The Brief

If you have lunch at Follow Your Heart vegan cafe on Sherman Way in Canoga Park, you may see a friendly-looking guy hovering around. He’s there for a few hours every day, doing a little bit of everything.

“It’s kind of my job to eat different things on the menu to ensure consistency. One cook teaches another cook and recipes totally change.”

Take note — that man is not just the food taster. He’s Bob Goldberg, now a wise elder to the vegan food scene in Los Angeles. He began Follow Your Heart with friends in 1970, as a vegetarian hippie hangout in the valley.

Bob Goldberg and his partners

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Courtesy Follow Your Heart

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Today, more than 50 years later, it’s a vegan grocery store and diner, with a college town food co-op vibe, selling plant-based diner food: sandwiches, pot pies, chili cheese fries. And even more importantly, Goldberg has had a massive impact on plant-based eating, creating Vegenaise and starting the Follow Your Heart and Earth Island brands.

The Follow Your Heart cafe first started as a juice bar in the back of Johnny Weissmuller’s American Natural Foods on Owensmouth. Weissmuller was an Olympic gold medalist and star of the Tarzan movies.

In 1973, Goldberg, along with partners Paul Lewin, Spencer Windbiel and Michael Besançon, bought out the market, and got rid of all the meat and dairy products.

“When we first started, this strip was still Antique Row — we’d get thrifted plates from the Salvation Army,” he remembers.

The place soon attracted a loyal following, with people traveling long distances to the West Valley, because back then, as Goldberg says, "vegetarian places were few and far between."

By 1976, they outgrew the store and moved into a former butcher shop, which is the current Sherman Way location.

Questioning authority

"I grew up in a family of grocers,” says Goldberg. His grandfather Sam Kapitanoff opened Crystal Foods shortly after the turn of the century when he arrived in Beloit, Wisconsin from Eastern Europe — “very New Agey name,” he laughs. He’d visit the store as a kid with his parents from Chicago, an hour-and-a-half away.

The other side of Goldberg’s family was in the model airplane kits industry. In those days, Carl Goldberg Products was a hugely inspiring company for would-be aeronautical engineers. However, model planes later fell out of popularity in the 70's with the emergence of the space program. “I was a national champion as a child,” he says with a smile.

Chef Proof Fujiyama-Ahira and owner Bob Goldberg at Follow Your Heart Market & Cafe in Canoga Park.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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In 1967, Goldberg got drafted into the army. Initially, he thought he’d have to travel overseas, but he received a last minute change of orders to join the Army Band. (Goldberg had played trumpet since he was 10 and studied music at Indiana University).

Goldberg says he wasn’t yet critical of the war in Vietnam. “It was a bad time — a turbulent time. But I was on board for everything. I didn't question authority ... that came later.”

In the barracks he was assigned to a room with one other guy who had the "opposite of my background.” He’d been in trouble with the law and a judge had given him the choice to go to jail or enlist. His barrack-mate showed him something rolled up in aluminum foil — he didn't know what it was. "I'd never seen marijuana,” he says. They went into a closet and got high.

A moment later Bob remembers sitting down on his bed and thinking “‘Everything I know was wrong’ — it just hit me. I remember an overwhelming feeling that I'd been lied to.”

In the Army Band he’d travel to midwestern states playing “a lot of parades,” Bob pauses, “but also Taps at a lot of funerals.” This experience made him see the impact of what war can do, which led to his embrace of meat-less eating.

“I became vegetarian for moral reasons. I was against unnecessary killing. And sometimes the practice of killing animals can lead to the killing of people.”

Out of the Army, in 1969, Goldberg drove across the country to Los Angeles. He spent the first few weeks on a buddy’s couch in Woodland Hills before finding a place up the street from Johnny Weissmuller’s.

Goldberg was glad to find somewhere he could get camaraderie and vegetarian food. “I was meeting my people and getting an education in living in a more peaceful way.”

A promotional image for Vegenaise that shows the product when it was first introduced in wide release in 1995.

