Welcome to Radio West Films Presents.

I'm Doug Frabrizio.

We've created three films we want to share with you, and we're going to begin with a story about food.

And how food is often a really important part of our identity.

So we have here in Utah some really great chefs, and one of them is Viet Pham Viet is in that category of celebrity chefs.

If you watch the food competition shows on cable TV, you know what I mean?

He beat Bobby Flay on Iron Chef America, for example, which is kind of a big deal.

Now, it's a long story of how he ended up here in the West.

But it begins in Vietnam.

Viet emigrated to the U.S. when he was just a kid, and he thought food would help him fit in.

Unknown: I had a great childhood.

A lot of freedom.

We would go in the forest and play, we'd climb trees try to find robin's eggs, try to catch gart snakes, we ride bikes, I go fishing.

Being outside has been my place of refuge.

My parents were boat people, mea they fled Vietnam by boat in the 70s.

So my mom was pregnant with me.

And they made a decision as a family that they had to leave.

They ended up sailing South, ended up on an island on the eastern coast of Malaysia.

So they built this tree house.

And that's where I was born.

And then we ended up in Illinois with my dad's brothers, my mom's brothers.

And we all ended up in this little house.

I can vividly remember being in kindergarten, that's when I realized that I was different.

You know, kids don't have filters.

You know, kids can be very mean, kids can be really cruel.

But it's just because they don't know any better.

They would pull their eyes back.

I hated it.

I didn't like it.

I want it to be at that time growing up, was to be white.

Every Friday was a very special day for us.

Because Friday meant that my parents got paid.

And we get to have McDonald's.

I felt like the more hamburgers, the more Big Macs that I ate, the more American I was.

But at that time, I felt like because eating McDonald's we were a normal family I knew growing up that it was very different.

I was very intuitive.

I also knew that I was very creative.

So at an early age, my parents taught us how to how to boil water make instant ramen.

And part of my early creative development, I think it came from that moment, you know, being able to add things into the ramen and make it different.

At 18 years old, I didn't know what I want to do.

I just knew that I like to draw, I like to cook.

When I had friends over.

I would just cook but it wasn't, it wasn't in a way where like, hey, I want to make a profession out of this.

I just wanted to do things that were creative.

And it wasn't until you know this one evening when I was online, and an ad popped up for culinary school.

Something clicked for the first time in my adult life, I knew that this was something that I wanted more than anything.

In 2008, I had this opportunity to move to Utah.

So I jumped on it.

Ultimately, over time, in 2011 got Best New Chef.

And it's one of the most coveted awards that a young chef can get.

Getting this award was life changing.

It opened up a lot of different opportunities.

And one of those opportunities was food television.

So the network really liked me, you know, so they casted me for a show called Food Network Star.

And we went to one of the contestant's friend's restaurant and I met the chef and he's like, hey, I want you guys to try this fried And I eat it and my eyes lit up.

I've never had chicken that had chicken.

so much complexity.

So much crunch different flavors going on.

You know I was inspired.

I was like blown away.

And the first thing that came out of my mouth.

I'm going to open up a fried chicken place one day from that day on, when I woke up every single day and when I went to sleep every single day, fried chicken was on my mind.

I would fry chicken for whoever would try it.

I wanted something to help lift the main ingredients, the fried chicken, and how it balances out the flavors.

So I started to add some acid to it some lemon juice, some lemon peel, and it made somewhat of a flabby sauce become elevated.

But it was still missing something.

The fish sauce moment came from the echoes in my mind, in my memory, my mom everything that she did, she goes you have to put fish sauce, it makes it taste better.

You know, as a kid, I'm like, I don't want that in there.

It's stinky.

It's fishy.

She goes no, you have to add it and makes it better.

So for me fish sauce was just easy to get.

We'd walk to the Asian market and I go through aisles of all of these three ingredients.

And one that stood out to me was for sauce.

So add a dash to it.

And then at that moment, that sauce is perfect.

I worked on the recipe for six years and then Pretty Bird opened up.

Using fish sauce in that sauce, slowly found his way into our slaw into our chicken.

And then the presence of fish sauce became so much more you know, and then I started to connect myself, my heritage, my upbringing, my identity to it and it was full circle it made more sense to me.

It's brought me closer to my identity as a Vietnamese American from you know, I've been ms immigrant family.

It brought me closer to my mom.

It allowed me to open up and pay more attention to what she was doing.

And through that made me a better cook.

I never thought that fried chicken would reconnect me back to my roots bring me home, you know, it wasn't even a bowl of fried chicken.

Who would have known.

In June of 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned its own landmark decision Roe vs. Wade.

For nearly 50 years, Roe had protected abortion in this country as a fundamental right.

And so everyone was wondering what's going to happen... what will change?

But one of the things that interested us at Radio West was how would this new reality change the lives of women living in rural Utah?

