Frybread is not such a great thing once you know the history of it: According to Navajo tradition, frybread was created in 1864 using the flour, sugar, salt and lard that was given to them by the United States government when the Navajo, who were living in Arizona, were forced to make the 300-mile journey known as the Long Walk and relocate to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico onto land that could not easily support their traditional staples of vegetables and beans. For many Native Americans, frybread links generation with generation and also connects the present to the painful narrative of Native American history. It is often served both at home and at gatherings. The way it is served varies from region to region and different tribes have different recipes. It can be found in its many ways at state fairs and pow-wows, but what is served to the paying public may be different from what is served in private homes and in the context of tribal family relations. Health concerns The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that a plate of fried bread consists of 700 calories and 27 grams of fat.According to Chaleen Brewer, a nutritionist at the Genesis Diabetes Prevention Program, commodity foods like processed cheese, potted meats, and the lard used in making frybread are partly responsible for a diabetes epidemic among her people. The Original tortilla of Indigenous people is the corn tortilla: 3000 B.C. - Excavations in the valley of “Valle de Tehuacán”, in the state of Puebla, revealed the use, for more than seven thousand years, of the basic cereal by excellence of the Mesoamerican diet, a little wild cob that along with roots and fruit was a complement for hunting. According to Agustín Gaytán, chef and Mexican cuisine historian, in a Greeley Tribune newspaper article: Sometime about 3000 B.C., people of the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico hybridized wild grasses to produce large, nutritious kernels we know as corn. Mexican anthropologist and maize historian Arturo Warman credits the development of corn with the rise of Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Mayans and the Aztecs, which were advanced in art, architecture, math and astronomy. The significance of corn was not lost on indigenous cultures that viewed it as a foundation of humanity. It is revered as the seed of life. According to legend, human beings were made of corn by the Gods. Most historians believe maize was domesticated in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico.The Olmec and Mayans cultivated it in numerous varieties throughout Mesoamerica, cooked, ground or processed through nixtamalization. Beginning about 2500 BC, the crop spread through much of the Americas (North and South) The region developed a trade network based on surplus and varieties of maize crops. By the time Spaniards reached the shores of what is now Mexico in the 1400s, indigenous Mesoamericans had a sophisticated and flavorful cuisine based on native fruits, game, cultivated beans and corn and domesticated turkeys.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 04:20:39 +0000
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