Dining Like a Native : Bowers Museum Lecturer Provides History, Samples of Foods Columbus Found in New World

Lina Austin is a researcher in the field of ethnobotany dedicated to the cultural aspects of native foods, foods that flourished in the Americas prior to the landing of Columbus.

Those who attended a lecture by Austin on Sunday at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, and who enjoyed a native-foods dinner in the museum’s Cafe Topaz, surely learned as much about cultural aspects of their own European and Asian heritages.

They learned how the Swiss came to eat chocolate, the Italians tomatoes, the Szechuan Chinese peppers and the Irish and Russians potatoes. (All were New World foods brought back by Columbus.) They also learned how narrow, in light of the available diversity, our gastronomic confines remain today.

“Now that it’s been commercialized, we’ve all become pretty familiar with blue corn,” Austin said. “But blue corn is but one of 1,000 varieties of corn native to the New World. There are 3,000 varieties of potatoes--purple, yellow, orange, even black potatoes. There’s one potato that’s literally neon blue. I made mashed potatoes the other night, and it was hilarious.

“The Peruvian (Indians) prized diversity. Meanwhile, this country seeks genetic uniformity.”

Austin, a docent at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, contrasted typical American and Native American farming practices.

“On any one of the 500 Indian farms left in the United States, you can find up to 110 species of plant and 130 species of bird,” Austin said. “They don’t think something’s a weed and shoot it with weed killer. They may not understand what it’s for, but they let it live there.”

Austin showed a slide of 500 “back-yard” varieties of tomatoes, noting that hand-watered, back-yard gardens have been credited with saving most heirloom varieties of tomatoes, as well as beans, in this country. She also praised the efforts of her mentor, Gary Paul Nabhan, founder of Native Seed/SEARCH, a Tucson-based seed conservation organization dedicated to preserving traditional crops and their wild relatives. Native Seed/SEARCH distributes those seeds free to American Indians. Austin made a plea that those in attendance consider growing some of the rarer plants.

“Literally, you could save a variety yourself just with your own back-yard garden,” Austin said.

John Sharpe, executive chef at the museum’s Cafe Topaz, used native ingredients to create a meal that followed the lecture. Appetizers included squash blossoms stuffed with sweet corn and chilies, and nasturtium flowers with buffalo cheese. (“Who milked the buffalos?” pondered guest Robert Williams.)

The dishes may have been updated and stylized, but this was no “nouvelle native” dinner.

Served family style in bowls and baskets were generous portions of braised rabbit and roast buffalo; quinoa, bean and summer corn soup; orach leaf, wild mustard and dandelion greens with nopales in a blueberry vinaigrette, and mesquite sunflower bread. Wild berries on blue corn bread with maple chocolate sauce served as dessert.

The dinner was the first in a series to explore native foods, Sharpe said. On Aug. 24, he and Bowers curator Paul Apodaca have scheduled a Harvest Festival of the Pacific Northwest; a meal in October will focus on the cuisine of the Plains Indians, while an Indians of the Northeast Thanksgiving dinner is planned for November. Price for each dinner will $35 per person.

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According to Austin, Columbus wrote that he didn’t recognize one food or plant that he found here. Among the New World foods that took hold in the Old World were beans, turkey and vanilla; peanuts, walnuts and almonds; pineapple, papaya and avocado; and strawberries, raspberries and blueberries. In return, Europe sent livestock, lettuce, melons, sugar cane, wheat and bananas.

In addition to corn, the most extensively cultivated grain in the world, grains from the Americas include amaranth, chia, mesquite and quinoa. Some of the foods Austin discussed have already been commercialized; amaranth, for instance, is readily available in health-food stores, and has become very popular in China.

But hundreds of other crops are waiting to be rediscovered.

Austin is working with the Southwest Indian Agricultural Assn. to determine which of these crops will grow best on which reservations. American Indians see a two-fold benefit in reintroducing such crops: Not only are they a potential source of income as a cash crop, but even more important, they need to bring back these foods for health reasons.

“Native Americans got onto white man’s food, like cattle and dairy products, and started depending on a grocery store diet,” Austin explained. “The refined sugar (in that diet) is not good for anyone--it is the worst addiction in the nation. The dairy products are deadly for Native Americans, who are lactose-resistant. Instead of making mesquite bread, they started buying the ‘upscale’ white bread, and their diabetes just went off the chart.

“It’s killing them. The Indian Health Service is filled with people who are blind and losing limbs to diabetes; 50% of the Native American population has it right now.” The IHS has prescribed a diet of mesquite flour, acorn flour and tepary beans. “So far it’s working,” Austin said. “If they eat traditional foods, they can keep their blood sugar under control.”

Many of the foods Austin hopes to see reintroduced, however, are threatened with extinction. Wild versions of many native high-nutrition foods are already lost.

“The commercial lima crop must periodically be crossbred with the wild crop for vigor or they stop reproducing. People think wild Hopi limas will always be available, but the Hopi limas need a degree of wildness to survive. You get them too close to civilization and they won’t, and areas are not being reserved where they can flourish.”

To bring home the point to anyone not inclined to storm the steps of Congress to lobby on behalf of the wild lima, Austin suggested that such principles do not apply solely to food.

“That applies to everything,” she said. “It applies to us. Because of overpopulation, we are losing wild areas. If we lose these wild areas, we lose something wild in ourselves too.

“In the Pima language, the words for wildness and wellness are almost identical. The root word of both means to be healed or to be cured. It’s vitally important for our full maturation in all aspects--our body and our soul--that we somehow retain this element of wildness.”