Post by Okwes on Dec 21, 2006 12:32:31 GMT -5
Native Foods Making a Comeback
NY Times
_http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/dining/23nati.html?emc=eta1_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/dining/23nati.html?emc=eta1)
November 23, 2005
Native Foods Nourish Again By KIM SEVERSON
Last week, 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 Mr. Johnson prefers, are best simmered like
pinto beans.
As late as the 1930's, 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
Mr. 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 of the adults in the tribe had
the kind of diabetes attributed to poor diet.
While researchers investigate the link between traditional desert foods and
diabetes prevention, Mr. 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.
Mr. 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, who likes to simmer the white ones with oxtail.
"I see my grandmother telling her friends, 'Yeah, I can get some beans for
you,' " Mr. Johnson said. "The elders, they're so glad to see it."
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much as $9.50 a pound for
teparies online. Big-city chefs are in love with the little beans, too, turning
them into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised local pork.
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural erosion,
they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and 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, chilies and buffalo meat.
At the Cave B Inn, a resort a couple of hours' drive east of Seattle,
Fernando Divina, the chef and a co-author of "Food of the Americas: Native Recipes
and Traditions," uses fresh corn dumplings, local beans, squash and Dungeness
crab to augment a sophisticated menu meant to match wines from the resort's
vineyards. Smoked whitefish chubs from Lake Superior and sassafras gelée
ended up on the table at Savoy restaurant in Manhattan earlier this fall, and
later this month pine-roasted venison with black currants and truffled hominy
will star at a $100 indigenous foods dinner at the Equinox restaurant in
Washington.
Native foods encompass hundreds of different 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," Ms. Erdrich said.
American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that has yet to
be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who
learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi reservation in
Oklahoma.
"You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or
Mongolian barbecue, but you can't eat indigenous foods native to the Americas,"
said Ms. Oden, who has been traveling the nation filming segments for a 2006
PBS series titled "Seasoned With Spirit: A Native Cook's
Journey."
One item that won't be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy circles
of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with
sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations. That bread is fast
becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the American Indian diet, which
evolved from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal
government commodities, including white flour and lard - the two ingredients
in fry bread.
In a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the
poorest and one of the largest reservations in the country, Larry Pourier, a
film producer, is working on a healthier fast food. He is developing a snack bar
based on a recipe for wasna, a patty Lakota elders used to fashion from the
kidney fat and meat of bison mashed with chokecherries. Over the next couple
of months he will add other dried fruits, grains and alternatives to the suet
to make a modern snack bar that is high in protein and low in sugar.
"I'm trying to keep it traditional, but in order for it to be successful it
has to taste good," Mr. Pourier said.
Eventually, Mr. Pourier and his colleagues at Lakota Express, the economic
development company behind the bar, want to manufacture an entire line under
the brand Native American Natural Foods. The idea is that products from their
tribe and others might be sold in special American Indian food sections, the
way kosher, Mexican or Chinese products are grouped in many mainstream grocery
stores.
"There are a lot of people trying to figure how to create a Native-based food
product and having a real struggle to find market access, whether it's
salmon or wild rice or teas or baked goods or corn chips, whatever," said Mark
Tilsen, who helped to found Lakota Express. "By trying to build a brand, we can
provide some market access."
American Indians and Alaska Natives make up only about 1.5 percent of the
nation's population, and those people are spread among almost 600 tribes. Even
in the largest tribes, knowledge of how to forage and farm traditional food
has faded.
Efforts like the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which harvests and sells
rice from the lakes in northern Minnesota, are helping to keep that knowledge
alive. The project, run by Winona LaDuke, is part of an effort by food
activists and chefs to save traditional American Indian foods and cooking methods.
Mr. Johnson's tepary bean farm has its roots in Native Seeds/SEARCH, a
Tucson-based organization that Gary Nabhan, a professor at Northern Arizona
University, founded to preserve native plants in the Southwest and northwestern
Mexico.
