We started this week’s class with two videos from KQED: Cultivating an Abundant San Francisco Bay and Discovering San Francisco Bay: The Portolá Expedition. It was fun to see how many names we could recognize from the stories - Shellmound, Portola, Sausalito, San Francisco - and to see how a people’s food culture (in this case the Indigenous diet of shellfish) actually influenced the topography of the land.
What I hope students take away from this lesson is that Ohlone land was rich with resources and that the arrival of the Europeans in the 1700s dramatically changed everything, including food. The Spanish brought new crops like wheat, sugar, and grapes, as well as animal husbandry practices, all of which dramatically altered the land.
At home together on the Zoom, we assembled our own shelter-in-place version of a classic Spanish dish, pan con tomate. The introduction of wheat and sugar had profound consequences on the local diet that continue to influence what we eat today. I can think of no better shelf-stable representation of this than the delicious flatbread bites made by Rustic Bakery in Marin. Wheat is a miracle! And sugar makes everything taste good! And now they’re everywhere and we’ve forgotten how to eat minimally processed plants! (I digress.)
Because we needed to distribute the tomatoes a week in advance, I made a jam from some beautiful tomatoes donated by our friends at Oak Hill Farm in Sonoma so that students could experience them at their peak flavor and so the jars could hang out in the fridge until class time. Eating tomatoes, native to the Americas, as part of a Spanish dish is a great way to bring the history of Spanish colonization to life. We had a few issues with kit items going missing or accidentally being eaten before class, so I’ll be experimenting with some new labeling for our second round of home kits next week. Stay tuned.