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Courtesy Follow Your Heart

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The birth of Vegenaise

Their customers included many seeking a more spiritual parth, and would suggest books, which they’d sell in the corner of the shop. The Whole Earth Catalog, books on environmentalism or eastern philosophy, Hindu- buddhism, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Michael Besançon was a follower of a guru whose followers’ culinary practice excluded meat, fowl, and eggs (though dairy was okay). So the menu at Follow Your Heart applied that approach to their familiar diner fare.

But they wanted to serve that part of the community that didn’t eat eggs. And without mayonnaise, the cafe’s sandwiches were less than appealing. “They still needed a lube," laughs Goldberg.

So they set about finding a mayo alternative. They went through lots of options before stumbling upon a guy who’d created a product called “Lecinaise” which was supposedly an egg-free substance made from lecithin, which helped emulsify lipids.

They began using it in the restaurant. But a few months later they started hearing that there were actually eggs in this “Lecinaise.” Eventually, Goldberg says “the guy got busted by the California Department of Food and Agriculture — he was soaking jars of regular mayonnaise to get the labels off and then putting his own label on top!”

The fried chicken sandwich from Follow Your Heart Market & Cafe in Canoga Park.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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The sprouts sandwich love plate, fried chicken, reuben and club sandwiches from Follow Your Heart Market & Cafe in Canoga Park.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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They immediately had to look for other options. But when they approached food manufacturers, they were told an egg-free mayo alternative wasn’t possible.

So Goldberg started experimenting. What could be a good plant-based solution? He tried mixing various oils and fats trying to find the best way to make them cohere. “It took a lot of trials, my whole fridge [was] full of various stages,” he says.

He finally came up with the answer in a dream. “I bolted up, and then sat in bed, waiting two hours for light — then mixed tofu scraps in a blender and combined them with oil,” he says, which gave the consistency he was looking for. Eventually they replaced the tofu with isolated soy proteins — and began making it themselves, as Vegenaise.

“We didn’t want to be a manufacturer, but that became the only option,” he says.

It was so popular that in 1988, Follow Your Heart started a manufacturing division, Earth Island, which expanded from Vegenaise into other plant- based products like salad dressings, dips, and cheeses.

It was highly successful — but around that time the original Follow Your Heart partnership started to dissolve. Goldberg says “we all wanted to do different things. Like many bands we broke up. We lasted about as long as The Beatles.”

Goldberg and Lewin bought out their other partners. Goldberg says “Spencer went into early retirement, and Michael went on to become an executive at Whole Foods.”

Vegetarian to vegan

At that time Follow Your Heart and their Earth Island products were vegetarian, which meant they made some dairy products in their factories.

But when they started making white label products for Trader Joe’s, they were forced to wrestle with whether to go vegan. Trader Joe’s Caesar and Blue Cheese salad dressings had been made with a plant-based rennet. But when that became unavailable, they faced a choice.

"I wasn't comfortable with the company using a natural rennet — the enzyme used to coagulate cheese — from the intestine of a baby cow when the vegan one ran out,” he says.

They ultimately decided to give up that part of the business, and became completely plant-based. “I wasn't willing to be involved in the slaughter of animals.”

He says they walked away from millions. "We saw a short-term drop in sales, but eventually it paid off.”

Goldberg spent nearly 30 years building Earth Island. In that time, their products became available at grocery stores across the country and around the world. Their offerings helped spread the ubiquity of plant-based eating to a new generation that could now more easily access vegan food.

In 2020, Bob's long-time friend and business partner, Paul Lewin, unexpectedly passed away. "His passing was a big part of why I was ready to close that chapter of my life" says Goldberg "as it was something that we had done together for 50 years, and without him, it just wasn’t the same". So in 2021, he sold Earth Island for an undisclosed amount to French food-product corporation Danone, famous for their yogurt, who also had a dairy-free division, including the plant-based milk alternative, Silk.

At the time, Goldberg felt like he had spent enough time at the factory. “It was a good thing — but it was just so big,” he says. “I wasn’t having as much fun as the first ten years with the four partners behind the bar. I didn’t know everyone on the staff anymore. I didn’t know our customers, it was all big grocers. It wasn’t the same personal experience.”

Part of the sale required Bob to stay on at Earth Island/Danone for an extra year to help the transition, but now Bob is back where it all started at Follow Your Heart in Canoga Park.