Last year, Mr. Nabhan started RAFT, which stands for Renewing America's Food
Traditions. The coalition of seven nonprofit food, agricultural and
conservation organizations has published a "red list" of 700 endangered American
foods, including heritage turkeys and Louisiana Creole cream cheese.
Several dozen items are tied directly to Indian tribes, including wild rice
and the tepary, said Makalé Faber, who tends the list as part of her work with
Slow Food USA.
During the first week of December, members of the RAFT coalition, including
the culinary organizations Slow Food and the Chefs Collaborative, will gather
at the annual Tohono O'odham Community Action basket makers and food summit
at the Heard Museum in Phoenix to discuss how to expand the list of endangered
foods and figure out ways to nurture American Indian cuisine in the
Southwest.
People involved say the evolution won't work without chefs.
"Having people at a high-end restaurant buy some of this makes it available
for the rest of the community that it originally came from," said Patty West,
a forager who works at the Northern Arizona University's Center for
Sustainable Environments and is an organizer of the December food workshop.
John Sharpe, the chef at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz., devises as much
of his menu as he can from local tribal foods. About four times a year, he is
lucky enough to get a delivery of Navajo Churro lambs from a small, scrappy
breed that was almost extinct. The animals are smaller than most commercial
breeds and have very little fat. Mr. Sharpe, who has often paired chops from
the lambs with tepary beans, will roast legs from four carcasses he received
last week with wild local herbs, and serve them on his Thanksgiving buffet.
He also borrows from Hopi traditions, turning tepary beans, roasted corn, a
little French mustard and some olive oil into a dip that echoes a traditional
Hopi dish. He uses thin Hopi piki bread, made from ground blue corn and
cooked like a crepe, for dipping.
"Do the Hopis like it?" asked Mr. Sharpe, who will be at the December
workshop. "They kind of laugh at it, but they love it. They say, 'This is a crazy
white man who likes our food.' "
NY Times
_http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/dining/23nati.html?emc=eta1_
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/dining/23nati.html?emc=eta1)
November 23, 2005
Native Foods Nourish Again By KIM SEVERSON
Last week, 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 Mr. Johnson prefers, are best simmered like
pinto beans.
As late as the 1930's, 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
Mr. 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 of the adults in the tribe had
the kind of diabetes attributed to poor diet.
While researchers investigate the link between traditional desert foods and
diabetes prevention, Mr. 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.
Mr. 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, who likes to simmer the white ones with oxtail.
"I see my grandmother telling her friends, 'Yeah, I can get some beans for
you,' " Mr. Johnson said. "The elders, they're so glad to see it."
But there are other fans, too. Home cooks pay as much as $9.50 a pound for
teparies online. Big-city chefs are in love with the little beans, too, turning
them into cassoulet, salads or beds for braised local pork.
As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural erosion,
they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and 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, chilies and buffalo meat.
At the Cave B Inn, a resort a couple of hours' drive east of Seattle,
Fernando Divina, the chef and a co-author of "Food of the Americas: Native Recipes
and Traditions," uses fresh corn dumplings, local beans, squash and Dungeness
crab to augment a sophisticated menu meant to match wines from the resort's
vineyards. Smoked whitefish chubs from Lake Superior and sassafras gelée
ended up on the table at Savoy restaurant in Manhattan earlier this fall, and
later this month pine-roasted venison with black currants and truffled hominy
will star at a $100 indigenous foods dinner at the Equinox restaurant in
Washington.
Native foods encompass hundreds of different 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," Ms. Erdrich said.
American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that has yet to
be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who
learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi reservation in
Oklahoma.
"You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or
Mongolian barbecue, but you can't eat indigenous foods native to the Americas,"
said Ms. Oden, who has been traveling the nation filming segments for a 2006
PBS series titled "Seasoned With Spirit: A Native Cook's
Journey."
