Why subscribe?
Because you, like me, love Seattle. Because you, like me, love Seattle’s food and want to know how it got to be so damn good.
I never cared much about food growing up as a kid of the 70s in the sunny southwest. I was nourished on canned spinach, Doritos, Lucerne ice cream, and Hostess Ding Dongs. Decades later, I didn’t fully appreciate how good Seattle’s food was until I left the Emerald City and moved to the mid-Atlantic, living in DC and Baltimore for five years.
Compared to Seattle, the mid-Atlantic was a food desert when I moved there in 2007. So when I moved back to Seattle in 2012 –in large part because I missed the food– I became curious about the history and forces that shaped Seattle’s extraordinary culinary scene. I hope you follow along as I explore how the intersection of immigration, agriculture, geography, and the culinary arts made Seattle’s food so goddamn good.
Why Strawberries & Milk? In the early 1900s, much of the land across Lake Washington from Seattle was strawberry farms owned by Japanese farmers. They dominated Puget Sound agriculture at the turn of the 20th century, filling the stalls at Pike Place Market and providing three-quarters of the region’s produce and half of its milk. Any good chef will tell you that the dishes they create are only as good as the ingredients farmers provide them. They stand on the shoulders of those pioneering growers. Without these Japanese farmers in particular, I don’t believe food in Seattle would be what it is today.
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Callie Neylan is a designer, mother, writer, and curious human living in Seattle, Washington. Her writing as been published on NPR.org, AIGA.org, Grist.org and in ARCADE, Seattle’s premier architecture and design magazine. She is also the co-founder of Bellflower Chocolate Company.
If you like my writing, support my creative work by buying me a coffee.
Writing collections also on Medium, Nineteenthirtyfour.org, and Silver Copper Lead.
