How learning about indigenous foods can open up your worldview (with Sean Sherman)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy.

I love to cook. I love to make a meal and have friends and family over and sit around a table eating and talking and having a great time. That's one of my favorite things in the world. But when I first started cooking, there was this period of several years where, as I was learning, I never used the inside of an oven, only the stovetop and the microwave. Because turning on the big box full of gas, that felt way too scary and certainly too advanced for a beginner like me. I was afraid I was going to make my whole house blow up.

At the same time as I was learning to cook, I was learning alongside my roommate, Dave, one of my best friends. And one time, Dave got his mom's recipe for this traditional Persian chicken and walnut and pomegranate stew called fesanjin. And one of the steps was to process or grind the walnuts into really tiny pieces.

But in the recipe, Dave's mom had added correctly, I don't think either of you have a food processor. So if you don't have a way to grind the walnuts up, you can always just put them in a Ziploc bag and then hit it with a boot or roll a wine bottle over it. And now I, first of all, think this is an incredible step in a recipe. Put it in a bag and smash it with a boot. But she was also completely correct. We did not have any other way to make these walnuts smaller.

And because we didn't know many other recipes, we were just learning. This was like our one fancy, impressive meal. So we would end up making Festogen quite a lot. And that means that two or three times a month, we would be in our kitchen smashing a bag of walnuts with the heaviest boot we could find.

Now, for me, cooking Fesenjoon wasn't just a way to use my boot in my meal. It was a way to also have a personal connection to Persian people and a window into Iran's history and culture that wasn't just the typical U.S.-Iranian hostilities I'd always heard about in the news. All of a sudden, I had this meal, these flavors, and this way of opening a door, even just a tiny bit, that allowed me to start discussions and piqued my curiosity.

I love that about cooking. I love that eating a new dish, trying something delicious from a different place or a different people, it can build connections and open you up to new experiences and new conversations. Today's guest, Sean Sherman, he is a master of that. He's a chef who makes delicious meals, but he is so much more than that. Sean uses Sioux recipes and recipes from other Native Americans to further conversations about indigenous people and justice and culture.

Here's a clip from Sean's talk where he discusses how this journey began for him. I became a chef at a really young age in the city, and I've just been chefing for a long time. And a few years into my chef career, I just realized the complete absence of indigenous foods. And even for myself, I realized that I couldn't even name like less, I could name less than a handful of Lakota recipes that were truly Lakota, you know, things without cream of mushroom soup in it, right? So

It put me on a path to try and understand what happened. Where are all the Native American foods at? So it's been really interesting. So Indigenous foods, it shouldn't be a big question mark. We should know about it because no matter where we are in North America, North America obviously begins, all of its history begins with Indigenous history, right?

And no matter where we are, we're standing on indigenous land. And so we should have a really good strong sense of Native American food because it's just the land that we're on. It's just the history of the land that we're on. So for us, it became more than just serving foods. It really became talking about it and talking about why it isn't here. And I think it's a really important story for us to know. And it's also really important to see the benefits of why understanding indigenous foods could really help all of us in the future.

And Sean's work isn't just relevant to North Americans. It's relevant to wherever you are in the world. What is your relationship to indigenous cultures? What's your relationship to food, to local plants and foods and recipes? And while sometimes trying to understand history from a new perspective with a new vision of the truth can be uncomfortable and can carry shame, it doesn't mean that we should look away.

In fact, I think as you'll hear so much more eloquently from Sean than from me, it is exactly those conversations that should make us grab a plate, pull up a chair, and start listening. We're going to do that today. But first, an ad.

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I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you. And we are back with Chef Sean Sherman.

My name is Sean Sherman. I am the CEO and founder of my company, The Sous Chef, and also our nonprofit N.A.T.I.F.S., which is an acronym for North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. I'm very curious to talk to you about food, but I also want to talk to you about so much more. And it seems like that is a big part of what you do with Sous Chef. So the first thing that I'm wondering about is how can food be the start of a process of education?

