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, …

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 …

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 …

You might expect the winners of a California high school culinary competition to come from one of the state's restaurant destinations like Los …

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 …

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 …

On this Day of Remembrance, here's a story about Japanese Americans in California. Japanese Americans have been particularly vocal in opposition to …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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, …