What happens to a vegetarian who moves to the last frontier?
Eating Alaska is a serious and humorous film in progress about connecting to where you live and eating locally. It is about trying to break away from the industrial food system when that means not only buying fresh seasonal food from local farmers, but taking part in a world of hunting and gathering. Made by a former city dweller now living on an island in Alaska and married to fisherman and deer hunter, it is a journey into regional food traditions, our connection to the wilderness and to what we put into our mouths.
The film portrays a wry quest for safe, healthy, meaningful, and sustainable food that leads to climbing mountains with women hunters, scrutinizing food labels with kids, and exploring how others in the last frontier, Alaska Natives and non-Natives, are eating. Eating Alaska will take viewers into the tundra looking for caribou, to the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall to take part in preparations for a feed, to a home economics class in the Arctic, a vegan cooking class in an Alaskan city, and to shop at a lower 48 urban farmer's market. Along the way we will visit with people who are grappling with what is on their plates and trying to balance living off the land with the convenience and speed of reaching for what's on the shelf at the supermarket. This is a story about connecting to where we live, urban or far from it, and coming to terms with what we eat and how we come by it.
In addition to a feature-length documentary film we are creating audio stories too, for public radio and web streaming.
KTOO-TV, PBS in Juneau, Alaska is an organizational partner for Eating Alaska. This project is made with the help of Raven Radio, KCAW, Sitka. Made possible, so far, with support from Steps to a Healthier SE Alaska, the Sitka Film Society, the National Shooting Sports Foundation,, the Douglas-Dornan Foundation, and individual and business donations. You can help too.
