh mi sandwich shop run by Lynda Trang Dai, a Vietnamese pop star who’s as comfortable behind the stove as she is behind the microphone.

The Valley Fire that hit Lake County in September, 2015 was one of the most destructive in California history. The hills here, once thick with pines and firs, now look like a moonscape with trees. This is just the environment that draws mushroom hunters who ‘chase the burns' in search of the black morel mushrooms that grow in the springtime after a forest fire.

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 March of 2017, though, top prize went to tiny Greenville High School in Plumas County.

If you ask people in the city of Mexicali, Mexico about their most notable regional cuisine, they won’t say street tacos or mole, They’ll say Chinese food. Just north of the border in Imperial County, the population’s mostly Latino, but Chinese restaurants are super popular, too. I went to discover the history behind some dishes you won’t find anywhere else.

Between Sacramento and Redding, Highway 5 cuts through the middle of rice country. In the town of Willows, right next to rice fields, there's a one-of-a-kind restaurant that's popular with travelers, farmers, truckers, and pilots: Nancy's Airport Cafe.

On this Day of Remembrance, here's a story about Japanese Americans in California. Japanese Americans have been particularly vocal in opposition to President Trump proposed Muslim ban and Muslim registry. They have long memories of being incarcerated during World War II in what were called “relocation” or “internment camps” over 75 years ago. For this story, I joined a busload of people traveling to the former Tule Lake Segregation Center, just south of the Oregon border in Modoc County. I learned just how much how agriculture was linked to the incarceration of Japanese Americans.

Jim and Mary Rickert came together because of cows. They met and 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, co-reporter 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 weighs 20-pounds, has orange bucked teeth, and can eat a quarter of its body weight a day.

The Capay Valley is pretty serene, except for the cacophony inside its most lucrative business: the Cache Creek Casino. Up to 2,000 visitors a night swell the valley’s population and traffic, causing tension between local farmers and the tiny tribe that runs it. In this story we ask: do farming and gambling mix?