Grey Matters: Local Notion

I have been eating locally for more than 50 years: fresh Dungeness crab and lutefisk, meat pies, cheap burgers, salal berries, salmon and homemade Scottish shortbread that would make Proust forget his little tea cakes.

Growing up, I lived in south Seattle’s Rainier Valley, aka Garlic Gulch, where our Italian neighbors had truck gardens of tomatoes and greens, and Rainier Avenue sprouted Italian bakeries and produce stands. In addition to supermarkets, we had independent butchers and grocers that supplied fresh food within walking distance of the house. My mother, who disdained the 1950s miracle of Wonder Bread, brought home fresh-baked loaves from Brenner Brothers Bakery in the Central Area. We frequently ate cracked crab, with bowls set on the floor at each corner of the dining room table so we could discard the shells as Henry VIII might have tossed away a mutton joint.

During summer retreats in the San Juans, we were often fed by Mrs. Willis’ garden on Shaw Island: fresh corn and carrots, snap peas and beans, all protected by a tall fence to keep out the deer. We also picked berries for Mom’s jam and pie experiments, mostly from blackberry vines that grew tall enough to swallow an entire old barn in a basket of thorns. When we tired of blackberries, my mother shifted to plentiful salal berries, a staple of the local coast Salish tribes. It made an earthy, seedy spread that tasted of the forest.

We knew what the Indians ate because we dug into middens, ancient native trash heaps layered with centuries’ accumulations of shells and fish bones. We tried the beachcomber’s bounty, too: I still remember the time a family friend pried an oyster off a rock and slurped it down raw and whole. I gagged at the thought, but soon tried it myself, and survived. As the old Northwest saying goes, “When the tide is out, the table is set.”