Native American Foods

Columbus embarked on the first of what would be four voyages, reaching the Bahamian Islands on October 12, 1492. He discovered a thriving indigenous people, the Taino (a tribe of the native Arawaks), who drew sustenance from colorful native crops, fish, and game. Maize, beans, squash, and seafood were central components of the native diet. In one of his logs, Columbus described a native meal, which was comprised of fish and “bread which tasted exactly as if it were made of chestnuts.”

Fish and wild fowl (turkey) were the main sources of meat. Other regional crops included cacao (chocolate), maize, potato, tomato, capsicum, peppers, cassava, pumpkins, and groundnuts (peanuts). Tropical fruits enhanced the native diet, such as pineapple, avocado, guava, and papaya. Most of these foods were new and unfamiliar to Columbus and his crew. In Hispaniola, the first settlement in the New World, the native foods of the Taino tribe became an important source of sustenance to the European colonizers.

While European colonizers had difficulty adjusting to the new food culture of the Americas, their arrival took an even greater toll on the native landscape. Before Columbus came to the New World, it is estimated that some 250,000 natives Arawaks lived on the Bahamian islands. By the early 1500’s, less than 15,000 remained, most having perished after exposure to European diseases (for which they had no immunity).

On Columbus’ second voyage he brought wheat bread, as well as radishes, chickpeas, and melons. Livestock came from Europe, including horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and chickens. Over time, new crops were introduced to the Americas, including wheat, rice, barley, oats, coffee, sugar cane, citrus fruits, melons and Kentucky bluegrass.

The introduction of wheat was of particular significance. For thousands of years, bread had been a central part of the European diet. Wheat was not indigenous to the Americas, where maize was the native grain. In the first few decades of colonization, European settlers imported goods like bread, wine, olive oil and certain meats. Over time, wheat and other European foodstuffs were cultivated and grown in the Americas.

Certain native foods were considered “barbaric” by European settlers, simply because they were unfamiliar. Ironically, other foods were adopted readily, including chile peppers, cacao, and pineapple. Settlers enjoyed native foods like atole (a sweet, hot drink made from masa), pinole (toasted maize meal), scalded plantains, butter of the cacao, and puddings made with fowl.

When all is said and done, the Spanish hoped to Europeanize the native populations of the islands of the Caribbean and convert them to Catholicism. By attributing the deaths of European settlers to native foods, they were buoying their argument for the superiority of European food and, simultaneously, European values. The truth is, the arrival of European settlers devastated a thriving native population and landscape. This strange and sad intersection of native American foods and European crops gave rise to a brand new food culture.

Salmon, Bison, and Turkey are all New World Foods.

How did Native Americans get food for their families?

There were four basic ways for people in ancient societies to find food:

Native Americans did all these things, but the first three were much more common. There were not many domesticated animals in North America before Europeans arrived-- only turkeys, ducks, and dogs, and most tribes did not eat dog meat. In South America, llamas and guinea pigs were also raised by some tribes for their meat.

The other three food sources were much more important to Native American life. Most tribes used two or three of these food-gathering techniques at once to get a varied diet.

Every American Indian tribe that we know of took part in hunting and fishing to get fresh meat to eat. The Inuit (Eskimos) and some Indian tribes of the far north relied almost entirely on hunting and fishing to survive. Some Native Americans were primarily big game hunters, migrating frequently to follow herds of bison or caribou. The Blackfoot and Sioux are two examples of big game hunting tribes. In tribes like these, large groups of Native Americans usually worked together to drive large animals into an ambush, a man-made pit, or over a cliff, sometimes setting controlled fires or building fences to cut off their escape. In other tribes, such as the Chippewa or Creek, each individual Native American hunter would stalk deer, rabbits or other game, or set snares or traps for them. In fishing tribes, Native American fishermen would either catch fish and hunt marine mammals from their canoes, or else set fish nets and wooden traps for them. The Tlingit and Salish are two examples of Northwest Indian tribes who got most of their meat through fishing. Native hunting and fishing weapons varied from tribe to tribe but the most common ones were bows and arrows, spears, harpoons, fish-hooks, and blowguns.

Farming was another very important source of American Indian food materials. Native agriculture was most advanced in what is now the southern United States, Mexico, and the Andean region of South America. Native Americans from those areas used special farming techniques like irrigation, terracing, crop rotation, and planting windbreaks to improve their farms, and they usually harvested enough crops to dry and store for the winter. Some examples of southern Native American tribes who were expert farmers included the Hopi, Navajo, and Cherokee tribes. Other tribes further to the north planted crops in garden plots in their villages but did not harvest enough to last the winter, so they would split up into hunting camps during that time instead. Examples of northern tribes who farmed this way included the Lenape and Iroquois tribes. Besides food crops, Native American farmers often grew cotton, hemp, tobacco, and medicinal plants.

