E
BY NANCY ZIMMERMAN | PHOTOS BY LOIS ELLEN FRANK
ating is not only a physical act based on biological necessity, it’s an expression of cultural identity rooted in geography and ancestry, with far-reaching effects on health as well as on a given society’s worldviews and self-definitions. How food is acquired, prepared, and presented informs gender roles, social structures, family relations, rituals, and spiritual beliefs, and it underlies humankind’s earliest artistic endeavors, from crafting baskets and pottery to store and cook food to creating cave and rock art depicting hunting and farming scenes. In Native America, a growing movement to revive traditional cuisines of centuries past addresses issues of health and well-being and, in the process, reclaims a vital cultural heritage. This movement has been spurred in part by crisis. Throughout the United States, type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, and Native American communities have been especially hard hit. Related illnesses like obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease are at alarming rates as well. And while everyone from healthcare professionals to researchers to desperate dieters struggles to find a solution to these growing health threats, a dedicated cadre of Native American chefs, scholars, and educators are working to forge a new path to wellness and cultural continuity via the ancient foodstuffs and dietary practices that may be in danger of being forgotten. One of the first to recognize the importance of Native cuisine as a cultural force was Loretta Barrett Oden, a Potawatomi chef and food historian from Oklahoma who is revered as a leader in the movement to return to a Native diet. In 1993 she and her son, Clayton Oden, opened the highly acclaimed Corn Dance Café in
trendmagazineglobal.com
Santa Fe, the first upscale restaurant to offer indigenous foods to sophisticated diners. “My absolute, all-consuming passion is the relationship between food and culture,” she says. “There’s no way to separate one from the other.” Oden spread the word via her cooking show, Seasoned With Spirit, which ran on PBS between 2005 and 2007, as well as through appearances on Good Morning America and The Today Show, among others, and she continues to serve as a consultant on a variety of food-related projects. Taking the movement to the next level is Santa Fe–based Lois Ellen Frank, PhD, a renowned chef and culinary anthropologist of Kiowa-Sephardic ancestry, who is also an educator, author, food historian, and photographer. Frank has made the revival of traditional foodways her life’s work, and her results so far have been impressive and encouraging. “Returning to an ancestral, plant-based diet is a way to reclaim our health,” she says. “And when traditional foods are revitalized, all of the cultural traditions associated with them are also revitalized—the songs that go with the planting, the sustainable agricultural techniques that each tribe uses, traditional knowledge of how to harvest wild foods, the foods that have medicinal qualities, the language, the stories, the baskets, everything.” Frank is the chef/owner of Red Mesa Cuisine, a catering company whose mission is to bring Native American cuisine into today’s kitchen and to promote traditional foods, agricultural practices, and cooking techniques from throughout the Americas. She brings a contemporary flair to ancient recipes while promoting heirloom agriculture and introducing exciting “new” products to receptive diners. Along with Diné chef Walter Whitewater, who TREND Passion of the Palate 2014/2015
19