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In my kitchen lately, I’ve been trying to focus on celebrating the flavors of the season before the weather changes over the next few months. There’s a passage from a favorite cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman, that’s been inspiring me. He writes:
“Think of August’s sweet corn roasted over a fire to be crispy and succulent, of poached eggs on a bowl of soft cornmeal, of a hearty, rich black bean soup. Not one of these dishes is difficult or complex and they’re made with ingredients found right outside our back door. To build the indigenous kitchen, I began by turning my focus to the foods that have always been available here.”
As Sean has shown us so deliciously through projects like the award-winning restaurant Owamni and the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), seasonality in our kitchens, prioritizing local and Indigenous ingredients, and elevating the wisdom of folks who’ve been practicing sustainability for generations all go hand-in-hand.
“There’s so much amazing knowledge that we could really integrate from Indigenous communities on a global scale, understanding all these diverse food systems,” Sean told me on an episode of the Food Talk podcast. “When we’re looking at Indigenous values around food systems, it’s really community based,”he tells Food Tank.
That’s what Sean’s upcoming projects aim to accomplish, too. He and a couple collaborators have a new cookbook coming out this fall that I’m very excited for, called Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. And he’s expanding operations in Minneapolis with a new commissary kitchen space that’ll allow NATIFS to supply Indigenous meals to hospitals, schools and colleges, large corporations, and other institutions. Plus, he’s a featured speaker at Food Tank’s Climate Week NYC programming next month—so CLICK HERE to explore our whole lineup and learn how you can join us.
“I see so much opportunity for utilizing chefs and commercial kitchens to not only normalize but popularize a lot more diversity in our food systems,” Sean tells Food Tank. “We just really want to be a support system for the region around us to help tribes create healthy Indigenous food operations within schools or communities,” he said on the podcast.
Halfway across the world, Appolinaire Djikeng is thinking deeply about sustainable, localized food production, too. Like Sean, Appolinaire sees building resilience as rooted in communities of both people and animals.
Appolinaire is the Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), an organization I was fortunate enough to spend time with when I was ground-truthing in Ethiopia last month. ILRI is an affiliate of our friends at the research partnership CGIAR and works across 14 offices in Africa and Asia to “turn livestock into a lifeline for smallholder farmers,” as Appolinaire phrased it.
He says the goal is “ensuring that farming communities are resilient in the face of climate change.”
“On any African farm that you’ve visited, there is always an animal somewhere,” he says. “There is a chicken, there is a goat. How do [they] contribute to social economic development?”
These are questions I’m looking forward to digging into with Appolinaire at Climate Week NYC, too! CLICK HERE to get your tickets to join an inspirational lineup of farmers, chefs, food system leaders, artists, and more, and let’s keep the conversation going.
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Photo courtesy of Waqar Hussain, Unsplash
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