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Outside/In

The Acorn: An Ohlone Love Story

Outside/In

NHPR

Society & Culture, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Nature, Science

4.71.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the early 1900s, an Ohlone woman named Isabel Meadows was recorded describing her longing to eat acorn bread again. She detailed the bread’s flavor; the jelly-like texture; the crispy edges; the people who made it. And she talked about the bread’s place in the creation story of her tribe. A century later, a young Ohlone man named Louis Trevino came across the recordings and recognized Meadows as an ancestor from his community. Today, Trevino and his Ohlone partner, Vincent Medina, are on a journey to bring acorn bread, and the language and traditions connected to it, back to the Ohlone people. The Acorn: An Ohlone Love Story is a documentary about Ohlone food, language, and history. But, ultimately, it is a story about Ohlone strength and homeland, the landscape that stretches from the Bay Area of California to Monterey and Big Sur. And at the heart of this story are acorns. Links Michelle Macklem Zoe Tennant Cafe Ohlone Sign up for the Outside/In newsletter for our biweekly reading lists and episode extras. Support Outside/In by making a donation! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm going to start off with cracking the acorns first, see if there's skin just slid

0:16.6

off, see how you perfect that is, just like that.

0:22.8

I'm peeling off some of this skin that's after you shell them, there's a skin on the acorn

0:29.2

that you have to remove before you can make it into flour.

0:36.4

So after we get the acorn like this, what we're going to do is for the ones that are all

0:40.5

done, we're going to start to make them into a flour, which we're still not edible yet

0:46.6

because they still have the tannic acids and then after then we have the flour, then we'll

0:51.8

start to leach it to take out all the bitters.

0:54.5

So do you imagine our ancestors did this every single day?

1:00.2

Not just even to make a small amount, but to feed the entire village.

1:18.8

You're listening to Outside In, a show about the natural world and how we use it.

1:22.6

I'm Sam Evans Brown.

1:25.6

And you're hearing Vincent Medina and Lewis Trevino grinding black oak acorns in their

1:30.2

backyard in San Lorenzo, California and teaching kids from their community how to process

1:36.2

the nuts.

1:37.7

Vincent and Lewis are partners in many senses of the word, partners in food, in business

1:43.5

and in life.

1:44.5

They're both aloney people.

1:47.0

And acorns are at the heart of their story.

1:52.3

Porsche Tuhi Maacom, Kanakraakat, Vincent Medina.

1:56.0

To everybody, my name is Vincent Medina.

1:58.7

My family is indigenous to the East Bay, which is where we're at right now.

...

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