The tomato in your pasta. The chili in your Thai curry. The taters in your fish and chips. Much of what we think of as ‘traditional’ global cuisine began with Indigenous crops cultivated thousands of years ago in the Americas. Cam Hassard heads to Santa Fe, New Mexico to redraw the culinary map.
Eight ingredients. Corn, beans, squash, chili, tomato, potato, vanilla, and cacao. Before Columbus arrived in the Americas, none of these existed in Europe or Asia.
“If we deconstruct that, the Italians did not have the tomato, the Irish did not have the potato, and half the British national dish did not exist,” says my host, chef, historian and cultural anthropologist Lois Ellen Frank. “Russians didn’t have the potato, and thus no vodka; there were no chilies in Asia, and no chilies in any East Indian curries.”
Sit with that for a while. Without the ‘Magic Eight’, as Frank calls them, who knows what iconic European and Asian cuisines we know and love today might have become? No fish and chips. No pasta puttanesca. Papaya salad without that spicy zing.
I’m sitting in the Santa Fe School of Cooking expecting to spend the morning learning how to make Native American food. Instead, I’m being asked to reconsider the history of almost everything I’ve ever eaten.
At the helm are Frank and her discreet culinary right-hand man, Walter Whitewater, in embroidered chef’s coats. Above, an overhead mirror lets the class watch as the duo prepare the day’s main dish: Trout baked in clay, stuffed with fresh sage and grilled green onions, wrapped in smoked applewood bacon.
Frank holds the show as Whitewater assembles the sides: Harvested wild rice sauté, smoky guajillo chile sauce, sautéed rainbow chard. A Diné man (pronounced di-nay), Whitewater is reticent, making it all the more compelling when we eventually hear his voice. “Food is our medicine,” he tells us.
“People ask, are you herbivores? Are you locavores? We say, ‘No, we are Nativores’.”
- Lois Ellen Frank, chef, historian, cultural anthropologist
The eight ingredients on the counter are magic not just because they taste good, but because they tell a pivotal story hiding in plain sight. Before 1492, Europe’s agricultural pantry and that of the Americas were remarkably separate. With Columbus came what historian Alfred W. Crosby would later call the Columbian Exchange: The vast movement of crops, animals, people—and diseases—between the Americas and the Old World.
“Practically any crop you name was exclusive to one side of the ocean and carried across,” Crosby wrote in The Columbian Exchange (1972). Potatoes traveled from the Andes to Europe, where they eventually became a staple of Irish agriculture. Chili peppers made their way from the Americas to Asia, helping transform cuisines from India to Thailand and Korea. Tomatoes gravitated to Europe, becoming inseparable from Italian cooking. But, as Frank highlights, the story of Indigenous food in America is more than one of abundance and geographical transition. It’s also one of rupture.
As a descendant of the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, Frank brings both scholarly and lived knowledge to the subject. Drawing on her doctorate in cultural anthropology, her book Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations examines the traditions of Native American kitchens and their often-overlooked contribution to the world’s culinary lineage.
Frank divides the history she teaches into three periods: Pre-Contact, the thousands of years before European arrival; First Contact, the period following European arrival; and what she calls the Government Issue period; when the US westward expansion, displacement, and government-issued food radically disrupted Indigenous ways of eating.
The consequences of the era were not confined to land and sovereignty. Food itself became part of the machinery of colonization. Frank points to fry bread, a flat dough bread, often deep-fried, a staple born from the Government Issue period. Made from flour and other government-issued ingredients and fried in oil, it’s become a complicated symbol: An expression of resilience and cultural survival, but also a reminder of the conditions that produced it.
For Indigenous communities, the legacy of the disruption continues into the present.
Frank describes children growing up with an attitude of “not if they got diabetes, but when.” Reconnecting people with traditional foodways, she argues, can be part of reversing that trajectory.
Frank and Whitewater also work to reintroduce Indigenous people to their culinary heritage, helping recover knowledge around ingredients, preparation, and the relationship between food and place. At their Santa Fe catering company, Red Mesa Cuisine, they cook with ancestral ingredients including wild greens and hand-harvested prickly pears, using traditional techniques like clay baking to bring Native foods back into contemporary kitchens.
“People ask, are you herbivores? Are you locavores?” says Frank. “We say, ‘No, we are Nativores’.”
Santa Fe is an especially rich setting for our culinary re-education. Alongside Spanish and Mexican influences, it serves as a crossroads for centuries of Indigenous agricultural and food knowledge. The state of New Mexico is home to 19 sovereign Pueblo nations and the Navajo (Diné) Nation, as well as the Jicarilla Apache Nation and Mescalero Apache Tribe. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, whose ancestral territory includes parts of southwestern New Mexico, also maintains ties to the region. Each of these nations sustains distinct identities and living traditions through their own agricultural and culinary practices.
The chefs invite us to share in their culinary lineage—not just recipes, but a philosophy of food as nourishment, culture, and perhaps most importantly, medicine.
- Cam Hassard, journalist
All this dovetails with Frank and Whitewater’s underlying mission: To understand food as part of a cultural and ecological system—what grows here, what has always grown here, how it was harvested, prepared and shared, and what that knowledge means to the people who inherited it.
Which makes some of our modern buzzword food philosophies sound, well, not that fresh at all. “There’s no wording in our language about ‘organic’ versus ‘non-organic’,” says Frank. “It always was farm-to-plate, and it always was zero-waste.”
As snow coats the piñon pines outside the window, our class reaches its culmination. The trout is cooked, the wild rice is ready, and the chili sauce awaits.
But first, a prayer. Frank and Whitewater sing together, Whitewater accompanying on a Diné water drum. The kitchen quietens as their voices fill it. For a few moments, there’s not a dry eye inside.
We sit down to eat, finishing with a delicious Native American parfait of corn pudding and local berry compote, sweetened with apple. We’re given so much more than a meal and the Magic Eight: An appreciation of Frank and Whitewater’s devotion to food as living culture.
Nourishment, not just for the body, but for the heart, the spirit, and the soul.
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Cam Hassard is managing editor at Caddie Magazine and features writer for Junkee, AWOL, Carryology, Fairfax Media, and more. He’s eaten ant salad in Laos, hauled trucks from NYC to Vegas, and destroyed himself on the Camino de Santiago. Originally from Melbourne, he currently calls Berlin home.