And then we found Danielle Pendergrass in Price, Utah.

She runs a clinic there that provides care to women from hundreds of miles around.

So that summer, Danielle had to figure out how to do her work in an uncertain future.

Danielle: So Price is an interesting little place in Utah It goes way back to how we were settled.

Over 52 different nationalities came to live and work in Price in the coal mines and railroads and everything else.

It's just a beautiful area where people come together and really show up for one another.

Being a teenage girl, we didn't have access to contraceptive or reproductive care here.

Our older friends who are now in college at the U where life's like, "Oh, there's a Planned Parenthood right up here."

So we would all lie to our parents tell them we were going wherever hop in a friend's car pile in, drive two hours and a half up one of the 10 most deadliest canyons in the United States, my parents would die.

And then we would all go up there and get our birth control, get STI testing.

Back then they did pap smears.

We'd go through the whole rigmarole just to make sure we were all okay.

And it was at that time I met a women's health nurse practitioner and she told me what she did and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is this is what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna start a women's health clinic in Price.

I am that's what I'm going to do.

That's what I'm going to do for my life."

"Hi Nayla!

How are you?"

"What's going on?"

Patient: "I think that I've been having like some kind of like panic attacks sometimes."

Danielle: Talk to me like what's causing them?

What are you stressed about?

What's going on that way ... We provide care for the entire woman.

Patient: It was the only sexual experience that I've ever had that made that week or experience worth it or any of the other things.

[sad laughter] Been really stressed out and I, I've noticed if stressed on it I start to ... Danielle: Everything from sleep, to exercise, sexual health issues, what's your stress levels like, how's your mental health, what's going on with wor your family life?

Patient: I take care of my kids, I take care of my mom .. Danielle: You name it.

If women have it we're seeing them for it Patient: ...and I have not taken care of myself Danielle: Right?

And that's what we do as women we take care of everybody else first.

I listen a lot.

And I learn so much.

The role that I play in the lives of women in these rural counties is I'm really a soft place to land.

We really try to create the time and space for women to actually sit down and take care of themselves.

We knew that the decision to overturn Roe versus Wade was coming.

It really just felt like you knew somebody who was terminally ill and very close to you and was like a big part of your world was going to die and you're just waiting for it.

There's only two places in which a woman can get an abortion in the state of Utah.

Those are both in Salt Lake City.

And if a woman from our area had to go and access an abortion, it's it's two hours one way and then the procedure in that time and then two hours or more back.

You move to Emery County, you add another hour.

You move to Grand County, you add another hour.

It's really hard.

Honestly, I don't know what it's like.

But I can imagine starting up that canyon and all the emotions a woman may be feeling.

What's the procedure going to be like?

Is it going to hurt?

Am I going to be okay after?

What if somebody finds out what if somebody knows I left town?

What if whoever's driving me tells someone?

What now is, you know, how do we take care of the people who really need this type of care?

Rural women are so important to me because I'm a rural woman.

Breathe deeply.

Being in that moment, with whoever is in front of me, it's very special.

And it's one of the things that brings me great joy in what I do.

I feel like we're ready.

As ready as we can be.

And now you just got to sit here and watch things unfold and hope for the best.

Patient: Thank you.

Danielle: You are so welcome.

Patient: I really appreciate it.

Only good things to come.

Only good things to come.

This last film we have for you is more like a portrait than a story.

As the water levels in Great Salt Lake kept dropping throughout 2022 to really terrifying numbers.

We wanted to show people images of the lake in this condition.

Which, as you'll see, can be deceptively beautiful.

Bonnie Baxter: I'm out there on average about once a week and it's an entirely different landscape.

The water is evaporating and disappearing at a rate that is visible over days because the leak is so shallow a foot of elevation decrease is something that's visible in miles.

We're - I used to just get out of my car and grab a shore sample.

Now you literally need to walk a mile to the waterline, two miles in some cases.

In White Rock Bay, the white rock that used to poke out of the water is now something you walk to, Egg Island and Bridger bay around Antelope Island is also something you walk to.

The smell that lofts into the city when we get those winds that come just right over the lake actually is biology and it's a sign of a really vibrant saline ecosystem.

Now when I go to some of the beaches on the island that I sample often I don't smell that.

These microbialites that I study have been beached.

They're no longer in the water There are no brine flies flying around my feet.

The gulls that usually are running around the shore eating the brine flies are floating out in the deep water hoping one of the pupa will release a brine fly so they can eat one.

They're like tombstones out there.

It's otherworldly.

It's silent.

it's just different.

For a moment I'm measuring salinity, which has gone crazy high, and I'm analyzing water samples, and I'm trying to scrape some mats off one of these microbialites and I'm busy doing my science and then another moment I just stop and cry.

We're seeing this system crash before our eyes.

I don't know any other way to say it.