Canadian Native here, if anyone ever has the chance to try moose meat, do it! It’s easily my favorite meat, I’d take moose over a t-bone or prime rib every single time. If I had to eat it every single day for the rest of my life I’d die with a smile on my face. You can make steaks out of it, make ground moose burger, cut it into small slices and stew it, or one of my favorite treats, turn it into smoky jerky etc. Lot’s of different ways to cook it.
The taste is hard to describe, it’s a bit gamey but not overly so (at least to me, I grew up on the stuff) and it’s very tender and flavorful. Tastes a bit like beef I guess but IMO much better.
I’d love to try it. How does it compare to deer? I like deer but I don’t like black bear. That’s my line for gaminess.
Honestly I haven’t tried deer so I’m not sure! My grandparents didn’t like it so they didn’t hunt it. Sorry!
Where I live I estimate at least half of white men hunt deer. Some people look at me funny if I tell them I’ve never been hunting. It’s absolutely necessary for population control, because we’re never going to get these people to go for reintroduction of wolves.
I’ve had a deer steak so good it ranks up with the best beef steaks I’ve had. I’ve had deer so gamey it’s gross. Hunters tell me the biggest influence on taste is how quickly the deer dies. It could be bullshit but I believe it. They aim for the heart, and if their aim is true the deer will die instantly.
I’m a big fan of jerky made in the old style (very thin and chewy) with no sugar added. Deer jerky is my second favorite after biltong. You should try it if you get a chance! I know I’ll keep an eye out for moose now.
Stress hormones taste like ass but that’s not game taste as such.
Interesting, I’ll definitely keep my eye out for some deer when I have the chance, thanks for the recommendation! Jerky made out of pretty much any meat is good tbh, my grandparents also made it out of salmon and it was absolutely amazing. Cut into cubes but left on the skin and then hung in a smoke rack until dry. So good.
I had like five slices of Elk salami once while in Norway and I can still taste them.
Also they’re out there, a rare sight maybe but not unheard of. A spot in rural North Dakota comes to mind.
Where my Clovis people at?
While not the same, I recall reading that Barbeque is a native American cooking technique that has been changed into what it is today.
Cooking with smoke is pretty much universal across all indigenous people, not just in North America
Why don’t we see any restaurants that make a big deal about cooking buffalo?
Oh… Right.
Lots of restaurants around me have Buffalo wings on the menu.
Yeah they were domesticated and bred smaller and smaller, dang shame. Their wings used to be the size of a mans arm.
And it’s made them aggressive, unlike the common house hippo.
Quick clarification…
Buffalo will fucking kill you.
Bison will also kill you, but they live in North America.
Bison also live in Europe, and I’m guessing they’ll also kill you.
I’ve seen bison burgers on the menu at a few local restaurants
Yeah farmed bison is certainly a specialty meat, but not a rare one. And yes, wild is an endangered species
Iirc a lot of the farmed bison is from bison that we hybridized with cows. So not technically the same as wild bison
That’s true, although some groups are trying to preserve non “cattle ingressed” bison. Like these guys: https://americanprairie.org/
That’s actually really cool! Thank you for sharing a link!
That makes sense. I’ve heard you can fence in bison only if they don’t care to leave.
They offically went extinct. I think there’s efforts now to reintroduce them and get wild populations happening again, but some time in the 80s they were declared extinct.
Yeah, the reintroduction of buffalo to America is the single most successful repopulation effort in history. Buffalo were literally extinct in America. To start the reintroduction efforts, they had to ship a few breeding pairs in from a zoo in Germany, because they couldn’t even find any native buffalo in America. And now the buffalo population has resurged to the point that they’re not even on the threatened list anymore. Their population will never reach the same point that it was at its peak (c1700, there were an estimated 29 million buffalo in North America), but they’re at least not in danger of going extinct.
