The Humble Jojo and the Pacific Northwest
by Wombstretcha
A preface: I am from the Pacific Northwest, born and raised. An increasingly difficult thing to find, as most folks in the area are here seeking better lands to enjoy, as refugees from modest places in the Midwest or the East Coast, and horrible places like California. We enjoy only a few culturally native dishes, the things provided to settlers by the native tribes, who showed these weird, wagon-driving motherfuckers what to do now that they’d arrived.
The natives introduced to the palates of the wagon fools the tastes of salmon, mussels, scallops, shrimp, elk, and other larger game animals. Before agriculture was established on a large scale, there were still various plants and delightful things to satisfy the tastes of the newcomers, who had never seen such provender.
Naturally, the settlers had their own dishes and hybridized those things the tribes had taught them with things they found comforting from the homes they’d left to strike out for fortune in the Oregon Territory. Assuredly, this is how we got oyster shots. I don’t have authoritative proof on that one, but only people who rode on a wagon from the Midwest would be like, "Hey, what if we took this slimy thing and sucked it down raw with some sauce?"
While the older flavors of the land were eventually supplanted by more modern foods, as the logistics train got set up, and people started cultivating industrial fisheries, and salmon boats, and...clam guns? Well, we settled into the more modern pattern of existence. People built roads and avenues for commerce, stopped doing subsistence agriculture and fishing, and set into a network of associated industries that served the people who moved, in increasing numbers, to the Oregon Territory. In a decade or so, people had established cities, towns, and burgeoning industry. Much of that industry wasn’t foundries or mills, though timber, of course, was an important part of the growth of Oregon. No, it was fishers, hunters, farmers, and people using the rich, natural fauna of the land to sustain the people who had come to live there...
