Food is a portrait of the American dream and the American struggle. As the United States commemorates its semiquincentennial, Lookout Eugene-Springfield traced the iconic foods and culinary figures that have shaped Eugene and Lane County — in the past 250 years and beyond.
The bounty
It’s difficult to condense the nearly 200 crops grown in the Willamette Valley, let alone the abundance of foraged foods, seafood and big game, into one list. Below is a small representation of our region’s biodiversity.
Chinook salmon
Chinook salmon, the largest Pacific salmon and the official state fish of Oregon since 1961, had to be first on this list. The fat reserves on these black-gummed kings give the meat its ambrosial reputation, among the ranks of a plump filet mignon and a ripe alphonso mango.
Chinook salmon, tender-flaked and juicy, is enjoyed in a variety of ways: hot smoked, canned, candied, oven-baked, seared in a pan. One Indigenous cooking method involves roasting the fish on sharpened sticks over an open fire.
The first humans to eat Chinook salmon were Indigenous peoples: The Kalapuya subsisted off, understood and took care of the Willamette Valley for more than 14,000 years. They foraged for acorns, berries, native hazelnuts and camas roots, hunted seasonally and prescribed burning for sustainable land management. When white settlers arrived in droves in the 1830s and 1840s, they decimated tribes and bands through forced removal, land grabbing and disease.
Chinook salmon populations, too, diminished over the next 150 years due to overfishing and habitat destruction from farming, logging and other industries. By the 1990s, many populations in Oregon were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act…