The issue with buffalo burgers (and the reason they’re not in more restaurants) is that buffalo are hard to farm commercially. They make bad animal husbandry candidates, because they’re extremely territorial and get aggressive towards people. So farming them is something that needs to be done with a lot of caution, and buffalo farms likely won’t ever reach the same kinds of sizes as modern cattle farms.
Given the climate impact of farming meat its probably for the best that they can’t be farmed as easily. And yeah, I’d expect most species on Earth reached a peak before I was born and won’t recover for at least decades after I’m dead, if ever.
I’ve always heard about this buffalo skull pile, but I didn’t actually look at a picture of it.
And damn, that is striking to see so many dead buffalo in one place under the heel of colonialist scumbags. Thousands upon thousands…
Proud boys.
What happened there
Restaurants near me sell buffalo meat, like buffalo burgers, steak, etc. You can also get it at the grocery store, and it’s basically leaner beef.
its a revival but its a very long way off
My god that is disturbing.
Would have been a very awesome source of beef if properly sustained.
Not really, buffalo are notoriously difficult as livestock. They’re stubborn, defensive, and enormous. A buffalo is more likely to bust any fence before it can be domesticated. Cows on the other hand are pushovers.
I meant as game really, kind of like deer. Permits and such for hunting. But I appreciate your comment as I did not know any of this.
You can get them, but it’s not very fun since they’re confined to certain regions and are super easy to kill. There’s a reason they nearly went extinct…
There’s something to be said for a wild source of meat.
Migratory herds disperse seeds and fertilize soil with their manure, while cutting back on overgrowth without overgrazing.
Odd take because plenty of communities have lower populations and still have restaurants of their cuisine. But also because there are a bunch of native cuisine restaurants.
It doesn’t help that a relatively equal society without extreme division of labor is probably not producing cuisine on the same level as cultures with extreme inequality. A class of jealous and idle nobles with personal chefs trying to outdo each other does a lot to push culinary experimentation.
We also, specifically, forced them into cultural re-education camps to force them to be christian, not speak a native language, or engage with anything from their native roots.
Tribes were removed from their lands and forced onto reservations that didn’t resemble their lands. The buffalo was driven to near extinction to deny the tribes that relied on it their main food source. Until 1967 the US had a policy of eradicating indigenous languages and cultures. A lot was done to erase their culture. It was a systemic approach, not random or accidental.
It doesn’t help that a relatively equal society without extreme division of labor is probably not producing cuisine on the same level as cultures with extreme inequality.
Dude what. Get out of here with your foie gras and make some ratatouille. Not just anyone can be a great cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere.
Did you miss the following sentence or?
More than that, we completely transformed the native ecology of places such that they’re nearly unrecognizable from what they once were. Native plants only occupy a tiny, tiny slice of the ecology that they used to, thanks to invasive introductions that came either accidentally or deliberately with livestock and agricultural imports. I know that in California, many of the plants the native people depended on are difficult to find anymore, and are almost never deliberately cultivated. We also took deliberate, calculated steps over decades to eradicate their cultures, and since very little was ever written down, it was largely successful.
In spite of all that, AFAIK there IS at least a Dine restaurant that they’re using to try and teach their own people and others about their traditional culinary and food-ecology practices.
So I almost stopped reading at “native ecology”. You do have a good point about deliberate destruction of what was there, but the American continent wasn’t in some kind of pristine natural state before Columbus arrived. The native peoples altered their environment to suit them. What we call corn today came from maize, but maize isn’t natural, either. Its closest genetic relation to a natural plant is one with tiny, inedible cobs. It’s not clear how they manged to go from that to maize.
Humans alter the environment around them to better suit humans. That doesn’t mean we have to be relentlessly destructive, but we always do it in some way. Narratives that native peoples were in some kind of perfect state of nature feeds into noble savage myths, and take away from their humanity.
But focusing on cultural eradication is a very good point.