I think there's so much education that we need centered around food. I think we've lost a lot of access to that where so many kids today don't even really know where their food is coming from, let alone adults, you know? And I think that we really have to get closer to the source of our food. We have to really spend a lot more time understanding the importance of localized and regional food systems and supporting those growers and providers.

And it is an education issue. And for us, our focus is Native American and indigenous food systems. But we feel like it's such a great model for people to truly understand how these localized food systems had worked for millennia. And we can be learning a lot of these lessons from the past and applying them to today. I used to teach fifth grade and I taught at an elementary school in Boston. And I remember once we were talking about food and

I showed them a photo of lettuce growing and kids were like, you're telling me that lettuce comes from the dirt? That's disgusting. And like the fact that so many kids who grow up in cities are estranged from the land to such an extent that people are surprised that vegetables grow from the ground is funny, but it's also like that's a very real thing in our culture right now.

Yeah, it's very, very true. And I've seen it a lot too, just hiring lots of young kids for restaurant jobs here and there and kids not even knowing what a cucumber looks like, for example. So it's really interesting. And I think we have to see how our food is grown and people should taste the difference of when they're pulling something right out of the ground and what it's going to taste like compared to all these cleaned and processed foods that we find in our grocery stores today. You talk a lot about

indigenous foods and that's a lot of what you work on what is indigenous food well i grew up on pine ridge reservation in south dakota myself and i'm enrolled with the ogallala lakota sioux tribe so all we're doing is really looking at the food and the people and the cultures of the land that we're currently on today and really trying to truly understand the importance of these communities and how they existed and

and how we can go back to some of these lessons in today's world. When we're looking at indigenous foods, it's a pretty broad subject. So we're looking at a study of Native American agriculture and seed saving and farming technique and wild food and ethnobotany. We're looking at history. We're looking at food preservation, all sorts of culinary, of course, but also other things on the outliers like medicinals and genetics.

utilizing all this plant life for crafting. And there's just so much to it. So I think there's a lot of these lessons that could benefit so many of us. For me, sometimes I'm guilty of certainly of that lumping it together, but also I'm sometimes guilty of thinking of this as more of like a historical project to think about indigenous and native foods rather than something that is current and vibrant and alive. And I think a lot of what I find really moving about

your work and your recipes are that they're not historical, right? They're of this moment and alive and continuing to grow and change. Absolutely. And we see this work as an evolution of our knowledge of indigenous food and people and culture and community. And we're trying to showcase that there's a lot of indigeneity alive in the world today.

Kind of going back a little bit, what do you think are the most important questions that people should be asking themselves about the food that they eat and cook? - Well, I really think that people really need to include the indigenous story into the foods of what makes American foods today, if that's where we are right now, or what are North American foods in general. And you have to understand that indigenous background to really truly understand this amazing cultural and culinary diversity that's already everywhere.

You know, and we should really truly be embracing that regional and cultural diversity to truly understand that the land that we're standing on today and so much of our history has completely ignored the indigenous perspective of this land that, you know, this was the land that we're from. Like we, this is where our families have been here for millennia, for thousands of generations.

And we have so many amazing stories to share and so many amazing foods and flavors to share on top of that. And there's just so much more nutrition involved with these indigenous diets because, you know, for us, the challenge was what really truly makes modern indigenous food today. So we cut out colonial ingredients of things that were introduced and haven't been here very long. So we remove things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, and chicken, and started cooking with extremely hyper regional localized and culturally appropriate foods.

And there's so much to play with. And now we have this great little team set up here in Minneapolis, and we've just been pumping out tons of recipes constantly. So there's so much to explore. It's interesting to me because a lot of these...

things that are kind of trendy in foods or restaurants right now, right? Like things like eating local or plant-based or like all of these, and I'm putting this very much in quotes, these new ideas, they're actually old traditions and they're the exact ones that you're trying to protect. Why do you think that is that people are regarding these as kind of like new ideas when they're not?

