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For Claudia Castro Luna , nothing transports her back to her native El Salvador more quickly, and more vividly, than then pupusa . It’s the unofficial national dish of El Salvador, consisting of a think corn tortilla wrapped around a rich filling. But for Castro Luna, Seattle’s first civic poet, the pupusa contains more than pork, cheese and beans. It contains the history of the country of her birth, and of her journey away from it. She writes, in her poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pupusa”:

For many immigrant families, food is a way to both stay connected to their culture, and a way to survive. For the Chou family, opening a restaurant seemed like the only way to make ends meet in small town Columbia, Missouri. When they opened Chinese Delicacies in 1980, Hsiao-Ching Chou was only 8 years old. The restaurant defined her childhood, even inspiring her career later as a food writer in Seattle. For the family, it defined their American experience. They developed a menu that appealed to

Nancy Leson, half of knkx's Food for Thought duo, has been in the food industry for a long time. But some of her earliest memories of food come from bars -- not as an employee, but as a patron — a six-year-old patron. Leson grew up in Philadelphia, in a time and place where children were allowed to belly up to bars and eat Slim Jims and pickled eggs, or order a Coke with loads of Maraschino cherries. The reason Leson wound up in those bars was that that was where she would find her mother. Leson

Everyone’s got a favorite food. But how about a favorite crop? Dr. Stephen Jones, director of Washington State University's Bread Lab in Mt. Vernon, loves wheat. A lot. "The sheer beauty of the crop in a field like this ... you can almost hear the voices in it — the voices of the tradition, the voices of the people that came before us into this crop," said Jones. "I don't get that when I walk into a lettuce field, but I do in wheat." Beyond appreciating the beauty of the field, Jones directs

The town of Lynden, Washington sits just to the south of the U.S.-Canadian border. It's a small town of about 13,000 people. Lynden is also home to the Lynden Dutch Bakery (which makes a tasty short cake), Darigold (maker of cream, both ice and whipped), and of course, acres of berry farms. Lynden just turned 125 years old recently, and to celebrate, folks there decided they needed a birthday cake — but not just any cake cake would do for such a celebration. They wanted a really big birthday

This week on Sound Effect, we tell stories of the lies we hear and the lies we tell. Old Time Con Woman One woman became one of the most infamous liars in the Northwest in the early 1900s. Maude Wagnon, who went under the alias Maude Johnson, swindled railroad companies out of an estimated thousands of dollars. Student Scam This past spring, hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, were stolen from Chinese international students going to school at the University of Washington.

At the turn of the 20th century, trolleys were just beginning to transform cities across the country. At the same, one Oregon woman figured out a way to defraud the companies that operated these interurban railroads. Maud Wagnon, who went under many aliases but was known by most as Maud Myrtle Johnson, was dubbed the "Queen of Fakers" by newspapers across the Western United States for her history of swindling the trolleys. How did Maud become one of the most infamous liars of the Northwest?

When something seems too good to be true, it probably is. More than 90 Chinese international students at the University of Washington had to find this out the hard way. This past spring, Chinese students were the target of a scam. The alleged ringleader, a fellow Chinese student who goes by FY, possibly walked away with nearly a million dollars. The scam promised students 5 percent off tuition for the 2016 summer quarter if they gave the money to people working for FY. Justin Su, a 21-year-old

There are lots occasions when bending the truth is something we want to happen. This is what more than 60,000 people do every summer in the Nevada desert for Burning Man, the iconic week-long festival with art, music and lots of partying. It’s an event that attracts the likes of hippies, Hollywood celebrities and tech billionaires. However, Burning Man is also sometimes described as one, giant, utopian lie.Before going to Burning Man, where he is known as Konifer, 31-year-old Benjamin Kantner’s

For our show this week, we wanted to talk to someone who hears lies all the time: Tow truck drivers. That’s what Sound Effect Executive Producer Erin Hennessey suggested. She sent 88.5’s Simone Alicea to a towing company in Bellevue to talk to someone who’s heard it all. But it turns out Erin wasn’t being totally forthcoming, herself, about the role she had cast for these drivers. She and Simone sat down to compare notes about their impound experiences. While Erin was in college, she drove a