The indigenous people used to move giant rocks and make rock walls to corral giant herds of buffalo, right off the side of a cliff. Kill thousands at a time.
To be fair, “native ecology” doesn’t necessarily mean “natural ecology.” A change from the native cultivated landscape to one left fallow and overgrown is still the kind of radically destructive change @[email protected] was talking about.
On a related note, it reminds me of this video about suppression of indigenous fire management practices and their consequences.
Hey, yeah, you’re completely right. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that they lived in some unspoiled wilderness or that they didn’t believe in touching the wilderness like a lot of the colonial narratives suggest. I’ve been reading Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson, and it does a lot of work dispelling those myths. What I mean is that they had relationships with the ecology here; California native tribes knew where edible corms grew and how to cultivate them to ensure a good bounty, they knew when to expect and hunt migratory birds, how to sustainably harvest roots and leaves for basketry, how to harvest and use acorns from the various oak species here, and how to get food and shelter from incense cedar and sugar pine without killing the trees. They also knew how to tend these local ecologies to ensure that these plants and animals continued to exist as long-term and renewable resources. In fact, another book I’m reading, Braiding Sweetgrass makes the case that the plants that native people used fare worse without human intervention. While the tribes, at least as early European settlers knew them, were semi-nomadic (they would move between the valleys and the mountains depending on the season) rather than agrarian, they still cultivated and shaped the lands they lived on. They helped to shape and were also shaped by the ecology.
European and American settlers blew almost all of that away without even realizing it in many cases. In California, all it took was introducing grazing animals and declaring land private property.
Some humans suck so much. Like this whole thread is a painful read, even as a random European.
Yeah. There’s also post contact/reservation foods and less accessible are traditional foods of people whose land was less actively stolen like the Alaskan Natives. I’ve had a bit of traditional Yupik food and it isn’t bad
If y’all get a chance, try Navajo Tacos.
I adore Navajo Tacos! Ironically, they are a post colonial invention that was the result of the US forcing the Navajo into concentration camps and issuing them rations of flour, sugar, and lard. The Navajo people invented fry bread with their limited ingredients, which became the base for many other foods later on.
This got me in a rabbit hole and I got curious about what indigenous/Native American cuisine would be like because I genuinely didn’t know and came across a good list of indigenous owned restaurants as well as a bunch of new recipes to try, in case anyone else is curious.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/native-american-restaurants-in-the-us
https://www.tastingtable.com/1297689/native-american-foods-should-try-once/
Things we would call “Mexican” food are indigenous food. Mole, empanadas, certain types of salsa. We just call it something else. I mean, they had corn and tomatoes all the way up most of the U.S.
Surely it wasn’t all the same clear up into the US eastern seaboard though, right? Mexican (Aztec/Nahua) food is great and all, but I’m interested in what the natives in my specific part of the continent would’ve been eating, which here in Georgia would mean Creek and/or Cherokee cuisine.
Sure, I’m just saying If you want a version of “authentic” native American food a lot of what we call Mexican food is alive and well in the modern day. I’m sure cornmeal was a staple of a lot of the US before modern borders and we categorized it as central American food.
The Mississippians were growing corn in the Midwest. I am sure it was grown in the East as well. When you have a domesticated plant that grows pretty much everywhere and is able to fulfill a lot of your dietary needs, it spreads and spreads. See wheat or rice. Or in the Andes, potatoes. Or taro in Polynesia.
There would be a ton of local variety since a large number of different tribes and societies had varying access to local fauna and game, plus trade. Think of the variety we have from Canada to Argentina and that is likely a comparable range to the wildly different native populations. Food near the great lakes would be completely different from food in the tropics and completely different from the foods in the mountains of the southern continent with a ton of variety in between.
Kind of like the massive variety in the continent of Africa.
To be more accurate, smallpox killed somewhere between like 65-95% of the native american population after contact with Europeans. And, of course, many of their remaining descendants ended up concentrated into reservations.
