Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

by Dan Saladino

There are a few foods Americans think of as traditional native staples, the most famous being frybread, dough pancakes that puff up as they’re cooked in corn oil on hot skillets. It’s still cooked in homes on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico where it has a strong association with Navajo culture and is sold as an indigenous street food, often described as an ‘American Indian food’. But ‘Navajo frybread’ was never a traditional food – it was created 150 years ago out of desperation. Deep in the winter of 1864, the US Army forced 8,500 Navajo men, women and children off their land in north-eastern Arizona and onto the Bosque Redondo reservation, an internment camp that was three hundred miles away in New Mexico. Getting there involved a trek that is now known as the ‘Long Walk’. Along the way, hundreds of Navajo died of exposure and starvation. They had not only lost their homes, but also been made to abandon their crops, seeds and food stores. To reduce the numbers dying of starvation, the government sent food parcels, rations that included white flour, sugar and lard. This was how frybread came to be. ‘I go into neighbourhoods and still see people cooking up frybread,’ says Baca. ‘I don’t want to embarrass them, but I make sure they know the history of that food.’