Gathering is a general term for collecting food that grows wild in the environment. Sometimes this is a very basic sort of task, such as picking blueberries from a bush. Other times gathering can be complicated and requires special tools and training, such as tapping trees for maple syrup or grinding and leaching acorns into edible flour. The kinds of wild foods gathered by an Indian tribe and the tools they needed to do it with varied a lot depending on where the tribe lived. Usually Native Americans gathered wild foods in addition to hunting, fishing, or farming.

What were some typical Native American foods?

Truly "traditional" indigenous recipes contain no Old World foods, and that means no fry bread, pasta, pies, cakes, nor any other dish containing wheat, flour, sheep, beef, pigs, goats, milk, cheese, chicken, or butter.

Plants such as asparagus, broccoli, garlic, Brussels sprouts and apples are Old World foods. Raspberries may grow in abundance in many parts of the US, but they originally come from Europe. Black-eyed Peas are indigenous to Africa. Many other dishes might be termed "American Indian foods," but only because Indians now eat them; many of those recipes contain foods that indigenous people did not have until contact with the colonizers. For examples, green chili stew or posole with ham, and mutton stew are not truly traditional because swine and sheep are Old World animals. Many Bannock bread recipes are made with flour. A lot of "traditional" wojapi recipes are merely some fruit mixed with flour and large amounts of sugar.

The most important Native American food crop was Indian corn (also known as maize, which comes from the Taino Indian name for the plant.) The majority of American Indian tribes grew at least some corn, and even tribes that did not grow corn themselves often traded with neighbors for it. Other important American Indian crops included beans, squash, pumpkins, sunflowers, wild rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, avocados, papayas, and chocolate.

Whether they were farming tribes or not, most Native American tribes had very meat-heavy diets. Favorite meats included buffalo, elk, caribou, deer, and rabbit; salmon and other fish; ducks, geese, turkeys and other birds; clams and other shellfish; and marine mammals like seals or even whales. But almost any animal who lived in the Americas in ancient times was sometimes added to the menu, even animals you might not think of as food like porcupines, monkeys, or snakes. Many Native American tribes had strong beliefs against wasting food, so if they killed an animal for any other reason, they would often try to eat it.

Other foods that could be found naturally in the Americas and were often eaten by American Indians included eggs, honey, maple syrup and sugar, salt, nuts (including peanuts, pine nuts, cashews, hickory nuts, and acorns), fruit (including cranberries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, chokecherries, wild plums, and persimmons), and a wide variety of beans, roots, and greens.

What were Native American meals like?

Native American cooking tended to be simple. Most Native Americans preferred to eat their food very fresh, without many spices. This was different in Mexico and Central America, where Indians tended to use less fresh meat and more spices in their dishes, including hot peppers, cumin, and chocolate seasonings. Meat was usually roasted over the fire or grilled on hot stones. Fish was often baked or smoked. Soups and stews were popular in some tribes. Corn was eaten in many different ways, including corn-on-the-cob, popcorn, hominy, and tortillas and corn bread baked in clay ovens. Indians in some tribes enjoyed fruit puddings or maple candy for dessert. Most Native Americans always drank water with their meals, but hot chocolate was a popular beverage in Mexico, and some Indians in Central and South America developed an alcoholic corn drink called chicha.

How did Native American eating habits change after Europeans arrived?

The Europeans introduced some new plants and animals that didn't exist in the Americas originally, such as bananas*, wheat, sheep, and cows. Some Native American farming tribes, such as the Navajos or the Mexican Indian tribes, began to raise these new crops and farm animals in addition to corn and other traditional crops. Many people in those tribes are still farmers today, and they have been raising some of these "new" foods for centuries now!

*Bananas are indigenous to the tropical portions of India, Southeast Asia and northern Australia, and were brought to South America by the Portuguese in the early 16th century.