So, I imagine if you were going to find native american cuisine restaurants, they’d be rare but typically in and around reservations.
Guns, Germs, and Steel covers that in a brief but eye-opening way. When Hernando de Soto’s crew first explored the Mississippi river in 1541 they wrote about all the people they found, but did not mention bison. A century later another set of Spanish explorers revisited the Mississippi and didn’t record much at all about people, but commented on how prolific the bison were.
Worth noting GGS is incredibly poorly received in the anthropology community. If this was reddit most of the major history and anthro subs have a bot to debunk much of it.
Jarred Diamond, the author of GGS, is an eye doctor and bird expert. He isn’t a good source for this stuff.
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CGP Grey is such an odd person. Charming, good presentation, sometimes has weird takes.
His video on how to solve traffic uses “mass automatic cars talking to each other” which ignores hundreds of thousands city planners and other actual experts advice: public transit.
Worth noting that “solution” was strongly promoted when I sold cars. If you do have some from of assistive cruise control you should use it.
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Didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.
If you want to look into it the askhistorians FAQ is great
Many reservations are far from the original habitat of the people living in them, (see Trail of Tears) so the food materials for their original cuisine can’t be found or grown
The initial Spanish expeditions had herds of pigs with them, which transmitted a ton of diseases to the natives. A hundred years later when other Europeans came the cities were almost completely depopulated.
People are weirdly against this idea, I think because they believe it diminishes the deliberate genocide that came later, which it doesn’t. The horrible truth is that disease spread through completely biologically defenseless populations starting in the late 15th century. By the time European countries were consolidating colonial power, the Native population had been obliterated by somewhere between 65–89%. Those aren’t extremes, that’s a range of completely plausible figures. The variance is so large because it’s hard to tell how many people used to live in a place when disease, unaided, killed every person in every settlement in unthinkably huge areas. To say entire tribes disappeared is an understatement, entire networks of multiple cultures were wiped out so thoroughly that their memory is lost forever. The Native American population in 1800 was a small fraction of the number of people who once lived.
Didn’t Lewis and Clarke note how often they found abandoned settlements?
Not sure about Lewis and Clark, but I have read that David Thompson did.
George Vancouver recorded beaches strewn with old human bones. Around the same time he wrote journal entries along the lines of, “Wow, look at all this rich, uninhabited land that would be ideal for settlements!” I don’t recall Ol’ George ever putting two and two together.
Never knew that, wow.
Even in the american mythos of the mayflower it mentions them surviving off established food caches and stores from abandoned settlements. People dont think much about that, but they werent left behind because the natives were so welcoming to the Pilgrims.
Their diminished population just made it a whole lot easier for Europeans to commit further atrocities
“Most of them” is the understatement of the day. Our country killed nearly all of them.
It is truly staggering the extent of the destruction we caused on the natives to this land.
Wiki says 96% of them were killed. That’s something like 3.6 million humans were slaughtered.
And most all of their land taken.
It’s an injustice in this country that we don’t learn about it more and try to atone as best we can.
It’s worth remembering that most of them were killed by disease, and that the diseases travelled faster than the colonists. Europe had had centuries of people living in filthy cities where all kinds of diseases were constantly breeding. The survivors carried those diseases but were immune to them. As soon as they met the native populations, the natives were exposed to countless deadly diseases that were completely new to them.
Now, sure, the colonists went and tried to slaughter as many natives as they could, but often they’d get to a new native settlement and find it was mostly empty because everybody had already either died or fled. Who knows, the natives might have been able to put up a fight against the colonists if they hadn’t been so devastated by the diseases. I’d bet that the colonists just took all the natives dying as another sign that their conquest was blessed by their god.
The city of Cohokia was unrivaled in population on the continent until post-colonial Philadelphia about 800 years later, and by some estimates may have even rivaled contemporary London at its peak
There’s other native American cities being found hidden in the jungles of South America too.
