Native American Food

Picture of Sean Sherman
Founder & CEO of Sioux Chef

     Sean Sherman, with the real name Oglala Lakota, is a native American chef from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.  As stated on the Sioux Chef official website, Sherman's goal is to incorporate the culinary teachings of his native people into modern cuisine.  In order to do this , he has gone to great lengths to learn about his past, and the culture in the food an native Americans.  He has used information from farming techniques, types of food preservation, the production of salt and sugar, and many other factors.  This is in order to make the most authentic native American food of his heritage.  He is the founder and CEO chef of the Sioux Chef company.  As written on the Sioux Chef website, the entire mission of the company is to make native American culinary arts an important part of North American cuisine.  Sherman had worked with many other American chefs in order to make traditional native American cooking.
   According to Rebecca Rupp on National Geographic, the nature of native American food is so diverse that it is nearly impossible to define.  Each native American tribe has there own unique cooking traditions.  Fry bread seems to be the most common dish in native American cuisine all across the country.  This dish was created due to the forced migration of the native Americans.  On the trip from the east to the west, their traditional crops were not available, only the good given to them by the Americans.  This made many native Americans develop some form of this dish.  Native American food heavily relies on local food and ingredients with healthy styles of cooking.  The author say this would include "unprocessed, organic, local, sustainable, high-protein and low-carb meals."(Rupp).  Some native American food has already become integrated in North American cuisine.  Corn bread, corn fritters, grits, chili, succotash, and Brunswick stew all came from native Americans.  Of course, normal Thanksgiving food such as "Corn and squash, beans and potatoes, turkey, wild rice, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie."(Rupp).  This is the essence of general native American food.

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  According to the article on Science Direct, the extent that native American food has influence food that we think of as average American food originated from the native Americans.  For example, deer hunting for venison (deer meat) originated from the necessity for their meat in early North America.  Maple syrup originated from native Americans taking the sap from maple trees.  They would then boil it in order to make the original version of maple syrup.  Also, corn shells traditionally used in Mexican food such as tacos and enchiladas were first used by the Native Americans.  According to the Science Direct article, the previously mentioned foods were only representations of the several hundreds of tribes.  With the influence of only a few tribes being able to shape a large portion of culinary work on this continent, imagine how much the entire Native American culture shaped our food.