People in Portland, Oregon have salmon on the brain. It is a centuries old, intense love-affair – one that I can easily identify with having grown up in the Bronx where lox was one of the five basic food groups along with pickled herring, pastrami, rye bread and shmalts {or schmaltz} - chicken fat. Everyone from the state’s original people – the Umatilla, Warm Springs, Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes, to the chic tattooed urban dwellers, is salmon obsessed.
At the downtown Portland farmers market there are at least 3 purveyors of fresh and smoked salmon, not including a Native American guy who also sells fresh salmon eggs that you can take home as I have and make ikura. I’ve not done any scientific surveys but it appears to me that in the last 10 years the Oregonian has had more front page articles on protecting salmon habitats than on any other major political issue – except logging maybe. (Actually logging and salmon are joined at the hip because logging allegedly destroys salmon habitats.)