The amount of history, stories and people that have been lost to the sands of time are incredible
Keep in mind that at the time London wasn’t all that big a city.
Cahokia is estimated at between 12k and 40k people. That’s a decent sized city for sure, but around the same time, Baghdad had a population over 1 million. Uruk in modern-day Iraq had 40k people at 3000 BC, and Ur hit 100k by 2000 BC. Rome and Alexandria hit 1 million 2000 years ago.
I think Tenochtitlan was more impressive, not only because of the population (estimated at between 200k and 400k on the day Cortez arrived) but also because of how the city looked, basically a city built into the middle of a lake. I still love to look at Thomas Kole’s visualizations of the city
By the way, if you haven’t read Cahokia Jazz, you should. It’s a fun crime story, set in a world where Cahokia didn’t fall, and where the independent native people are waging political battles to keep their freedom as Europeans claim the rest of the continent.
There’s a good reason that Hitler’s concentration camps and Final Solution were inspired by America’s campaign against the native nations.
We pioneered race science too
Of that 96% starvation and disease killed many/most. The USA absolutely waged genocidal campaigns against the various tribes but that 3.6 million includes other deaths as well.
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Active or not, the Europeans and then the Americans caused the collapse of their civilization.
Imo all deaths are related.
Many weren’t intentional though. There was diseases spread initially by livestock that killed many of that 3.6 million.
Yes, there absolutely were intentional campaigns of genocide but a lot of natives just caught the flu and had zero defense to it. Nobody intentionally gave them the flu because many of these people never saw Europeans.
I guess my sticking point is, does it matter if it was intentional? Contact with Europe destroyed them from both accidents and outright malice. It was still genocide even if it was on accident, imo.
“Guns, Germs, & Steel”?
Yes GGS= Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. OP already used the full name.
I have a suspicion that if it weren’t for all the disease the colonizers would have destroyed them anyway.
Also nobody intentionally made them deathly ill? Smallpox blankets.
You’re not wrong.
However, it is worth pointing out that the documented “smallpox blankets” stuff happened in the 1700s and 1800s, which was already a century or two after the continent had been greatly depopulated by diseases spread unintentionally.
Measles, syphillis, rubella, mumps, chickenpox even. chickenpox is especially dangerous to adults who never had it.
shooting bison and smallpox blankets say hello
I mentioned starvation specifically because of the needless slaughter of bison.
We count that in the genocide
my point is it is completely fair to say white America killed the vast majority of the natives
whitewashingly pedantic to blame the gun and not the man pulling the trigger
I’m from Oklahoma and rarely saw a Native American. Saw an old guy in Chicago one time and we about shit.
I’ve been living in Oklahoma for over 20 years now, and I’ve still never seen a Native American.
That’s true, but it’s also important to not overstate it. Anti indigenous groups love to claim that since we basically wiped them out it’s a fool’s errand to give the survivors their reasonable demands like traditional lands and respecting tribal sovereignty.
Very few real Aztecas dance in Mexico Tenochtitlan these days too. I wonder why.
Check out Sioux Chef in Minneapolis. That one is pretty good!
Natv in Broken Arrow is pretty good.
Because you arent looking?
We have a few here in my city… Maybe you just gotta actually go look around a bit more…?
Spent my first 30 years in Oklahoma. Never heard of or seen one.
It’s not the same everywhere. Chicago has one of the biggest restaurant scenes in the country and there aren’t any Native American restaurants. There are a few Mexican restaurants that do one or two traditional dishes, but that’s it.
That’s surprising, there was one in the 50k pop town I grew up in.
You probably have more native folks than some regions. Columbus Ohio is a significant enough culinary city, but not only are there no reservations here in ohio, of the five states we border only Michigan has any. Illinois also doesn’t have any. Here’s a map and you can see the reason for the disparities clearly on it. Any Native American cuisine in this region would be a personal project of someone’s.
