Anchorage Food Mosaic
The Anchorage Food Mosaic’s mission is to build and celebrate community through our cultural foods.
In our current conventional agricultural system, a monoculture replaces lots of genetically diverse plants with one uniform crop, which is highly susceptible to disease and failure. In the same way that monocropping is dangerous to the future of a crop; we must encourage diversity within our community to prevent disease.
In order for our community to thrive we need to embrace and nurture the “mosaic” of people in this city.
The Anchorage Food Mosaic features different community members through photos and traditional recipes. Let us cook each others cultural foods and share our stories with one another.
Celebrate Your Rhubarb, Alaska
In Alaska, rhubarb is one of the crops that grows with a pretty high success rate. The yield is excellent, it is a perennial – that means it grows every year – and harvesting the stalks is absolutely satisfying.
Some folks will even pull a shaker of salt out of their pocket at this moment, cover the stalk, and chomp in to it.
Salmon Delight
As the end of winter draws near I open the chest freezer to find it mostly empty. It is a sight that stirs both sadness due to a diminished food stash and excited anticipation for how to best fill it again in these imminent summer months. A freezer full of locally grown and wild harvested food is no small task.
With March here, it is time to start blocking out the weekends to ensure that we are in the right place at the right time for the many seasonal wild foods available in Alaska.
Wild Alaskan Low-Bush Cranberry Sauce
Chutneys, sauces, jams and other acidic fruit preserves are a refreshingly tart way to brighten up a winter meal. I happened to find myself with 5 gallons of low-bush cranberries, handpicked and straight from the Interior. Check out one of my favorite ways to prepare the berries and then try your own experiments.
Wild Meat Stew, Norway
Anna Barnwell and Øistein Berget are two Alaskans slash Norwegians that cannot get enough of either location. Anna – a born and raised Anchorageite – first lived in small town Norway as an exchange student, but has since returned multiple times both to visit her partner Øistein and most recently for grad school.
Although generally speaking, they miss Alaskan food more than they love Norwegian food culture, there are some highlights of Norwegian cuisine which they love. Norwegians have a rich tradition of using local food from their own ecosystem.
Food Day and Fair Trade Month
October 24th is National Food Day and October is Fair Trade Month!
Food Day seeks to bring together Americans from all walks of life-parents, teachers, and students; health professionals, community organizers, and local officials; chefs, school lunch providers, and eaters of all stripes-to push for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way.
Baba Ghannouj & Peasant Flatbread, Syria/Germany
Camilla Hussein grew up between Germany and Syria; her Dad is from the Syrian Golan Heights and her mom is Bavarian. She is a German national, but has been in the United States for over 23 years. Camilla came to Alaska four years ago because her then husband opened a pathology lab and she wanted her three home schooled daughters to be closer to their dad.
Anchorage Food Mosaic Project: Ghormeh Sabzi, Iran
When Samuel Bayani Neek arrived to Alaska in November 2009, the Alaskan winter seemed tough. He left as a refugee from his native country of Iran. He lived in Turkey before coming to Anchorage. He did not know a single person in Alaska when he arrived.
