Today it’s all about Cosmic Crisp apples, winter wheat and wine grapes, but 400 years ago Washington state’s food environment looked a lot different.
The mechanized system of food production has churned over recent centuries, but when the land was occupied only by Indigenous people whose ties to the land had deep roots, the Pacific Northwest served an abundance of helpful herbs, fragrant flowers, fat-rich fish and vital vegetables that could easily make a feast.
Other fish like sturgeon, lamprey eels, suckers and various species of traits also helped sustain these communities. Diets for people in the Northwest also included a fat-rich fish called eulachon, found in the rivers, Washington State University anthropology researcher Shannon Tushingham told WSU Insider earlier this year.
WSU archaeology researcher Molly Carney studied how often Indigenous tribes used camas root and found the onionlike bulbs were a critical part of the cuisine, according to a WSU News article this year.