Haida Gwaii Culinary Cooperative interview on CBC

Recently Kiku from the HGCC was interviewed on All Points West. click here to listen, or download the podcast.

Haida Gwaii Culinary Cooperative

I have started working with the Haida Gwaii Culinary Co-operative here in Haida Gwaii. I am helping out with communications and for the past few days have been working on making some signs (like the one above). It is really exciting. The main focus of this co-op is to provide mushroom pickers and other wild harvesters with a fair price for the products they harvest. Central among these is the "rainforest chanterelle", a beautiful little fungus that is native to the islands. I have been picking some myself and they are scrumptious (above are a few tiny examples, though those are not my hands, they belong to my picking partner). The big brianwave of the co-op is to have developed a very high tech dehydration system which allows them to buy mushrooms at a fair price from the pickers (who ideally are members) and then if they can't sell all the fresh mushrooms, they can dry them and sell them all year round. More on this process later.