Matt Kettmann’s 2021 in Review

Amid the cavalcade of digital panels, podcasts, and social media posts that I worked on in 2021, I still put pen to paper — or fingers to keys, as the modern case may be — to publish more than 130 articles for the Santa Barbara Independent this past year. Then there were the two dozen newsletters that I wrote under the banner of Full Belly Files, another couple dozen stories for Wine Enthusiast, 805 Living, and other publications, and more than 2,500 wine reviews on top of that. Granted, many of these stories are not the complex news investigations carried out more regularly by my colleagues, but yeah, it feels like I could use a break. 

Long Reads

As usual, the bulk of my work was in the food & drink realm, even when it came to longer, more newsworthy cover stories. 

On that front, I got to hang with urchin divers and abalone farmers to write about the eco-aiding potential for a purple urchin market in my February story “Purple Urchin Possibilities: Santa Barbara Fishermen Team with Shellfish Farmer to Build New Industry, Help Kelp Forests.”