Maddie Oatman

Mother Jones, July/August 2018

Shortlisted in The Best American Food Writing 2019

It’s Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, but any barbecues died down hours ago, and the rural back roads of this southern Napa County neighborhood are a dark and silent maze. Around midnight, the lights of the Robert Sinskey Vineyards’ shop blink on. In the center of its gravel driveway, workers coax tractors to life and assemble large plastic bins that will soon brim with clusters of pale green pinot blanc grapes. Picked in the cool hours of the early morning, before their sugars can develop in the sunlight, the grapes will then be whisked off to the winery and prepared for fermentation.

As 1 a.m. nears, a white van pulls up and a crew of about nine pickers, contracted by Rios Farming Co., clamber out to don neon-­colored vests and headlamps. They’ve traveled two hours from Stockton, California, to be here, and for the next 10 hours or so they will together pick 25 tons of fruit.

Vineyard manager Debby Zygielbaum leads the group in a stretching circle despite her stiff work pants and then gives the call to start. In one swift motion, the workers lift small plastic bins onto their heads and begin running into the rows. They use clippers to quickly snip the grapes, 45 clusters per minute by my count, taking care not to crush the bulbous fruit or snag the leaves.

Clipboard in hand, Sergio Agustin Sanchez, the crew’s stubble-faced supervisor, paces after them. Pickers emptying their bins yell out to be recorded, and the deluge of calls punctuates the din of the tractor. Sanchez must concentrate to hear every shout, but he’s grateful there are enough voices. A few weeks earlier, the labor contracting company he works for had to scramble to replace crews. Ten years ago, he reviewed 700 job applications for each season. Last year, he tells me, he saw maybe 15. “There aren’t any people now,” he says.

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Mother Jones, Jan/Feb 2017

Winner, “Best Business Story,” Association of Food Journalists

Their neighbors raise hogs and cattle, sow soybeans, and tend pumpkin patches and orchards now sagging with apples. But five years ago, the Nelsons—a third-­generation Iowa farming family—turned to raising fish. Hundreds of thousands of silvery barramundi, to be precise. Part of a hearty species that’s roughly the size of coho salmon and has flesh the flavor of red snapper, the Nelsons’ barramundi start their lives in their native Australia. Seventeen days after spawning, they are flown in plastic bags of water to central Iowa, where they spend their adolescence swimming against a current pulsing through rectangular tanks on the Nelsons’ farm. Barramundi easily tolerate many environments and have a flexible diet, attributes that led Time in 2011 to call them “just about perfect” as a farmed species. Once the fish reach nearly two pounds, they’ll be shipped live to seafood markets and restaurants across the country, or filleted, flash-frozen, and sent to food distributors like Sysco.

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When he first smelled smoke, Luis just thought a neighbor was having a barbecue. But the scent lingered, and the 25-year-old aspiring neuroscientist soon learned that a forest fire was barreling straight toward his home in Santa Rosa, California. He dashed out the front door, jumped in his Saturn, and sped toward the highway through fumes so thick they swallowed his headlights. Within hours, Sonoma County’s Tubbs Fire—the most destructive blaze in the state’s history—would incinerate the house Luis shared with his father, sister, and grandparents, as well as about 2,900 of his neighbors’ homes. In coming days, he would think back on the belongings he’d left behind, like the paper lantern his girlfriend had pieced together from origami stars. At least he had grabbed a folder of precious documents—without which, he knew, he might never land a job in the United States.

Full story here.

Image Credit: Brian Frank

In 1935, when Gertrude Stein returned to Oakland, California, for the first time in decades, she stopped by her childhood home to find the big house and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge she remembered all gone. “There is no there there,” she later wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography, a phrase for which she (and, unfairly, Oakland itself) would long be remembered.

Author Tommy Orange uses Stein’s words to evoke a different sort of erasure in There There, his debut novel, out on June 5. The book’s 12 main characters, like its 36-year-old author, are Native American—their ancestral land, one reminisces, buried in “glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory.” Their stories, which become ever more tightly braided as the book moves toward its explosive finale (at a powwow in a football stadium), are those of contemporary Oaklanders—postal workers and custodians and high schoolers who are fighting “to be a present-tense people.”

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Image credit: Elena Seibert

My first Thanksgiving in the Bay Area, a new friend invited me to share the holiday with her family. Before the potluck meal kicked off, my friend’s Hawaiian grandmother unveiled a bowl of treasure: cubes of succulent raw ahi, or tuna, lightly seasoned with sesame oil and sliced scallions. It was poke—a traditional Hawaiian salad made from fishermen’s leftover catch. With its glassy pink tautness and oceanic aroma, the appetizer put the gloppy mashed potatoes and dry turkey that followed to shame.

Long a staple dish of Hawaiian fishing communities, poke—which means “to cut into pieces”—is often composed of tuna but can be made from other species of fish, octopus, shellfish, or even pork. Over the last few years, more off-island chefs started experimenting with poke on their menus, and boy, did mainlanders take the bait. The number of Hawaiian restaurants on the mainland, mostly in California, doubled between 2014 and 2016. Chains like Pokéworks, Sweetfin Poké, and Aloha Poke Co. feature the raw fish in bowls with rice, and a rainbow of vegetable sides and sauces have turned poke into the hottest trend in fast-casual dining.

There’s a dark side to this dish’s newfound popularity. Read the full story.

Image credit: Selman Design