He still has an eye to the future, seeing trends and wanting to be part of them.

"I have a sense, and a vision that Canoga Park is beginning a real renaissance of development, with the Rams building a training facility and Warner 2035. If you look around, this was an almost affordable area. Over the next twenty years it's gonna be very much in demand. We’re hanging in there — we want to be a part of the next phase.”

Diners eat in the cafe at Follow Your Heart Market & Cafe in Canoga Park.

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Brian Feinzimer

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LAist

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They own the building across the parking lot, which still says “Mr Jack’s Wig Shop” (which was never actually a business, just the set design from the movie Licorice Pizza).

In that space they are going to build out a bakery and a coffee roaster. “We still have our wholesale bakery — but we want to get into the retail side,” says Goldberg.

When I visited Follow Your Heart to interview Goldberg recently, we had a lunch of plant-based Reubens. Afterwards, he gave me a copy of his 2020 book “The Vegenaise Cookbook, Great Food That’s Vegan, Too” and signed it “To Josh my great new friend. Integrity is the answer.”

For Goldberg, integrity means “making sure that one’s actions are congruent with one’s beliefs. That you are living in your truth. And when you aren’t, those relationships get fractured. Integrity is what makes things cohere.”

Kinda like Vegenaise.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

On a weeknight in April 2016, about 20 people gathered in Koreatown for a run organized by two friends who weren’t sure what they were doing or if anyone would even show up.

Ten years later, that group has become Koreatown Run Club, a weekly fixture that now draws hundreds at a time and roughly 800 to a thousand runners across a typical week, according to co-founder Duy Nguyen. The club has expanded well beyond the neighborhood through partnerships with major brands, including sneaker collaborations with Nike and a banner encouraging the group for this year’s L.A. Marathon.

Neither Nguyen nor co-founder Michael Pak expected it to last this long, or to take on the kind of role it has in people’s lives. The pair, Nguyen said, were “just looking for stuff to do together.”

“I don’t think we thought that far ahead. The idea itself was kind of spur of the moment and then when we had the first run, we were like, ‘oh, what are we doing next?’ And then you blink and it’s 10 years later,” he said.

The first run was loosely organized. Nguyen, an avid soccer guy, had originally planned to start a soccer club, but field access and liability concerns made that difficult. Running was simpler to coordinate and required little beyond a meeting point and a time.

“You could run for free and people could come out at their own will and join,” Pak said.

Even then, they were unsure how it would work in practice.

“None of us are runners,” Nguyen said. “So we were worried like, what route do we run?”

Koreatown Run Club founders Mike Pak and Duy Nguyen at Love Hour in Koreatown.

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Brian Feinzimer

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The LA Local

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About 20 people showed up that first night, many of them friends who came to support the pair. Pak said much of the attendance over time happened through word of mouth rather than any formal outreach.

As the runs became more organized and more people came out to run, the nature of the group began to change. Pak said he started to notice it in conversations with runners who were willing to share more about their lives outside of running. He recalled one woman telling him about her struggle with alcohol addiction and how the club had helped her through it.

“That’s when a light bulb went off,” he said. “They have their own personal life, they’re going through their demons in life, and for them to express those feelings at a run club where they don’t know anyone, I realized, well, if it’s just that story, I’m sure there are thousands of other stories that maybe we have an opportunity to learn from.”

For many members, the club functions as a place to build relationships that extend beyond the runs themselves.

Julie Lee, co-captain of the crew on Thursdays, joined in 2023 after seeing its runners hype each other up in the Rose Bowl Half Marathon. She already knew who they were from Instagram, but said experiencing their energy in person made her want to join.

Originally from Maryland, Lee said finding a community she can trust in a new place has been life-changing.

“These are the friends that I call when I’m having hard times in life, when I’m going through my breakups, when I need a ride to the airport. This has become my family outside of my actual home,” she said.

Charles Austin, another co-captain, said the club filled a similar role for him after returning to the city after college. He’s invited people he met through the club, including Lee, to his wedding last year.