One item that won't be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy circles
of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with
sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations. That bread is fast
becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the American Indian diet, which
evolved from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal
government commodities, including white flour and lard - the two ingredients
in fry bread.
In a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the
poorest and one of the largest reservations in the country, Larry Pourier, a
film producer, is working on a healthier fast food. He is developing a snack bar
based on a recipe for wasna, a patty Lakota elders used to fashion from the
kidney fat and meat of bison mashed with chokecherries. Over the next couple
of months he will add other dried fruits, grains and alternatives to the suet
to make a modern snack bar that is high in protein and low in sugar.
"I'm trying to keep it traditional, but in order for it to be successful it
has to taste good," Mr. Pourier said.
Eventually, Mr. Pourier and his colleagues at Lakota Express, the economic
development company behind the bar, want to manufacture an entire line under
the brand Native American Natural Foods. The idea is that products from their
tribe and others might be sold in special American Indian food sections, the
way kosher, Mexican or Chinese products are grouped in many mainstream grocery
stores.
"There are a lot of people trying to figure how to create a Native-based food
product and having a real struggle to find market access, whether it's
salmon or wild rice or teas or baked goods or corn chips, whatever," said Mark
Tilsen, who helped to found Lakota Express. "By trying to build a brand, we can
provide some market access."
American Indians and Alaska Natives make up only about 1.5 percent of the
nation's population, and those people are spread among almost 600 tribes. Even
in the largest tribes, knowledge of how to forage and farm traditional food
has faded.
Efforts like the White Earth Land Recovery Project, which harvests and sells
rice from the lakes in northern Minnesota, are helping to keep that knowledge
alive. The project, run by Winona LaDuke, is part of an effort by food
activists and chefs to save traditional American Indian foods and cooking methods.
Mr. Johnson's tepary bean farm has its roots in Native Seeds/SEARCH, a
Tucson-based organization that Gary Nabhan, a professor at Northern Arizona
University, founded to preserve native plants in the Southwest and northwestern
Mexico.
Last year, Mr. Nabhan started RAFT, which stands for Renewing America's Food
Traditions. The coalition of seven nonprofit food, agricultural and
conservation organizations has published a "red list" of 700 endangered American
foods, including heritage turkeys and Louisiana Creole cream cheese.
Several dozen items are tied directly to Indian tribes, including wild rice
and the tepary, said Makalé Faber, who tends the list as part of her work with
Slow Food USA.
During the first week of December, members of the RAFT coalition, including
the culinary organizations Slow Food and the Chefs Collaborative, will gather
at the annual Tohono O'odham Community Action basket makers and food summit
at the Heard Museum in Phoenix to discuss how to expand the list of endangered
foods and figure out ways to nurture American Indian cuisine in the
Southwest.
People involved say the evolution won't work without chefs.
"Having people at a high-end restaurant buy some of this makes it available
for the rest of the community that it originally came from," said Patty West,
a forager who works at the Northern Arizona University's Center for
Sustainable Environments and is an organizer of the December food workshop.
John Sharpe, the chef at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Ariz., devises as much
of his menu as he can from local tribal foods. About four times a year, he is
lucky enough to get a delivery of Navajo Churro lambs from a small, scrappy
breed that was almost extinct. The animals are smaller than most commercial
breeds and have very little fat. Mr. Sharpe, who has often paired chops from
the lambs with tepary beans, will roast legs from four carcasses he received
last week with wild local herbs, and serve them on his Thanksgiving buffet.
He also borrows from Hopi traditions, turning tepary beans, roasted corn, a
little French mustard and some olive oil into a dip that echoes a traditional
Hopi dish. He uses thin Hopi piki bread, made from ground blue corn and
cooked like a crepe, for dipping.
"Do the Hopis like it?" asked Mr. Sharpe, who will be at the December
workshop. "They kind of laugh at it, but they love it. They say, 'This is a crazy
white man who likes our food.' "