It’s been a busy month or so at the Sky Full of Bacon headquarters.  So I thought it might interest all two or three of you to know a little bit about what’s ahead.

The picture above is from what will be the next podcast.  Hey, those don’t look like fish, you say, if you remember that the raccoon dinner podcast ended with a preview for one about fish.  Well, you’re right.  Right as the raccoon podcast went up, I went to Norwalk, Iowa to shoot at La Quercia, makers of some of the best prosciutto in the world.  And as it happens, that one’s in better shape to be finished sooner, so it should be up within two weeks or so.

Sky Full of Bacon has gotten tagged with having a locavore bent, which I’m fine with, although to a certain extent that’s accidental— hey, you go and shoot producers in your area, the result is you’re doing a story on local food whether you meant to or not.  But La Quercia is the kind of midwest-foods story I really want to spread the word on: some folks in Iowa seeing the potential of making a traditional food (prosciutto) using Iowa pork, and as a result producing truly world-class product which has been hailed by chefs nationwide, not just in the midwest.  This isn’t a story about local being better because it traveled less, this is a story about local being better because it’s the best of its kind on the entire planet.  (Arguably, of course, but you’ll hear from prominent chefs who feel that way.)  California has lots of stories like that, but the midwest is just starting to create them.  So that’s what’s coming next.

At 5:45 this morning, I was standing on a dock in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, waiting to ride 3-1/2 miles out onto Lake Michigan to catch whitefish.  This was something of the climax of a series of events that started when Carl Galvan of Supreme Lobster contacted me some months back about the possibility of shooting at their distribution center/big building kept cold and full of fish in Villa Park.  I shot out there a couple of times and interviewed him and a fish buyer without knowing exactly where the story was going— but I figured that was okay as long as I knew we’d have cool fish house visuals.  Then Carl came up with another possibility— going out with a whitefish boat.

Previous podcasts have mostly involved people whose stories I already knew.  These two are really examples of finding the stories as I shoot.  In the case of the fish house one, I’ve been interviewing chefs about what they and their customers want when they’re thinking about fish for dinner, and that’s provided a broader context that connects what we’ll see in the fish house with how we eat.  In the whitefish boat one, it quickly became clear that the fishermen have big issues with how they’re being managed by the various state agencies, and so part of it will be looking at how this profession, which some of these people have been in for generations, is changing today under regulatory pressure.  If that sounds like a simple story of overfishing fishermen versus purehearted conservationists, it’s not at all, far from it.

In both these cases, getting these additional interviews has taken up more time and, perhaps, slowed production on the next one a little, since the editor is still out shooting.  But still, it’s encouraging to me to know all the good stuff that I have in the can and the time I have to really pursue the fish stories and get all the pieces that will make them solid and thought-provoking videos.  (And I even have parts of a fourth in the can— about an ethnic deli/restaurant in an old-time suburb.  I shot interview footage out there but need to go back and shoot them making food.  And then I need to figure out if it’s a standalone piece, or if I need a second segment on the same theme within the same video, something I haven’t actually done since the very first one.)  So, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the works here— watch for it.