“That’s the sort of bonds that you end up building. And that’s something that kind of fulfills me day in and day out,” he said. “I probably couldn’t make it through some of the harder things I’ve been through in the last couple of years if not for KRC.”

Runners pose for a group photo before running with Koreatown Run Club at Love Hour in Koreatown.

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Brian Feinzimer

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The LA Local

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The club has also influenced how participants interact with the neighborhood itself. Pak said that before joining, he felt some people were hesitant to spend time in the neighborhood or felt unsure navigating it.

“When you have friends in the neighborhood and you live in the neighborhood, you get a little curious and have curiosity to explore more of the neighborhood that you live in. And I think we just opened a little door,” he said.

Nguyen agrees.

“I think maybe the run club opened it up more to being like, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna walk to get coffee after a run and stumble upon all these places and meet all these people,’” he said.

Running through the neighborhood also shapes how people experience it. While the streets of Koreatown are “unpredictable,” Pak said, moving through the area on foot allows runners to notice details they might otherwise miss.

“I think in the beginning, I didn’t expect to see some really undiscovered restaurants and businesses,” Pak said.

Over time, Koreatown Run Club has expanded well beyond the city. Lee said that while traveling in South Korea for a marathon, she was welcomed by a local run club simply because she was associated with KRC.

Nguyen described a similar experience while traveling in Taiwan, where someone recognized the club’s name on his shirt and came up to talk to him.

Similarly, Pak said while traveling Japan, he ran into someone wearing a KRC shirt and ended up going to dinner together.

But Pak felt one of the clearest indicators of the club’s reach was when runners began sending him photos of unofficial club merchandise being sold overseas.

“That’s when I thought we really made it,” he said, laughing. “We didn’t know we could be bootlegged.”

The club has also taken on a larger role during moments of crisis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pak and Nguyen said runners used group chats to coordinate grocery deliveries and other forms of mutual aid.

More recently, after the L.A. fires, the club converted one of its spaces into a relief center, collecting and distributing donations to affected families. Pak said volunteers from the community showed up consistently to help run the effort.

“There were just so many volunteers that came through every single day,” he said. “It’s the community that we built. They all come together in a time of need.”

To Austin, the run club has become something he could rely on.

Runners along their route with Koreatown Run Club at Love Hour in Koreatown.

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Brian Feinzimer

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The LA Local

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“It’s a spot where I can come to and I can build on friendships and family,” he said. “It all starts here and it just kind of branches out from here.”

On a recent weeknight at Love Hour — a burger joint co-owned by Pak and Nguyen — Lynn Nguyen, who joined the club in 2017, was in the middle of an interview after a run when she turned to Pak.

“I’m getting married, Mike! You’re invited to my wedding!” she said, before returning to her answer.

A few moments later, another runner walked by and stopped to greet her. Nguyen mentioned she had officiated their wedding three years earlier, then laughed and gestured toward the exchange.

“See? That’s how it is.”

Both founders said their lives have changed dramatically. Neither expected to run full marathons — Pak has done 10, Nguyen 31 — or to meet people from around the world and see strangers become friends who go on to get married and have kids.

“It’s really inspiring to see how many people look at us outside of just Los Angeles. And at this point, it’s way bigger than us and it’s really cool to see new people coming in who I have no idea who they are, but they are part of this long-term journey,” Pak said.

Ten years after the first run, they say they still approach running the club without a long-term roadmap and take things day by day.

“We’ve been doing that from the start and it’s gotten us here, so I think we’ll just keep going at it,” Nguyen said. “We never think too far ahead.”

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home. 

The community space sometimes feels safer than the confines of her home, where she sits alone watching the constant reports of violence and death flash across her screen — reminders that her homeland of Palestine is being torn apart by war.

There isn’t much she can do from thousands of miles away, so she and hundreds of others find solace in the refuge that Astralab provides. 

And the space is at risk of closing.

After nearly two years in the Westlake neighborhood, the founders of Astralab say they’ve been told to leave. The news arrived abruptly as the founders said they were in talks to extend their lease with their landlord JMF Development.

The building manager had even thanked them for bringing life into the studio and creative office space.

