Reading about the O’odham tribe that had a huge nutritional change from their roots makes me very disheartened. I had never thought of such strong cultural and lifestyle roots in food like turtle, squashes, and seeds that make a wheat-like substance. This made me sad that these people rarely practice or even know about their roots in this kind of diet. This has correlatively led to a huge increase in health problems like diabetes, and honestly after reading about the past diet its not hard to believe that the shift to “anglo” food would change someone’s health and make it difficult for their bodies to adjust.
Adjust I think is a good word to use here. Your body naturally adjusts to new food intake. It gets accommodated to what you put into your system everyday. Just like vegetarians that haven’t had meat in years get sick if they eat a lot of meat. Your body only knows what you have made it accustomed to. The native indians are not accustomed to american cheeseburgers and greasy fried chicken, just like none of us naturally are. The natives shouldn’t have to adjust to the anglos food. They should be able to keep their culture through their own food alive, and this may cut down on the rates of diabetes and keep these people fed and fed with nutrition along with keeping their native culture in future generations.
I think this concept of keeping up with native foods can help with global hunger and the enrichment of native culture as well. Each area of the world has native foods and things that other cultures don’t know about or don’t find in their environments. Its important to keep these native foods alive and prosperous within their country or region or culture. We all can learn from other cultures, as well as we can learn from our own. We pass down recipes, stories, tales, tips, how-tos, literally so many different things through the sharing and topics of food from our culture. Its important to preserve the distinctions in different cultures and ethnicities and this can happen by keeping food native. These kinds of foods and the stories that go along with native foods, well, It keeps community strong and deeply connected to the past and the future generations.
I felt similarly after reading about the O’odham tribe. Although, after learning more about the loss of food traditions in Native American communities, I greatly enjoyed hearing Chef Jerome Grant speak about the role Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe plays in preserving and sharing indigenous cuisines.
I was impressed by the cafe’s genuine effort to source the food from tribes because it promotes biodiversity, and strengthens a community that has fallen ill to the fast and packaged foods which have been imposed upon them. It was also nice to hear that they made an effort to create accurate menus by consulting with the historians.