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Renewing America's Food Traditions

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Pictured Recipe: Haymaker’s Ginger Switchel

In the past 25 years the diversity of food available in the Pacific Northwest has multiplied, in part because groups in that area, such as Tilth, the Portland Farmers Market, Chefs Collaborative and Eco-Trust, have embraced heritage foods. At last estimate, restaurants in downtown Portland alone were purchasing more than six million dollars a year of locally produced vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, meats, cheeses and fish. While farms in other regions of the country may be struggling to stay solvent, the number of farms in Oregon has increased 44 percent over the last three decades, from roughly 27,000 in 1975 to more than 39,000 today. Today, you can walk into a Portland restaurant and find diverse delicacies: wild mushrooms, Olympia oysters, Makah Ozette potatoes, wapato, camas, stinging nettles, marbled Chinook salmon, Nootka Rose garlic, Orcas pears.

In 2003, I asked friends in a half-dozen organizations across the country to join me in trying to recover the diverse, imperiled foods of North America. The initiative is called Renewing America’s Food Traditions, or RAFT (see Rethinking Local, below) and our mission is to preserve vanishing foods.

There is much to be accomplished and we are hoping to engage others in the adventure to find, recover and celebrate these culinary rarities. With some 669 food varieties now considered to be endangered, and another 348 threatened, we need help to keep them from joining the 76 uniquely American foods that have already been lost from our tables through extinction.

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