Speaker Series

Thursday, March 13, 2025 at 7:30pm

Native American Foods

Speaker: Sara Calvosa

California is home to a vast and vibrant array of Native American peoples each with their own distinctive culinary traditions rooted in their ancestral lands.

Karuk-Italian food writer Sara Calvosa Olson celebrates this Indigenous heritage in her inventive and vim-filled cookbook Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen. Gathering over 70 delectable recipes and featuring more than 100 photographs as well as stories, staples, and stewardship philosophies from tribal communities across the West, this accessible kitchen companion reimagines some of California’s oldest ingredients for home cooks today.

Meaning “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, Chími Nu’am bucks the trend against the high-sugar, high-fat, high-sodium disease-making diets of mainstream food culture, centering recipes around natural foods indigenous to California, from acorns to deer meat, that have been cultivated and shared by Native peoples for thousands of years.

Sara Calvosa Olson (Karuk) is a food writer and editor living in the Bay Area with her husband and two teenage sons. Her work dwells at the intersection of storytelling, Indigenous food systems, security, sovereignty, reconnection, and recipe development. Her writing has appeared in News from Native California and Edible Shasta-Butte

Zoom Reservation Required: Link Here

Thursday, April 10, 2025 at 7:30pm

Bees & the Native Plants They Love

Speaker: Susan Karasoff

Get the buzz on the SF Bay Area local bees with Susan Karasoff

Susan Karasoff gardens in San Francisco’s clay and chert soil in former oak woodland. Susan is a member of the California Native Plant Society Yerba Buena chapter. Susan takes an “only the easiest plants survive” approach to gardening. Susan grows a buffet of pollen specialist bee, edible, shade tolerant, butterfly caterpillar and colorful native plants.