“We’ve been great tenants and kind neighbors. We’ve really built a space for people to come and to gather and not just grieve, but also joyfully be together,” said Yusuf Misdaq, co-founder of the third space venue that borders Koreatown.

“But they just took it off the table and gave us no response since then,” he said.

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Hanna Kang

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The LA Local

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Located in the Granada Buildings — a block-long Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival complex on La Fayette Park Place with open courtyards and greenery — Astralab sits as a kind of refuge in an otherwise blighted stretch of the neighborhood. 

In February, Astralab received a 60-day notice to vacate. Co-founder Christina Lila said they are now working with a pro bono lawyer to challenge the landlord. 

When reached by phone, a person at the real estate office declined to provide his name and questioned why anyone was asking about the notice to vacate. 

“Why is this a story? I don’t know why I’m even entertaining this conversation,” he said. 

He said Astralab’s tenancy ends April 19 and that they would need to vacate the space. The real estate company did not respond to requests for comment via email. 

'Community is medicine'

While all are welcome at Astralab, the space was created to provide refuge with a specific community in mind.

Lila is half Iranian and Misdaq is originally from Afghanistan. The community space was meant to cater to people from Southwest Asia and North Africa, or the SWANA region, who often feel unmoored away from home.

“We really saw the lack of cultural centers in America, frankly. And while working in the SWANA region, I saw the vibrant cultures and the community love and how powerful it was,” Lila said. “It feels like there’s almost a psychological torture in America, and you can’t get the medicine. Community is medicine, and we just don’t have it as much here.”

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Courtesy Astralab

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Muhammad said that sense of community is what drew her to Astralab.

“My kids have performed cultural songs and dances there. That place just reminds me of who we are and it just gives me that comfortability of being there,” she said.

Muhammad, who owns Knafeh Queens, a dessert shop based in Rancho Cucamonga, has also hosted workshops at Astralab, teaching people how to make the dessert and sharing its history.

“I’ve rarely been able to find spaces like this that I barely have to put effort into. I always show up as my full self, but there’s something really special about Astralab and how welcoming they are to everyone regardless of background and faith,” she said.

Shortly after opening, Astralab quickly started hosting a steady rotation of gatherings, drawing people from across Los Angeles and beyond. Some nights are quiet, with poetry readings or small group discussions, Lila said. Other nights spill into the courtyard.

“We host regular bazaars where we open our courtyard, and there’ll be 30, 40 creators and so many people, artists, musicians, healers — we have a ‘Silk Road’ type of space where people will come and put their creations — all sorts of different medicines and jewelry and things like that,” Lila said.

More than 200 artists, musicians and small business owners have participated through those events over the last two years, according to the founders. Astralab is sustained through event-based income and the bazaar, Lila said, but most paid events include sliding scale or free tickets for those who could not otherwise afford to attend. 

For Fatmah Muhammad, Astralab is a home away from home.

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Courtesy Astralab

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Misdaq can tell that people often visit carrying the weight of what’s happening back home.

“With Iran being so prominent, people are coming in tears. We’ve had a lot of grieving events where people can just come and just be,” he said.

But “a lot of dance happens here, a lot of celebration happens here. It’s not all sad. In fact, it’s mostly joyful, actually,” Misdaq adds.

'A drop of solace'

Parisa Nkoy, an Iranian-Congolese organizer, had been following Astralab online before visiting earlier this year. She has used the space to host workshops connecting struggles across the world, including Congo and Palestine.

Earlier this year, she led a teach-in on Congo, inviting Congolese organizers who do advocacy work for refugees and immigrants.

“We did a little presentation and a workshop, and then we were able to connect to Palestine as well. It was a fundraiser as well to raise money that we donated to folks on the ground in Congo and I just don’t know that I could have found another space that would have been as comfortable for me to do that,” she said.

“I think that that’s super important and we need more of that, not less of that,” she said.

Neighbors say they haven’t seen similar action taken against other tenants.

“As far as I know, no one else here has gotten something like this just randomly. I mean, most people will move out on their own accord if they can’t pay rent. We’ve only really had positive interactions with them,” said Eric Gorvin, who runs a branding agency next door.