Other tribes were forced to change their traditional lifestyles a lot after Europeans took over. Since Europeans killed most of the buffalo, tribes that used to follow the buffalo herds had to find new ways of living. Today, some tribes raise buffalo on ranches. Many forests and jungles have been cleared, which makes it harder to earn a living by hunting. In rural areas of Canada, Alaska, and South America, some Native Americans and Inuit (Eskimos) still make their living by hunting and trapping, but this is becoming rarer. And of course, one of the biggest changes was Indian tribes being forced to move to reservations far from their original homelands. In many cases, these tribes had to give up their old ways of life in their new location because the environment was different and the land was not suitable for their traditional agriculture.

Northeast Woodlands

The essential staple foods of the Eastern Woodlands Aboriginal Americans were maize (also called "corn"), beans, and squash. These were called the "Three Sisters" because they were planted interdependently: the beans grew up the tall stalks of the maize, while the squash spread out at the base of the three plants and provided protection and support for the root systems. A number of other domesticated crops were also popular during some time periods in the Eastern Woodlands, including a local version of quinoa, a variety of amaranth, sumpweed/marsh elder, little barley, maygrass, and sunflower.

Maple syrup is another essential food staple of the Eastern Woodlands peoples. Tree sap is collected from sugar maple trees during the beginning of springtime when the nights are still cold. Birch bark containers are used in the process of making maple syrup, maple cakes, maple sugar, and maple taffy. When the sap is boiled to a certain temperature, the different variations of maple food products are created. When the sap starts to thicken, it can be poured into the snow to make taffy.

Southeast

Southeastern Native American culture has formed the cornerstone of Southern cuisine from its origins till the present day. From Southeastern Native American culture came one of the main staples of the Southern diet: corn (maize), either ground into meal or limed with an alkaline salt to make hominy, using a Native American technology known as nixtamalization.[8] Corn was used to make all kinds of dishes from the familiar cornbread and grits to liquors such as whiskey, which were important trade items. Though a lesser staple, potatoes were also adopted from Native American cuisine and were used in many ways similar to corn. Native Americans introduced the first non-Native American Southerners to many other vegetables still familiar on southern tables. Squash, pumpkin, many types of beans, tomatoes (though Europeans initially considered them poisonous), many types of peppers, and sassafras all came to the settlers via the native tribes.

Plains

Great Basin (Nevada, Utah), An arid region in the western US between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains that includes most of Nevada and much of Utah.

Plateau

Northwest Coast - In the Northwest of what is now the United States, Native Americans used salmon and other fish, seafood, mushrooms, berries, and meats such as deer, duck, and rabbit. Rum was popular, having first been introduced to the Western Hemisphere by Chistopher Columbus. In contrast to the Easterners, the Northwestern aboriginal peoples were principally hunter-gatherers. The generally mild climate meant they did not need to develop an economy based upon agriculture but instead could rely year-round on the abundant food supplies of their region. In what is now California, acorns were ground into a flour that was the principal foodstuff for about seventy-five percent of the population, and dried meats were prepared during the season when drying was possible.[

Southwestern

Ancestral Puebloans of the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, initially practiced subsistence agriculture by cultivating maize, beans, squash, sunflower seeds, and pine nuts from the pinyon pine, and game meat including venison and cuniculture, and freshwater fish such as Rio Grande cutthroat trout and rainbow trout are also traditional foods in the region. Ancestral Puebloans are also known for their basketry and pottery, indicating both an agricultural surplus that needed to be carried and stored, and clay pot cooking. Grinding stones have been used to grind maize into meal for cooking. Archaeological digs indicate a very early domestication of turkeys for food. New Mexican cuisine is heavily rooted in both Pueblo and Hispano food traditions, and is a prevalent cuisine in the American Southwest, it is especially prevalent in New Mexico.

New World Crops

The phrase "New World Crops" is usually used to describe crops that were native to North and South America before 1492 and not found anywhere else in the world at that time. Many of these crops have since come to be grown around the world and have often become an integral part of various cultures' cuisines.

Corn, beans and squash were domesticated in Mesoamerica around 3500 BCE. Potatoes and manioc were domesticated in South America. In what is now the eastern United States, Native Americans domesticated sunflower, sumpweed and goosefoot around 2500 BCE.

