Slow Food Afternoon

This afternoon P and I did our shift at the annual community tuna canning/Slow Food event organized by our friend Jeremy, a Bellingham-based commercial fisherman. His fish is in great demand because each one is bled and cleaned onboard before being frozen, ensuring the highest quality.

Jeremy, born in Cornwall, is also active in salmon restoration (see him here) and other environmental concerns, as well as the Slow Food movement, including serving as a delegate to last year's International Terra Madre Day in Turin, Italy. In addition to an astounding breadth of experience and knowledge about fishing and the sea, some of which you will find in this article, Jeremy is an opera lover, excellent cook, and much more -- not a man to be put in a box with one label!

P blipped last year's community tuna canning and described it well, so I won't go into all the details again, but I've posted a few more photos here. This year I was at the "packing" table, shown above, where volunteers put chunks of tuna into glass jars, squeezed in the traditional piece of carrot, and poured olive oil over the contents. The next table wiped the jar rims, added salt, and put the jar lids on, then handed over the ready-to-process jars to the pressure canning crew.

The tuna canning was again in the Rome Grange, out in the county on the Mt. Baker Highway. Last year, I just thought "Ummm, nice, we're in a building that farming families came to for events over the years." This year, as I took photos of memorabilia in the Rome Grange hall, I thought "Now that I'm blipping, I'd better find out just what a grange is!"

The website of The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867, describes the organization as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan, fraternal organization that advocates for rural America and agriculture. With a strong history in grassroots activism, family values, and community service, the Grange is part of more than 2,700 hometowns across the United States."

Founded in 1908, the Rome Grange attained Honor Grange status in 1940. Take a look at their certificate and a 1937 hand-drawn map of Whatcom County granges, showing 21 active granges; only seven, marked with an asterisk, were still active in 2008.

The percentage of American farmers has fallen from a third of the general population in the early 20th century to less than two percent currently, and grange membership has declined in tandem.