“Every time they’ve had an event, it’s been really respectful people. It’s always community-driven,” he added. “I didn’t know much about that community until meeting them, and it’s been really refreshing to have them around.” 

The founders say they haven’t been given a reason for the notice to vacate, but they believe it’s due to their pro-Palestine stance. 

“We’ve basically been speaking a lot about the genocide in Palestine, and we’ve used our platform to try and not shy away from that too much, but we also do a lot of other things besides that,” Misdaq said.

“We just had a Passover [seder] led by a Jewish mystic, and it’s a testimony that we feel the world needs right now where there can be an alliance of all these different people,” Lila said.

“We can share the beauty of our uniqueness together,” she said.

The founders said they invested most of their personal savings into creating Astralab and had only recently moved beyond breaking even. Lila said that milestone would have allowed them to begin offering new programs.

“We’ve become a home to so many people separated from their families during these wars, our space gives people a drop of solace while watching their homelands being bombed,” they said.

“If we have to, we’ll be nomadic, which is kind of appropriate maybe in some ways for our people. So maybe we’ll take it on the road for a little while before we find a space if they do kick us out,” Misdaq said. 

Astralab will host HAYAT, a Middle-Eastern/Persian celebration of dance and music on April 18. More details can be found on their Instagram page, @astralab_la .

Brandee Williams, a 2007 graduate of Inglewood High School, pulled over on Grevillea Avenue Wednesday to witness the destruction of buildings at her alma mater. 

Through a gap in the fencing, she filmed a video for a friend after discovering the senior square where they used to play Twister during breaks was gone. 

“I get what they’re trying to do,” she said. “Seeing it being torn down, that’s so many memories.”

Driving down Manchester Avenue, Williams and other IHS alumni saw heavy construction equipment, fencing and a partial demolition near Grevillea Avenue where the century-old high school used to sit. It’s all a part of the campus’ transformation after voters passed Measure I in 2020, which allotted $240 million for the project that is scheduled to be completed in December 2027, according to James Morris, the district’s county administrator. 

As of this month, most of the school’s original buildings have been demolished. Two structures — the gym and the auditorium — will remain, though both will be renovated as part of the new campus design, Morris said.  

Brandee Williams, a 2007 graduate of Inglewood High School, pulled over on Grevillea Avenue Wednesday to witness the destruction of buildings at her alma mater.

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Isaiah Murtaugh

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The LA Local

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Students will attend classes on the new campus at the start of the 2028 school year, according to Morris. For now, all of Inglewood’s high school students are being housed at what was Morningside High School near Century Boulevard and Yukon Avenue.    

“There are no plans for Morningside and we won’t make any decisions about that campus until the students move out in two years,” Morris told The LA Local before Wednesday’s school board meeting. 

While the city did have two high schools at one point, it now has one, Inglewood High School.

The transformation of Inglewood High School comes amid broader changes within the district. Morningside High School was officially closed as part of districtwide school closures in 2025. The district’s been under a 14-year receivership, or state control, that could end as soon as next year, Morris said, after closing nearly half of its schools between  2018 and 2025 due to financial constraints. 

However, Morris said the Inglewood High rebuild is not tied to its receivership status and is an investment he believes is long overdue.

“It’s been 102 years since that building was originally built,” Morris said. “This is a part of history and it’s going to be a part of the future when the kids get the school that they deserve.” 

As the physical campus changes, the school’s identity remains strong within the community. It’s still technically named Inglewood High School, though some students advocated for a new name: “Inglewood High School United,” Morris said, adding that the board will have to officially approve a name change once it regains control from the state.  

Just before Wednesday’s school board meeting, Morris displayed a brick he collected as a memento from the construction site he toured earlier that day with other board members. The brick is imprinted with the number 1924, the year the high school was built. 

“We are trying to work closely with Inglewood and Morningside alumni groups to honor that history, honor the traditions and collect certain things,” Morris said. 

The LA Local’s Isaiah Murtagh contributed to this report. 

The post Here’s why crews were tearing down parts of Inglewood High School this week appeared first on LA Local.

After three years of unprecedented closures that devastated California’s fishing industry, commercial salmon fishing is poised to reopen this spring.

