California

A Canadian grocery and pharmacy chain says it will close 22 stores and launch home delivery in Toronto in December and Vancouver in January.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to encourage manufacturers to voluntarily standardize date labeling on their products in order to curb some of the 5.5 billion tons of food tossed into the state’s landfills each year.

With wildfires still blazing in Northern California and 222,000 acres already destroyed, vineyard workers are breathing particulate-filled air as they bring in the grape crop. Many of the workers are undocumented and can't afford to lose a paycheck even if their homes were destroyed in the fires that have consumed the region.

For generations, members of the Yurok tribe have fished for salmon in the Klamath River in the northwestern corner of California. "Salmon is essential to Yurok ceremonies, for food and for income," says Lisa Morehouse in a story for The California Report that was produced in partnership with FERN. "But this fall, the number of chinook salmon swimming up the Klamath was the lowest on record, threatening the tribe's entire culture and way of life."

The wildfires in northern California destroyed vegetable farms in Sonoma County, "including several that were founded in the past six years by young farmers taking part in the local organic farm movement," says the San Francisco Chronicle. Growers lost homes and farm buildings and say that getting back into production will be an uphill battle.

California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have required employees at meal-kit delivery companies, like Blue Apron, to obtain food-handler cards for dealing with unpackaged ingredients, reports the LA Times. The bill was sponsored by the companies’ competitors, including the California Grocers Assn. and United Food and Commercial Workers State Council.

Driven by "diablo" winds, massive wildfires burned hundreds of buildings, including three wineries, and tens of thousands of acres in Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, reports the Wine Spectator. Dairy farms and produce growers with crops ripe for fall harvest also were in peril, "but moving farm animals is another story," said the San Francisco Chronicle.

For more than 40 years, the Emerald Triangle — "a densely forested region of labyrinthine back roads, secret valleys, and perennial creeks in Northern California" — has been a great place to grow a prohibited but highly desired product: marijuana. But this area is now coming under massive pressure with the state's legalization of recreational weed, reports Stett Holbrook in FERN’s latest story, published with GRIST, “The high price of cheap weed.”

Officials in California and Oregon are calling on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries division to release emergency funding after salmon fisheries were closed in both states.

The board of the largely agricutlural Westlands Water District voted 7-1 against taking part in Gov. Jerry Brown's twin-tunnel project "to remake the fragile estuary that serves as the hub of California's water delivery network," reports the Sacramento Bee. The decision, by the first water agency to vote on the project, is "a potentially fatal blow" to the $17-billion project.

When heat waves blanket regions of the country, an uncomfortable situation for many people can turn deadly for farmworkers laboring in fields. "That’s especially true in the Central Valley, where a major portion of the nation’s fruits and vegetables are grown. If farmworkers don’t drink enough water, are unable to take breaks in the shade, or simply aren’t acclimatized to working at such high temperatures, they can suffer heat exhaustion, heatstroke, even death," writes Ingfei Chen in FERN's latest story, published with Mother Jones.

In Trinity county, California, food can at times be painfully scarce. "It’s a beautiful, remote, rural part of northern California. It’s also one of the state’s most food insecure places, where many people don’t know where their next meal is coming from," reports Lisa Morehouse in FERN's latest story in partnership with KQED's The California Report.

Chefs protested and producers promised to pursue a reversal following a ruling by a three-judge U.S. appellate court panel to allow enforcement of a 2004 California law banning the sale of foie gras. The law "has been idled for more than half of the time it has been on the books" and a state judge decided in 2015 that the state law wrongly interfered with federal food laws, said the Los Angeles Times.

More than 1,500 Hmong farmers have moved to Northern California’s Siskiyou County and now raise as much as $1 billion-worth of marijuana, according to some estimates. But locals haven’t been pleased to see the newcomers or their crop, which law enforcement destroys during raids, claiming that the pot is sold to the black market.

An audit by the Interior Department's inspector general says the government improperly spent $84 million to help plan the mammoth twin-tunnel project to ship water to Southern California from northern parts of the state, reported The Associated Press. The audit said the expenditures meant the Bureau of Reclamation paid for one-third of the cost of project planning through 2016, when California water districts were supposed to bear the costs.

Animal welfare activists, led by the Humane Society of the United States, have filed papers in California to introduce an initiative that would make all eggs cage-free in the state by 2022.