Photo Essay: Celebrating Food in the Keweenaw

An artful arrangement of pumpkins, turnips, beets, carrots, squash, eggplant, dill, and sunflowers.
An artful arrangement of pumpkins, turnips, beets, carrots, squash, eggplant, dill, and sunflowers.
Huskies help the Keweenaw tell food stories. Here’s one of the winners in the Western Upper Peninsula (UP) Food Stories Photo Contest. Credit: Lisa Reitz
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By Allison Mills
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The winning images from the Western Upper Peninsula Food Stories Photo Contest showcase local food, farms, forage and community.

The Western Upper Peninsula Food Systems Collaborative (WUPFSC) launched the contest in collaboration with a class taught by Angie Carter, assistant professor of environmental and energy justice at Michigan Technological University.

The students in the course — Communities and Research SS4700 — reached out to local gardeners, growers, foodies and anyone who eats to share what local foods in the Keweenaw mean to them. Since a picture is worth 1,000 words, they asked people to share their experiences in a visual format. The course is based on transdisciplinary research methods, teaching students how to develop projects driven by needs identified from community members to ensure that their research would directly serve and empower the community.

The class gathered all the photos on Flickr and here are some of the winning images from eight categories: Food as Community; Homeraised and Homegrown; Hunting, Fishing, Gathering; Local Festivals and Markets; Health and Wellbeing; Make it, Bake it, and Preserve it; Food Culture & Histories; and Self Chosen.

Local Foods: Traditions, Bites and Solace

An Anishinaabe woman stands in a thriving garden.
A flock of chickens stands under a tree, curious and confused, with snow all around.
A full basket of acorns and mushrooms sits on a fungi-laden log.
A man kneels on the ice holding a silvery, polka-dotted fish.
A young boy holds a sheared sheep still with his knee and hands in a county fair contest.
A car seat is piled with orange cherry tomatoes, green peppers, broccoli, bread, dried fruit, eggs, and baked goods.
An artful arrangement of pumpkins, turnips, beets, carrots, squash, eggplant, dill, and sunflowers.
A group of people of all ages stand around a hole drilled into the ice.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to nearly 7,500 students from more than 60 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, Michigan’s flagship technological university offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.

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