The return comes with a catch: Regulators at the interstate Pacific Fishery Management Council will strictly constrain fishing dates and impose harvest limits for both commercial and recreational fishing to protect the threatened California Coastal Chinook. The council is set to finalize the details this weekend.

It’s not the season the fleet had hoped for after years of closures. But those who survived the shutdowns fear a graver threat: state and federal decisions could reshape California’s water systems and rivers.

“Water policy in California is about to change drastically and irreversibly, and nobody has the energy to pay attention to that,” said Sarah Bates, who fishes commercially from San Francisco. “I am concerned that salmon is going to be (commercially) extinct in our lifetimes.”

For the first time since 2022, Bates was preparing her century-old boat, the Bounty, docked at Fisherman’s Wharf. She ticked off the boat’s needs: an oil change, a hydraulics check, a run-through of the steering system, the anchor. Her fading fishing permit, now four years out of date, still clings to the outside of the cabin.

“Pay no attention to my paint job,” Bates said. “Try not to make my boat look bad.”

Looking at its cracking paint and tangled ropes, Bates — who wrestles waves and weather for a living and uses a fishing float dented by a massive shark bite — seemed a little daunted by the tasks ahead.

Without income from salmon, Bates allowed critical upkeep to lag. “There's been a lot of deferred maintenance,” she said. “I'm actually a little worried about everybody charging out into the ocean in May to go fishing.”

‘A tremendous, avoidable hit’

Salmon is king in California. It’s what keeps the markets and restaurants buying, the industrial-scale ice machines running, the tourists booking charter boats and visiting the coast.

“It’s iconic,” said retired charter boat captain John Atkinson. “We have people who will fish every week for salmon. And for the other species, they come out once.”

But dams, water diversions, low flows and poor ocean conditions have driven decades of decline.

California experienced its driest three year stretch in history from 2020 through 2022 — worsening that burden and causing populations to plummet. Interstate fisheries managers cancelled commercial salmon fishing for an unprecedented three years in a row, and barred recreational fishing for all but a handful of days last year.

The financial damage was severe. California estimated the closures cost nearly $100 million in lost coastal community and state personal income during the first two years alone.

The fishing industry says these numbers vastly underestimate the economic and human costs: Boats went to the crusher, tourists took their money to other states, suppliers went out of business and fishers fled California or the industry altogether.

“This was a tremendous, avoidable hit. We have survived droughts throughout recent history, but none had impacts this drastic,” Vance Staplin, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, said in an email.

First: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on March 20, 2026. Last: Sunlight pours through a window of the Bounty, a commercial fishing vessel, on March 20, 2026. Photos by Jungho Kim for CalMatters Sarah Bates, a commercial salmon fisher, stands at the wheel of her boat, Bounty, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on March 20, 2026. Photo by Jungho Kim for CalMatters California has requested disaster assistance from the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. But federal aid has come slowly, and fallen short. The U.S. government has released only $20.6 million, and only for the 2023 closure.

“The entire framework for fishery disasters has to be totally redone,” said U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “We need something that is much faster, that is less political, that doesn’t depend on all the vagaries of multiple federal agencies and congressional appropriations.”

Rain, but little respite

The rains returned in 2023 — bringing the flows and cool water young salmon need to survive and complete their ocean migration.

Now, the Pacific Fishery Management Council projects that roughly 392,000 Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon are swimming off the coast. These are the mainstay of California’s salmon fishery — and the forecasts are better than last year’s, though still a fraction of the millions that returned historically. But the limited fishing season is not the respite that the industry had counted on.

“We're happy to get some fishing this year,” Staplin, of the Golden State Salmon Association, said, “but if we want to preserve the businesses and families that define California's coastal and inland salmon economies, we need a little compromise and balance in prioritizing water during droughts.”

A plan or a patch?

Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom released a plan aimed at protecting salmon from climate change.

The plan received mixed reactions.

Some scientists and members of the fishing community credited state agencies and the Newsom administration with concrete efforts like hatchery upgrades and cutting-edge genetic fish tagging. One$58 million state and federal effort — the Big Notch Project — connected salmon and other fish to prime floodplain habitat in the Yolo Bypass through seasonal gates.

