Let Them Eat Cake Mix

The fog falls like lace. It obscures any chance of a clear line that separates land from water, water from sky. A woman wades through the mud with a bucket and thick rubber gloves. She walks toward a crowd knee-deep in the water net fishing for salmon. This image sets the scene of journalist and food writer Julia O’Malley’s The Whale and the Cupcake: Stories of Subsistence, Longing, and Community in Alaska.

It also accompanies the book’s introduction: “What Why How We Eat.” No question mark, no punctuation. It does, however, reveal the picture’s GPS: “There is most likely no more democratic fishing spot in America than Kenai, Alaska,” claims O’Malley. An estimated ninety thousand people across the state annually share four hundred thousand sockeye, the majority of which come from the Kenai.

I had the pleasure of reviewing The Whale and the Cupcake for H-Net. Read the rest of the review here.