Well, I feel like the Western diet has largely ignored, again, this indigenous history. So if you're looking at this diversity of indigenous peoples and communities and just the plant usage alone is immense, like the knowledge of what kind of plants to use, which parts of the plants, which parts to harvest, when to harvest, how to harvest, how to do it sustainably so you're not damaging those plant families.

And there's just like so much plant diversity in the diet alone right there. And there's just so much to explore when it comes to having that and adapting that into our foods. So, you know, there's a lot of interest with people wanting to learn more about wild foods. There's maybe some heirloom varietals of some of the agricultural pieces.

But again, these indigenous communities have had a lot of this and still are utilizing a lot of this in today's world. And our main focus is North America, so we're looking at Mexico all the way through Alaska, and there's just so much diversity of indigeneity out there.

and so many food regions to really learn. And we could be applying this all over the world. So it could be in South America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Hawaii. There's so many areas that had the same colonial history happen to them. And it's just really important that people today realize that we are the stewards of this knowledge base and we have to discover as much as we can to retain it, especially just to be able to pass it down to the next generation.

For me, I come at this as a comedian, and that's kind of like the way that I process the world often. And I've often thought that one of the interesting parts of comedy is that if you can make someone laugh in that moment, they're open to hearing something new. They kind of can think about a new idea. And I think there's a I'd never thought about it before, but there's definitely a very real parallel in like if you can make someone taste something delicious, all of a sudden they're willing to hear the story of like, where's this from and how did you make this and how where's this coming at me?

Absolutely. And I feel like leaving everybody on a positive note is such a really important piece to showcase that there's solutions to some of these issues that we could all do, that we could all work together, and just all of us having a better understanding is a part of that solution.

And I think people are really inspired by chefs and the creativity and we utilize that all the time. But really, we're just trying to create something different so people who need food can have it. So nutrition shouldn't be a zip code or a color of your skin issue. You know, everybody should have access to nutritious food.

And we feel like there's definite models out there that we could be working on right now to make that happen and utilizing how indigenous communities in the past were able to have localized food systems in a non-capitalistic situation that it can still be done in today's world. What do you say when you encounter people who

are like food is not political. It's just food. I, you know, I think it absolutely is political and you can look at it on any stance because, I mean, it's just a part of its control. You know, if you can control food, you can control the people and that's just the way it is. But if we take the time to put that

power back on our own communities and put a lot of effort into controlling our own food, then we are the ones who can control our own destinies when it comes down to it. So I think that we have to have more localized gardens. We have to have kitchens that are trained to process a lot of this. We have to have a better ethnobotanical knowledge of how we can utilize a lot of this plant life around us for food and for medicine. And there's just so much that we could be doing to be

better, you know, and we should be thinking about utilizing our skills of being able to landscape any way we want to, but using that towards food, because, you know, if we just put food all over the place, then we would just be growing so much of it and having people trained to process it, you know, because we always, I always say lawns are stupid. I was just going to say, it's one of my favorite parts of all of your talks.

Absolutely. And I always say, too, that if we can have 30 golf courses in a place like Palm Springs in the middle of the desert, what we could do if we did that for good and the purpose of feeding people, cities should be jumping on this. They should be creating community gardens and parks that have a purpose of harvesting food when it comes through. Because we could be creating a huge community pantries if we just utilized our land space better.

