Where We Live: The Local Feast

The Salmonberries are ripe and the Red Huckleberries are like jewels. The Sockeye are running and Dungeness crab are big and juicy. Back in “” I talked about the ‘locavore’ movement and how much more efficient and healthy our food system would be if we just kept it smaller scale. I mentioned in passing that the local peoples lived just fine on what the land and sea provided.

The Duwamish/Suquamish people had a mighty good life here long before we got here. We’re talking about not a ‘100-mile diet’, but maybe a ’10-mile diet’!  

This is just a partial list of the immediately local foods they ate: Salmon (all five species), Cod, Smelt, Bottom Fish, Clams, Dungeness Crab, Oysters, Mussels, Ducks, Deer, Elk, Beaver, Bear, Otter, Muskrat, Crayfish, Freshwater Mussels, Thimbleberries , Oregon Grapes, Salmonberries, Huckleberries, Salal berries, Raspberries, Strawberries, Serviceberries , Trailing Blackberries, Fern Roots, Salmonberry Shoots, Bracken Fern Fiddleheads, Blue Camas, Wapato ‘potatoes’, Mushrooms, Acorns, Redcedar inner bark (starvation food).

Some of these were eaten raw, but salmon was often smoked, usually over Alder wood. Many things were dried for later use, and almost anything would be served with Smelt (eulachon) oil as a dip, as we might olive oil or butter- yes, this fish’s oil is softly solid at room temperature! Pemmican was made from mashed berries mixed with eulachon oil and dried fish and pressed into cakes for late-winter food or compact travel rations.

The Suquamish are actively encouraging the rediscovery of traditional food knowledge among their people. On their website they say “We know that eating a traditional Coast Salish diet of sea food, game, plants, berries and nuts promotes health and can help to prevent chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer. The ancestors of the Suquamish people were strong and healthy; in fact, they had a longer life expectancy than the first white explorers.” The University of British Columbia has a world famous series of books on the ethnobotany (what uses people make of plants) of the Coastal First Nations, just up the Salish Sea from here.

If you can these natives are eager to grow and have a lot to give, and all of us should find out how well we might eat from right here. My wife and I have just a slip of land, but we have Oregon Grape, Thimbleberry, and Nootka Rose growing, so anyone with a real yard should be able to produce a wide variety of foodstuffs.

Between the natives and our   we should be able to do quite well from this little patch of Puget Sound Country, and now that our Shoreline Farmers’ Market is open (welcome, and happy grand opening, people!) and the Lake Forest Park Commons Farmers’ Market is open again that only makes it easier for the conscientious and taste-conscious to do good and eat well!