The Sourdough Protest
Connecting with real food and the people who make it became more of a priority than refreshing the news
On January 20, 2016, my husband and I opened a restaurant called The Perennial, which was dedicated to spreading the message that food could help to solve the climate crisis. Exactly one year later, on Inauguration Day, a climate change denier became president. The day after that, I marched in the street, shouting, “Climate change is real!” with thousands of others. I couldn’t believe we still needed to assert this, but there we were, so I was out there shouting with my neighbors.
In those early days of 2017, I had to keep reminding myself to focus on climate change. There was just so much going on! I was struck by the range of issues that brought people out to protest, so I started a project I called “What’s Your Sign?” I went to protests and took pictures of signs, interviewed the folks who made them, and shared their stories online. It felt really good to be engaged and talking with my neighbors, hearing about what mattered to them. But by the summer, I started to feel overwhelmed, distracted from my personal work on climate change, and even a bit worried that I was just contributing to the echo chamber of the internet.
