Poems about food and drink

What's not to love? All the poems in this anthology, A Feast For Santa Barbara: Poets Celebrate Food and Drink, edited by SB Poet Laureate George Yatchisin (Gunpowder Press, 2026) explore the edible aspects of Santa Barbara County, with sections like "market," "ritual," "ingredients," and "labor," the last of which is where my poem, "Harvesting History," appears.

"Harvesting History" was inspired by a line in a Santa Barbara News-Press article I came across while researching Roosevelt Elementary's 100-year history a couple years back. In 1950, kindergarten enrollment was down because walnut harvesting was still underway at the start of school. I had no idea walnuts had once been a major crop in SB and Goleta, but what stuck with me more was a mental image of 5 year-olds filling sacks with walnuts, and missing their first day of school.

I found it fascinating how, out of the hundreds of articles I skimmed over nine months of researching school history, this one line from a news article stayed with me. When I saw the call for this anthology, I played with a few different ideas for poems, and this is the one that most wanted to get out into the world. In writing this poem, I started to understand why this scenario captured my imagination so much.