Table of Ancient New World Crops
Cereals Little barley, Maize (corn), maygrass, wild rice
Pseudocereals Amaranth, knotweed, goosefoot (quinoa), sunflower, chia
Pulses Common bean, lima bean, peanut, scarlet runner bean, tepary bean
Fiber Agave, yucca
Roots and Tubers Arrowroot, jicama, Camas root, leren, manioc (yuca, cassava), mashua, oca, potato, sweet potato, ulluco, yacon
Fruits Avocado, blueberries, cherimoya, cranberries, guava (guayaba), huckleberries, papaya, pawpaw, passionfruit, pepper, pineapple, prickly pear (tuna), tomato, tomatillo
Melons Chayote, squashes
Meat and poultry Bison, coypu, guinea pig, llama, muscovy duck, turkey
Nuts Black walnuts, Brazil nut, cashews, hickory, pecans, shagbark hickory
Other Achiote (annatto), canna, chocolate, chicle (key ingredient in chewing gum and rubber), cochineal (red dye), logwood, maple syrup, poinsettia, tobacco, vanilla

Old World beans

Before Columbus, the Old World was familiar with numerous kinds of beans, but neither our common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, nor the lima bean, P. lunatus, was known.

In the Old World, beans were first cultivated in the Middle East, perhaps around 10,000 years ago. Along with their fellow legumes the pea (Pisum sativum), the chickpea (Cicer arietinum), and the bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) - these cultivated plants included the broad bean/Fava bean (Vicia faba) - and the lentil (Lens culinaris) (although it is not always called a bean). The soybean (Glycine max) was also cultivated very early in China. Some of the other Old World beans are the adzuki (or azuki) bean (Phaseolus angularis), the hyacinth bean (Dolichos lablab), the winged bean (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus), the guar bean (Cyamopsis tetragonoloba), and the pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) (Walker 2005).

Known as Féve in French, Garten-Bohnen in German, Valske Bonner in Danish, and Hava in Spanish, the Fava Bean is native to north Africa and southwest Asia and has been cultivated for centuries. It is still considered a staple of the Mediterranean diet. It was the only bean known to Europe before contact with the new world. Remnants of favas have been found in archeological sites and medieval peasants made a purée of favas seasoned with a bit of salt pork. There is also a fava bean with tiny seeds used in Middle Eastern and North African cooking, called Ful Madamas—usually they are used as a dry bean. The fava resembles such shelled beans as limas and butterbeans, but it is actually more closely related to the pea family.

New World beans

Beans were cultivated early in the New World, both in South and North America. The most important bean species from the New World is the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Other New World beans include Lima beans (Phaseolus limensis), runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus), tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius, var. latifolius), and butter beans/lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus).

The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) was domesticated independently in ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes, and is now grown worldwide for its edible bean, popular both dry and as a green bean. Green beans are the unripe, young fruit of various cultivars of the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Green beans are known by many common names, including French beans, string beans, snap beans, and snaps. There are many cultivated varieties of common beans including navy beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, black beans, and many others.

Squash, Cucumbers and Melons

All squash, commonly referred to as “pumpkins”, “gourds” and “squashes” originated in the New World and are members of the genus Cucurbita. Their native range extends from the central United States south to Argentina, with the highest species diversity in Mexico, which is believed to be the origination point of the genus. Around 20 species of wild squash grew among the temperate to tropical climates throughout their native range. Most all of our domesticated squash we enjoy today came from just five species (C. argyrosperma, C. ficfolia, C. maxima, C. moscha and C. pepo).

This genus of plants was unknown in Europe until the late 16th century, with the first known record of squash occurring in 1591. However, long before the Old World debut of squash it was highly valued and widely cultivate by indigenous people in the Americas. Around 8,000 years ago, the earliest known domestication of Cucurbita species occurred in Mexico, some 4,000 years before domestication of the primary ancient agricultural crop we think of in the Americas, maize (corn).

Cultivated for at least 3,000 years, the cucumber originated from India, where a great many varieties have been observed, along with its closest living relative, Cucumis hystrix. It was probably introduced to other parts of Europe by the Greeks or Romans. Records of cucumber cultivation appear in France in the 9th century, England in the 14th century, and in North America by the mid-16th century. Charlemagne had cucumbers grown in his gardens in the 8th/9th century. They were reportedly introduced into England in the early 14th century, lost, then reintroduced approximately 250 years later.

Melons originated in Africa or in the hot valleys of Southwest Asia, especially Iran and India, from where they gradually began to appear in Europe toward the end of the Western Roman Empire. Melons are known to have been grown by the ancient Egyptians. However, recent discoveries of melon seeds dated between 1350 and 1120 BC in Nuragic sacred wells have shown that melons were first brought to Europe by the Nuragic civilization of Sardinia during the Bronze Age. Melons were among the earliest plants to be domesticated in both the Old and among the first crop species brought by westerners to the New Worlds. Early European settlers in the New World are recorded as growing honeydew and casaba melons as early as the 1600s.