Service Learning: Cultural Kitchen Cleanup!

My service learning project was to help clean up & repair  the cultural kitchen on campus! One way it relates to animal biology is because the main item being cleaned that day were these wooden rods that are used natively in the northwest to cook salmon over fires. The salmon typically found here is Pacific King salmon and Coho salmon which is one of the species of fish we used in our fish muscle protein lab! Also there is a pit oven filled with river rocks (because they don't crack when they heat up) that is used to traditionally cook things like clams. While the oven takes at least 2 hours to get it hot enough, once the temperature is that high the fresh clams will cook in minutes. We know from the material we covered in biology that clams are bivalve molluscs and they have a hard shell that protects them and are closed tight unless you can see their siphons out the side of their shell and that they will close very quickly when they are startled. The oven must get extremely hot to cook them inside and have their shells open.

There were about 7 volunteers this day and twice as many wooden salmon rods, so we all grabbed a couple and started scrubbing them really thoroughly with soap and water and rinsing them really well because they are going to be used for cooking. They had quite a bit of dirt on them and we even found some beetles and after looking up some pictures on google I can say I think they are Carabus nemoralis or at least something of similar size and coloring! We dried the rods then over the fire and we sanded all of the rods down so no splinters would catch on the salmon when they are cooked. We also rubbed them down with vegetable oil to make them last longer (hopefully!). After we finished that we planted some ferns around the cob oven.

Planted ferns next to the cob oven. 

Bonfire and dirty wooden salmon cooking rods (upper left). 

The title of this project was Cultural Kitchen Cleanup & Repairs, I volunteered 3 hours and the organizer was Juliene Wall: juliene.wall@email.edcc.edu

The goals of this event was to get the wooden rods as clean and prepared as possible for in May when the organizers throw their annual powwow and use them to cook the salmon.

This experience made me think a lot about how these types of tools (the wooden rods) are completely man-made and a lot of care went into creating each of them. I think a lot of the time in this society we throw so much away and don’t spend much time on the upkeep of things rather than just replacing them. I think by cleaning and preparing them and realizing how much time it actually took to do it correctly was really important. I’m glad I did it because if I had attended an event where they used these rods to cook, I don’t think I would have thought or known at all about the work and preparation that went into making that happen.

A couple question I have after this service learning event are:

What other animals were hunted/caught to be cooked in these traditional ways?

Can the wooden rods be used to cook any other fish or is it just specifically salmon? (In class, we learned that Coho salmon and Rainbow trout are so similar looking that sometimes they can be hard to distinguish, so that's why I was thinking about this. Or is this method of cooking just traditionally for salmon, I wonder?)

In the pit oven we were shown that you throw a wet burlap bag down before tossing the clams in to cook; is burlap used for a reason, or would other fabrics be okay to use?

We used spray vegetable oil (the kind used for cooking) on the wooden rods to make them last longer, but what kind of oil would be traditionally used for this and would be safe because they are used for cooking?