Fit To Eat S2E38 Ray Solotki Part 1 by Ivan Emke

As a species, over the past couple hundred thousand years, we – homo sapiens – ended up occupying an amazing range of territories and ecosystems. It is said that we have been able to adapt to living in a broader assortment of locations than any other species. And in all of these settings, from arid deserts to arctic tundra to mountains to swamps to jungles to prairies and beyond, humans were generally self-sufficient in terms of food. Of course, that was before the days of large-scale trading and mercantilism and colonialism and imperialism and capitalism and those traditions that we’ve inherited. And before the days when our diets became globalized.

All of these changes have made food security and food sovereignty in certain regions more tenuous than before. But there are people working to turn this around. Today, we head North, to talk with one of them. I first met our guest today, Ray Solotki, some years ago at a Circumpolar Agriculture Conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, the land of reindeer herding. We had some great chats about strategies for food production in remote communities, and since then our paths have crossed a couple of times. Recently I had a chance to speak with her while a digital recorder was operating. She was at her home in Inuvik, Northwest Territories.