Post by Okwes on Dec 9, 2005 10:23:20 GMT -5
URL:
www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/dining/article/0,2792,DRMN_24_4275739,00.html
Indians turn back to native foods - and others follow
By Kim Severson, The New York Times
November 30, 2005
Noland Johnson pulled the season's final crop of tepary beans from the
piece of desert he farms on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, about 120
miles southwest of Tucson. The beans look a little like a flattened
black-eyed pea. The white ones cook up creamy. The brown ones, which
Johnson prefers, are best simmered like pinto beans.
As late as the 1930s, Tohono O'odham farmers grew more than 1.5 million
pounds a year, and no one in the tribe had ever heard of diabetes. By
the time Johnson got into the game four years ago, an elder would be
lucky to find even a pound of the beans, and more than half the adults
in the tribe had the kind of diabetes attributed to poor diet.
While medical researchers work to understand the link between
traditional desert foods and diabetes prevention, Johnson grows his
beans, pulling down 14,000 pounds this fall. Most will sell for about
$2.50 a pound at small stores on the reservation.
Johnson, 31, began farming beans partly as a tribute to his grandfather,
who died from complications related to diabetes. He always saves some
beans for his grandmother.
"The elders - they're so glad to see it," Johnson said.
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much as $9.50 a pound
for teparies online. Chefs are in love with the little beans, too,
turning them into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised local pork.
In turning to the food that once sustained them, American Indians are
finding allies in the nation's culinary elite and marketing experts. One
result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that rejects
oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska
and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the Southeast, corn from
New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens of squashes, beans,
berries and melons.
Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built
from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn. At the
Mitsitam Cafe, opened last year in the National Museum of the American
Indian in Washington, cooks create dishes with roasted salmon, chiles
and buffalo meat.
Native foods encompass hundreds of cultures. "There's only now becoming
a more pan-Indian sense of what native food can be," said the author
Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about tribal food in
many of her books and is working on a cookbook with her sister, a
pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. "You're talking about
evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we
could get for a long time."
Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/dining/article/0,2792,DRMN_24_4275739,00.html
Indians turn back to native foods - and others follow
By Kim Severson, The New York Times
November 30, 2005
Noland Johnson pulled the season's final crop of tepary beans from the
piece of desert he farms on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, about 120
miles southwest of Tucson. The beans look a little like a flattened
black-eyed pea. The white ones cook up creamy. The brown ones, which
Johnson prefers, are best simmered like pinto beans.
As late as the 1930s, Tohono O'odham farmers grew more than 1.5 million
pounds a year, and no one in the tribe had ever heard of diabetes. By
the time Johnson got into the game four years ago, an elder would be
lucky to find even a pound of the beans, and more than half the adults
in the tribe had the kind of diabetes attributed to poor diet.
While medical researchers work to understand the link between
traditional desert foods and diabetes prevention, Johnson grows his
beans, pulling down 14,000 pounds this fall. Most will sell for about
$2.50 a pound at small stores on the reservation.
Johnson, 31, began farming beans partly as a tribute to his grandfather,
who died from complications related to diabetes. He always saves some
beans for his grandmother.
"The elders - they're so glad to see it," Johnson said.
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much as $9.50 a pound
for teparies online. Chefs are in love with the little beans, too,
turning them into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised local pork.
In turning to the food that once sustained them, American Indians are
finding allies in the nation's culinary elite and marketing experts. One
result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that rejects
oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska
and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the Southeast, corn from
New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens of squashes, beans,
berries and melons.
Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built
from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn. At the
Mitsitam Cafe, opened last year in the National Museum of the American
Indian in Washington, cooks create dishes with roasted salmon, chiles
and buffalo meat.
Native foods encompass hundreds of cultures. "There's only now becoming
a more pan-Indian sense of what native food can be," said the author
Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about tribal food in
many of her books and is working on a cookbook with her sister, a
pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. "You're talking about
evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we
could get for a long time."
Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.