All of us can be growing our own food. All of us can be interacting, whether you live in a tiny apartment, right? If you have a window, you can grow something that's edible. If you have a lawn, you can be using it for something useful instead. And that is kind of, it feels like that's the first step in kind of rebuilding a connection to the idea that this is

that food doesn't come from a factory or it doesn't have to. Absolutely. I think it's a great first step of people just starting to be aware of the immediate environment right around them. But, you know, I tell people just to start in your backyard if you can, just go outside and start identifying what's around you. And the more you start to learn these plants in your own area, you're just going to see food everywhere you look. You know, there's going to be all these plants that can be utilized. And I think with this,

You know, with chefs, especially, they should be really excited about the possibility of all of these flavors that, again, the Western diet has never really come to terms with because there's just so much food and flavor around us and it tastes different no matter where you are. Where do you get your inspiration from when you're thinking about taking some of these traditional dishes or ingredients and then turning them into something new? How do you get inspired?

I think part of it is just, you know, I really think about food, about where we are, you know, so I want the food in these plates that we create to really represent a little snapshot of the moment of where we are, the season, the plants around us, you know, what's coming out and what are these flavors.

and making food that feels like a moment in time. And like you can literally stand in the forest in northern Minnesota and just glance around and see all those ingredients right there nearby you. And I think that's kind of the fun of it. It was just like, what can we do with all this stuff that's like right here, you know? OK, we're going to hear even more from Sean about his work in just a moment. But first, a quick break.

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And we are back. Here is another clip from Sean's talk at TEDx Sioux Falls, where he's given some more context around indigenous foods and agriculture. - It's just amazing to learn about indigenous agriculture because it goes back so far and people figured out all sorts of ways to farm and be able to sustain huge civilizations, you know, whether they're in the middle of the desert, whether they're on the coastal regions.

or way up here in the Dakotas, you know? People were able to farm amazing things and had an amazing amount of diversity that we need to protect. We are the stewards of what's left of this diversity, and a lot of it got wiped off the map in the 1800s with all that colonialism that was going on. So we have to be understanding so we can protect these for the next generation, because these could disappear if we don't do anything about it, you know? So it's really important to understand that.

So to use Indigenous knowledge in today's world, it's just important to open up your eyes, you know? Stop calling everything a weed because that just means you don't know what it is, right? Our kids can name more K-pop bands than they can trees, and that's your fault, you know? You need to teach them things that's important, right?

Because just look around, there's food everywhere. And we should be making pantries like our grandparents did and our great grandparents. They just used the food that was around us, right? So we should just be making our own pantries that taste like where we are, what makes us unique in our own region. And that's why we should have Native American food restaurants all over the nation and run by indigenous peoples, right? Sean, you said that back in your talk,

Today, are there things that make you feel like things are moving in the right direction? I just really think that we're in a great place where people are taking the time to listen. People are understanding a lot of the atrocities that happened in the past on this land that we're standing on. And I think that we can really see through the other side. And I think education is going to be a huge part of this, like we talked a little bit about. But I feel like people are really open to it. And I think we can start to see a lot of positive changes because we're

We feel it only because we're kind of in front of this movement that's going on and we feel like so much of this energy out there and a whole new generation of more indigenous chefs coming out and more indigenous academics and artists and everything. And we feel like this bubble starting, you know, and it's just growing so fast.

You've talked about education and how education is a key piece of this. In your own personal education, what have been some of the biggest eye-opening moments for you?

I think, you know, just learning history is so important, you know, because especially when I had the realization of the work that I'm doing and started digging around to find, just realizing that I didn't know hardly anything about Native American food, even though I grew up on a reservation and my family's from the reservation and

And I think it's really important, you know, these things that happened directly to my own family, having to go through and survive boarding school situations and to deal with a lot of the trauma that was dealt down to them and just see like, you know, we really haven't come that far when it comes to a lot of these issues.

So I think just learning about the land that we're on, about the history of the land that we're on, and seeing the positives. We should have been learning from all of this diverse indigenous community out there how to live better with our environments and understanding their food systems before just trying to replace it with something that didn't belong here. I think the exciting part is just connecting with nature and learning all these plants.

