Here's a tariff times shopping list for your Alaska pantry

Notes on: Which groceries are about to get more expensive here, green goddess dressing, joining CSAs, arroz caldo, matcha red bean cake, Arctic Entries tickets and a new Medium Build song

Once my dad showed me a ‘30s aerial shot of Anchorage and asked me what I noticed. When I guessed wrong, he pointed to the little square patches in the backyards of all the houses. Gardens. They were basically required in this city before we became dependent on the Outside supply lines that now supply 95 percent of our food. That same picture showed little pastures for cows, small-time local dairies on the edge of town. You can see the old food ways in the architecture, too. Many of the early Anchorage houses downtown have generous pantries for storing dry and canned local goods. There’s a word for that practice: provisioning. My Aunt Barbara, who’s in her late 70s, still lives like that in an old house on 10th Avenue.

Here’s her pantry:

My Aunt Barbara’s pantry, photographed in 2019 in Anchorage. (Julia O’Malley)

Taking a clear-eyed view of the possibility of tariffs and a potential Canadian toll on top of inflation in a place with some of the most expensive groceries in the country (h…