In the classroom this week we watched a short film, Restoring Wetlands and Wocus, about the Klamath Tribes, their land, and one of the tribes’ first foods, the wetland plant called “wocus” in the Klamath-Modoc language. The video showed how an Indigenous family harvests wocus via canoe, told the history of Tule Lake and its conversion to industrial farmland, and highlighted a farmer who has experimented with returning some of the land to wetlands in order to remain both sustainable and profitable.
While we did not have access to wocus for our recipe this week, we did explore another first food of the Klamath Tribes, the Klamath plum, which is a relative of the many non-native plum trees that line the sidewalks of San Francisco.
In the kitchen, we made a panzanella featuring emerald beaut plums, John W plums, and red pluots (a hybrid variety of plum crossed with apricot). The produce was grown on local farms, not gathered, and our salad incorporated many ingredients and influences that came originally from elsewhere but have now become an integral part of our modern California culinary identity.
