Making license plates is the stereotypical job for a prisoner, but there’s a group of inmates in the Central Valley have very different work. They supply milk to almost all the prisons in the state system. The low hourly wages may shock some people on the outside, but for this story I talked to inmates who say the job gives them something else.

The thru-hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail start in Mexico, traversing 2650 miles into Canada. The lazier among us might have just read Wild, Cheryl Strayed’s PCT memoir. But the hikers, their toenails fall off, and their feet can swell whole sizes. They say the only thing they talk about more than their feet is food.

At the beginning of September in 1965, one of the most significant movements in modern day labor history -- the Farmworker Movement -- began in California's Central Valley. You’ve probably heard of the United Farm Workers and know the name Cesar Chavez, but before he became the embodiment of the strike and international boycott, a small group of Filipino farmworkers walked off the fields. Now people in the small town of Delano and across California are determined to share this rarely-told history.

When you camp in Yosemite and other parks with bears, you can’t just leave your food out on the picnic table or in your car overnight. Anything with a scent has to be stored in bear-proof containers: bear lockers for car-campers, bear canisters for backpackers. Along with reporter Marissa Ortega-Welch, I found out: this problem of bears wanting to eat human food, it’s a problem we humans created.

If you are driving along the striking Highway 395 in the Eastern Sierra, chances are you’ve come to fish for trout in one of the area’s alpine lakes. Fishing is synonymous with life in the communities that dot the highway, and it’s responsible for 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?

Rosa Hernandez left Oaxaca when she was 20 to work in the fields in Madera, California. Now, she co-owns a restaurant, cooking the food of her homeland for the many indigenous Mexicans who live in the area. She did it, she says, through inter-ethnic friendships and connections.

California grows a lot of rice, second only to the Mississippi Delta. But like a lot of agricultural development, rice cultivation took away a lot of habitat for native wildlife, including key resting spots for migrating birds along the Pacific Flyway. In this episode, I follow up on stories I heard about some strange bedfellows working to reverse that, to make rice farming part of the solution to the wildlife habitat problem.

The Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino is proof that sometimes a restaurant is more than just a restaurant. It’s the first stop in this new podcast: California Foodways. I'm Lisa Morehouse, and I'll be travelling county by county, reporting on people and places at the intersection of food and culture and history and economy. Places like the Mitla Cafe.

From politicians and celebrities to homesick Californians who make it their first stop when they return from their travels, Mitla Cafe has been a favorite spot for Cal-Mex food lovers since it opened in 1937. Through four generations of family ownership, the San Bernardino institution remains a key gathering point for civic and religious leaders to discuss the issues of the day. This down-home taco joint inspired the beginnings of the Taco Bell chain restaurant empire. but it also played a role in political change: desegregation that reverberated across the country.

California Foodways producer Lisa Morehouse spends a lot of time in her car. She’s on a kind of mission: to travel to every county in the state, finding stories about food, agriculture, and — most importantly — the people that make both possible.

California’s story can’t be separated from food. Food industries here generate $100 billion annually, our farms feed the nation, and kitchens set international culinary trends. But the real story is how people, work, and land connect to food – in the richest, most diverse, most complex state in the country.

Subscribe to the California Foodways podcast, because in California, food isn’t just food. It’s the common language that lets us explore culture, history, economics, the environment, and everything that goes into making the California story.