I feel like I'm still just learning. I'm still just beginning because I didn't start off as a botanist or anything. I'm a chef. I've lived my whole life in the kitchen. And I think it's just really exciting to learn all this. And every year I just pick up a few new plant species and I go to a different region and it's a whole new world. It's a whole new universe there. So there's so much exciting stuff to learn. Are there cookbooks or places to get recipes that you would...

recommend for a beginner? For indigenous foods in general? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a friend, Mariah Gladstone, out in Montana. She has a YouTube channel called Indigikitchen, and she explores a lot. One of our past chefs, Brian Yahtzee, has got a really great following, and he posts a lot of food ideas that they're doing. He runs this cafe called Gathering's Cafe at the Minneapolis American Indian Center just a few blocks from where we are.

And there's just a lot of fun out there. You should just start exploring because it's just a growing movement. What is your favorite meal? What's your favorite meal?

That's always a tough one because that's just like, what's your favorite song? You know, it changes so often, you know, but again, like I go back to, I love the choke cherry. So we make this dish called Wozopi and it was just a traditional choke cherry dish. But it reminds me of foraging for choke cherries on Pioneer's Reservation when I was growing up. And it reminds me of the smell of my grandmother's kitchen when she's cooking gallons of it down into the sauce. And, you know, it's just such a unique and special flavor. So for me, it's a really special, unique piece. And so that's what I think of.

What's your favorite native or traditional drink? - We love making just the simple cedar and maple tea. We served it on our food truck called Tatanka Truck a few years back. And it's so simple 'cause we're just using the white cedar, we just use some of the green bough, and we season it with just a little bit of pure maple. And it's just, it tastes like camping. You know, it's awesome. - Okay, I have some questions that are maybe more personally for me. I am not Native American, I'm not indigenous. I love to cook.

How can I, as a non-indigenous person, support food sovereignty and support the work that you're doing? So if you're going to support food sovereignty, I think that you really want to, especially indigenous food sovereignty, that you would want to see if there are any regional indigenous growers around you and try and support those efforts as much as you can because

A lot of indigenous communities grew up in a situation like me where we don't have generational wealth. We have to struggle hard to start a business. I think it's really important to support a lot of these BIPOC food producers that are out there and take the time to search that out. For example, I'm working on opening up this restaurant this year in Minneapolis, and I've been trying to see if I could develop an all BIPOC-owned wine list, which is a

huge challenge because that's a really non-diverse industry. I have been able to find a few native vineyards out there and a few black owned, but really it's just like it's going against the grain, you know? So I think, but doing, just taking the time to be conscious about it, to like, you know, at least search it out, see what you can find and how can you support? And those are the questions you should be asking. So it's all in the right direction.

Yeah. And I've been I was shocked to learn from you that there are in many major cities, not a single Native American or indigenous restaurant.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, like we hope to be able to change that because we're setting up the support development system with the Indigenous Food Lab to hopefully help more Indigenous food producers and food entrepreneurs come out and just be a support system. You know, how do you find funding? How do you create a business plan? How do you talk to banks? How do you deal with credit? Like all those basic issues. And then how do you set up for success? How do you market? Like we just want to support that situation. So hopefully one day we can start to

see not only on tribal communities, a lot of food production, but also in cities for people to show off their own creativity just to showcase the foods that should be from here. So hopefully you could find an indigenous restaurant in Manhattan or in Chicago or in Seattle, and they would all be different, you know? So we look forward to that future someday. And what about cultural appropriation? How do those of us who are not indigenous...

avoid that while also using and respecting these techniques and traditions. I think part of it is if you know, it's really about if you're trying to make money and sell product, using somebody else's culture to help that along and using your own privileges to make that happen, then that's a clear

clear definition of what is cultural appropriation. And I think there are a lot of, because of all these platforms and social media, a lot of people are able to kind of call out some of these instances when they do happen.

