How does knowing the history of a food make eating more pleasurable?
JAMES: “It’s a hard thing to pin down. As research for this project, I recently helped eat five dozen Olympia oysters. They were delicious, but it was more than that. Knowing their history made me feel more like a part of the place I live in. “A sense of place is a satisfying thing, and when we lose that it can have serious, real-life consequences. Vancouver is famous as a city where you almost never meet a native-born Vancouverite. That gives us a lot of freshness and dynamism, but also a lot of disconnection. When Alisa and I were on the 100-Mile Diet, the Fraser River salmon fishery was almost entirely shut down — and no one here seemed to care. One of the world’s great salmon rivers was out of salmon, and the people who lived on its banks hardly noticed because there was still wild salmon in the fish shop. Of course, that salmon was coming from farther and farther away — from the Queen Charlottes and Alaska and beyond.” You’ve travelled a lot spreading the word of the 100-Mile Di