“Anything that can be done is a help right now,” Atkinson said.

But others say that the strategy papers over policies that rob salmon of the cold water they need. California is built around nature-defying engineering that funnels vast amounts of water away from rivers to supply cities and the state’s $60 billion agricultural economy.

“As soon as it stops raining or snowing, we’re going to be back in the same situation with the salmon season closing,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director at The San Francisco Baykeeper. “If we don’t protect river flows and cold water storage, then we’re not protecting salmon.”

Some of the fiercest fights are over the contentious Delta tunnel and Newsom’s controversial deal with major water users, backed by $1.5 billion in state funding, to overhaul how farms and cities take water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the rivers that feed it.

Carson Jeffres, a senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, takes a more moderate view — the effect on salmon will depend on how California agencies manage these projects, but the status quo isn’t an option.

“I just don't see a world where the salmon are prioritized over human water needs — and I think we should plan for it,” he said. “Then that might be a more sustainable place.”

On top of state policies is a Trump administration that called for “Putting People over Fish” and adopted a plan in December to send more Northern California water to Central Valley farms.

State wildlife officials said at the time that President Donald Trump’s actions “run counter” to California’s efforts to improve salmon populations, “harming the California communities that rely on salmon for their livelihood."

California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot acknowledged the state’s finite water supply can’t satisfy everyone’s priorities.

“There’s no shortage of finger pointing by some groups who argue that not enough water is remaining in our rivers for salmon and aquatic habitat, and other groups that suggest that not enough water is being diverted for California communities and agriculture,” Crowfoot said.

“Water management in California,” he said, “involves balancing water across these needs.”

Last year, the Newsom administration announced that nearly 70% of the salmon strategy’s action items were underway, and more than a quarter were already complete.

That’s “crazy math … What is your outcome measure?" said Bates. "For us, our outcome measure is enough fish to go fishing.”

Adapting to survive

In the absence of enough fish, the industry has been piloting new strategies to survive.

Back at Fisherman's Wharf, a few rows over from Bates, Captain Virginia Salvador was getting ready to take a group out to troll for halibut and striped bass. Her French bulldog, Anchovy, wandered the deck between the ropes.

Salvador started her charter boat business, Unforgettable Fishing Adventures, during the salmon shutdown — and had to quickly expand her offerings.

Now, she runs barbecue and barhopping cruises around San Francisco Bay and takes passengers to McCovey Cove during Giants games. She teams up with food influencer Rosalie Bradford Pareja to offer a chef experience. And she still holds down a second job working in a hospital pathology laboratory.

“When you rely on a natural entity for your income, you have to learn how to deviate, pivot, expand,” Salvador said.

Captain Virginia Salvador on her boat, Unforgettable, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco on March 20, 2026. Photo by Jungho Kim for CalMatters Where the front row of charter boats line the street like storefronts, Bates’ row at Fisherman’s Wharf has the feeling of a neighborhood. One fisherman clambered down the ladder to Bates’ boat, where they swapped great white shark stories. Bates hollered to another neighbor every time a tourist wandered down the dock, bucket in hand, looking to buy fresh crab.

This neighbor, a tattooed and lanky and exhausted fisherman named Shawn Chen Flading, had been out all night. His 12 hour mission to retrieve crab pots turned into a 26 hour ordeal when his throttle cable broke.

At the time Flading bought his boat, before the shutdowns, it looked like a pretty good living.

“A lot of people — the older generation — put their kids through college, bought their homes. And it just disappeared,” Flading said. “I lost basically half my revenue for the past three years straight.”

He tries to fill the gap by advertising on social media and selling Dungeness crab directly off his boat. But the crab season, too, he said, has been disappointing.

Now, salmon fishing is once again on the horizon.

“Whatever limited opportunity we have for salmon, at least we're getting the ball rolling,” Flading said to Bates across the water between their boats, over the San Francisco mix of cars, construction and seagulls. “Without that, we're just stuck.”

Bates, leaning on the railing of her own boat, agreed. “I really understand why people are upset,” she said. “But also, I'm so excited to catch some fish. Even though it's not enough. It’s not even close to enough.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.