And it makes people to think twice about how they're going to market and what they're going to sell and the products and how they're going to do it. Because they might even be coming at it with not from an angle of trying to disrespect, but just not even realizing that they're disrespecting because they just didn't have the education to even identify what is cultural appropriation. So I think we're in a much better world where people can help define that a little bit more and people can help people along so they can still put some good products on the market, but you don't have to use somebody else's culture to do that.

And what are ways that we can amplify indigenous voices and help to make these stories heard and kind of fight this erasure, which seems like a really big piece of this? Well, I think just like this is obviously, you know, with media attention and with just people interviewing some of the leaders in these worlds, it just helps open up the door because this work for me isn't as far from an ego project. You know, I just

feel like I'm trying to do something that should have been already laid out in front of me. My parents' generation, I wish could have gotten onto this before me because there would have been so many elders left alive that still had a lot of really pertinent information that would be really amazing to know right now. But, you know, I think that people just have to, you know, realize that it's going to be a struggle and there's going to be ways to support and we just have to see how it goes, I guess. What are some of the

culinary lessons that you have taken from learning about indigenous dishes all around the continent? I think the biggest culinary lessons is taking the time to learn the region, to learn the communities and cultures that are there, to be outside and literally connect with the nature out there.

So it's really fun when we've gone around to all these different communities and we get to explore wandering around the Pacific Northwest or wandering around the deserts in the Southwest or the ocean side and some Mexican beach or something and exploring the jungle plants, you know. There's so much to explore out there and I think that we should just really take into account of

where we are and apply a lot of those flavors. And, you know, it's not like we're dismissing all of this wonderful culinary knowledge that came from Europe. It's just that we are applying a lot of food system knowledge that has been alive and has been able to maintain, you know, just

just being alive here in North America. And there's so much that we can do moving forward. So I think people just have to, again, you have to absorb that diversity and you have to really truly understand there's still so much of this indigeneity alive today. There's so much that we can be learning from it and it can make us all better if we just take that into account.

So when I first started, I was just looking at what my own family, what Lakota were utilizing. And then my vision just expanded outwards and I started seeing so many commonalities. And now we see it as a global issue, you know, because we see all of this vast indigenous knowledge on a global scale and how important it is to, it's going to be for our generation and the next generations to preserve as much of that as possible.

but it also apply it at the same time. So we can just have better environmental issues. We can have more nutrition and more food access to people that need it. And there's just so much work out there, you know, but I really feel like it has nothing to do with me. Like I'm just a vehicle in this at the most. And we just try to open up people's minds because we need to do it collectively. Like we need to work together for this. Well, I always feel like the most interesting people and the most

important lessons. They don't just help me think about something that is new and different and far away, but they help me to see the world right around me, my immediate world in a new way. And I very much feel that way from talking to you and from reading your work and looking at the

cooking and the recipes and all of the research that you've done, it has definitely changed the way that I look at my immediate surroundings, including like the small plot of ground in my backyard where I'm like, look, there's this garden is a thing that matters. So thank you. I really appreciate that. Yeah, of course. Thank you. And I also I also just want to say fastest way to my heart is wordplay. I mean, sous chef is just beautiful, a beautiful name. Thanks. Yeah, but it's been selling itself. So

And then last question, what is one way in which you personally are trying to be a better human? Just being open to learning all the time and just being open to understanding diversity and things that are different. I think that's a really important one, you know, and there's just so much to learn, you know, so I just see a lifetime worth of learning and I'm never going to get to it. And I think that's exciting. Well, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure. I really, really appreciate making the time to talk with us. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.

That is it for today's episode. This has been How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Thank you so much to our guest, Chef Sean Sherman.

On the TED side, this show is produced by the pleasantly simmering Abimanyu Das, steeped to perfection Daniela Balarezo, tastefully garnished Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, lightly salted Ann Powers, and locally foraged Karen Newman. And from PRX Productions, How to Be a Better Human is brought to you by the master chefs of audio, Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve. Thank you for listening. Eat well and don't be afraid to start a conversation. Just make sure you chew first.

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