There are plenty of people who -- in order to pursue their passions -- have jobs on the side to support themselves. It’s pretty common to hear about a novelist who does PR, an actor waiting tables. But a rancher? For this story we meet a mother and daughter in Sierra County whose supplemental work has helped keep the family in the beef business.

California Foodways

Sierra Cattlewomen

The soil in Tehama County is unfit, and the temperatures are all wrong, but the monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux are still trying to make wine here. It’s part of their ancestry. Cistercian monks have made wine in Europe since the 12th century. In California, they’re turning to those traditions to try to survive in the 21st. The monks of New Clairvaux have a website, a Facebook page, a PR guy. They host wine release parties. I went up to Tehama County to meet the monks who engage with the outside world all so they can pray in peace.

The Abbey of New Clairvaux: Wine in the Wilderness

If you want to recreate the Gold Rush experience — without all the terrible conditions — you can pan for gold, even descend into mines. In a few places, you can even eat the most prized meal of the Gold Rush, with a kind of bizarre combination of ingredients. That’s what I went off to El Dorado County in search of the Hangtown Fry.

Gold Rush Status Meal: The Hangtown Fry

When cannabis was 100% illegal, the price per pound was high. Since 2016, when Californians passed Prop 64 legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, the economy in the northern part of the state has been in limbo, impacting far more than the cannabis industry.

Legalizing Cannabis Impacts Food and Farming

The most commonly traded commodity in the world is oil. What comes in second? Coffee! It’s been grown and loved since at least the 13th century in places like Indonesia, Ethiopia and Central and South America. As a serious fungus threatens the crop world-wide, scientists are mapping the coffee genome to learn more about this plant. But what role does our state play in the future of this most beloved and lucrative crop?

Coffee Farms? In California?

 Up in far northern California, where the Klamath River meets the Pacific Ocean, this year’s drought is making a bad situation there even worse. Since early May, baby salmon have been dying from a warm-water disease. A mass death of juveniles, like this, means they won’t make it to the ocean and lay their eggs, and won’t make it back up the Klamath river in a few years. So I’m sharing this story I reported in the summer of 2017, when the number of chinook salmon making their way up the river was the lowest on record. That was devastating news for the Yurok tribe, which has lived along and fished the Klamath for centuries.

Fish Blood in Their Veins -- But Few Salmon In Their River

So what do baseball, a little-known religious group and a land-use fight have in common? If you’re in Stanislaus County, the answer is: nuts. Almonds are the county’s top crop, bringing in a record-breaking $1.125 billion in gross income in 2013. Walnuts came in third (after the county’s other powerhouse, dairy). Nuts aren’t just an economic driver, though. They’re also key to the story of this region’s past, and future.

Nuts for Modesto: Baseball, Religion, and a Land-Use Fight

Maybe you’re one of the people who started noticing birds more during the pandemic. A lot of us spent time in our yards, or looking out windows, seeing these creatures in a new way. Even though we’re noticing them more, there are fewer birds now than there were 50 years ago. So when I found out about farmers who are helping birds, and some new research that shows how those birds are helping farmers, I had to learn more.

Farmers' Secret Allies: Birds

It’s said that date palm trees want their feet in water, and their heads in fire. It makes sense, then that more than 90% of the dates harvested in the U.S. grow in California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Irrigation water’s pumped here from the Colorado River, and summer temperatures can top 120 degrees. I spent some time in the Eastern Coachella Valley recently, and got curious about the history of dates here, and about the palmeros, palm workers, who tend them.

An Oasis for Date Palms, Not For Their Workers

Tourists to the Napa Valley may visit their favorite exclusive wineries and fine dining restaurants. But locals love a more humble dish called malfatti. It’s a little spinach and cheese dumpling, shaped like a pinky finger and smothered in sauce. The most famous malfatti in the region is found in the back of Val’s Liquor in the city of Napa. The story of how that came to pass involves Napa's deep Italian history, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and a fortuitous mistake.

From Mistake to Legendary Dish: Napa's Malfatti

Members of the military are often deployed or stationed far away from their extended families. When military families make friends, they often move. Those are facts of life for many military families in many military towns. There’s a place in San Diego, though, where active duty service members, their spouses and kids can always share a meal with their extended military family: the USO Downtown Center.

A Sit-Down Dinner for Military Families

Trinity County is one of those places that doesn’t get in the news much, unless it’s for marijuana or wildfires. It’s a beautiful, remote, rural part of northern California. It’s also one of the state’s most food insecure places, where many people don’t know where their next meal is coming from. In this story, I join the county's food bank director on his 10+ hour food delivery to the most isolated -- and hungry -- residents in Trinity.

In Isolated Trinity County, This Man is a Food Lifeline

For this story, I visited a factory, a kind of factory I'd never seen before. I got suited up in safety gear -- smock, rubber gloves, a hair net -- not to protect me, but to protect the product made here. It's in almost every convenience store, college dorm, school cafeteria, and in thousands of family freezers around the country: the frozen burrito. I went to Dinuba, in the Central Valley, to meet the family behind the biggest business in frozen Mexican food.

A Frozen Burrito Legacy in the Central Valley

Are you worried about water cutbacks during this dry year? Try farming…without irrigation, relying only on rainwater. But lots of crops like wheat and grapes are “dry farmed” across the state. There are tomatoes on the Central Coast, squash in Humboldt, and walnuts in San Luis Obispo County, which is where we go for this story about dry farming advocate Jutta Thoerner.

Dry Farming During Drought

If you’ve read your John Steinbeck and listened to your Merle Haggard, or if you grew up in a farmworker family, you know that farm laborers in California have struggled to find decent housing for decades. Except in a few cases, growers have no legal obligation to house employees, and there’s not a lot of state and federal money earmarked for farmworker housing. In the Salinas Valley — the fifth- least-affordable place to live in the country — there’s just not enough decent housing for all the people needed to pick crops like lettuce and strawberries.

Spreckles: Farmworker Housing and a Changing Company Town

For California Foodways, reporter 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.

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California Foodways

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