The Food Connection

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0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And today, we are starting the show outside, foraging for food. I have been searching this whole city, and I finally found them. Black locust trees, and they're blooming. This is Alexis Nicole Nelson. And I am a forager. Ghost flowers, let's go make snacks. Which is a very fun way to say I eat plants that do not belong to me. And I teach other people how to do the same thing.

1:28Coolest job title ever. Eatin' mulberries in Central Park. Alexis is best known on TikTok, where she has over 2 million followers. We're making dandelion root coffee. And is kind of a foraging legend. Dig up some dandelions. Your neighbors will probably thank you. For those who haven't seen Alexis' work, her videos are all about her foraging adventures. finding cool plants, teaching people all about them, and then using them to cook amazingly delicious dishes. The kitchen smells so good. Look what in there. Rosewater. Filthy foragers. There's a lot of singing little ditties. There's a lot of quippy fun facts and little jokes.

2:12This free is very good. A lot of yelling about plants and fungi. You say yelling, but actually it's more just like hyped up enthusiasm, right? Thank you. Those are much kinder words. So sweet. Happy foraging. Don't die. So when you forage, Alexis, like you walk into your backyard or into a forest. And what do you see that I guess most of us don't? It's like a supermarket basically for you. It's like Disney World, but plants and full of much cheaper food. You walk in and you see this very vibrant ecosystem that like we are a part of. And there's something so fulfilling about it, right? You're just like, I pulled this out of the ground and now it's sustaining me.

3:07Yeah. Food is a way to connect with other people. Food is a way to express love. Food is a way to express creativity. I think I look into natural spaces and I just see wonder. Food, it's a basic need and one of life's greatest pleasures. But for many, accessing nutritious and affordable food isn't always easy. We have nearly 50 million people that are living food insecure, which means they never know when or where their next meal is coming from. And on top of that, the ways we produce and consume food are harming the planet. Human population has doubled in the last 50 years and meat consumption has tripled.

3:58How can we produce enough good food for a growing global population? I think that was the best place to start was just opening up my eyes and starting to see the world around me for what it had to offer. We need solutions to secure our food for the future and reconnect with the land that feeds us. So today on the show, the food connection. Ideas from people who are taking lessons from the past and others who are experimenting with new technologies to change the way we eat. For Alexis Nicole Nelson, collecting ingredients out in nature has helped her reconnect to her food. She first discovered foraging when she was just five years old.

4:42I remember gardening with my mother at the house I grew up in. And this one day stands out in my mind with me probably not helping at all. And her pointing out some grass in our yard that looked different than all of the other grass, which until she pointed it out to me, I had never noticed. So my mom tells me to go and break some for her. I break it and suddenly it's the air is just like perfumed with garlic. And she's like, that is onion grass. You know how we sometimes cook with like green onions. You can cook with that too. And warning, if you tell a five-year-old that, they will just start breaking plants in your yard and seeing if magical smells emanate from them.

5:33And eating them. Yes. Okay. So your mom was very into plants, clearly. Did you get your love of food and gardening and the outdoors from your parents, do you think? Oh, absolutely. So on my dad's side of the family, his mom is also of indigenous ancestry, Iroquois ancestry. So he was just being exposed to foodways that some of his peers weren't necessarily while he was a kid, while he was a teenager. And my dad's excellent in the kitchen. And it was really this kind of coming together of the two things that I enjoyed doing with my parents the most as a kid. And I'm very lucky to be a Black kid who grew up with two Black parents who were also very outdoorsy.

6:21Because not all of us get it. There really is kind of like a, there's been this cultural separation between a lot of Black folks and the outdoors. But historically, there was no separation, right? And you have been studying just what happened. Can you explain? Yeah, absolutely. 100%. So back, especially in the South, while a lot of Black folks were still enslaved, there was a whole lot of kind of knowledge trading between Black folks and Indigenous folks in a lot of the Southern states and a lot of like the Midwestern and Northern states too. And for a lot of people who were enslaved, the way that you beefed up like the meager meals or the scraps that you were given was often by supplementing with foraging, with trapping, with fishing.

7:16So that was knowledge that was a huge part of like early Black culture here in the Americas. after they were emancipated, suddenly laws were getting put in place very rapidly about only being able to kind of reap the benefits of land that you owned. And if you are newly freed, odds are you do not own land. No. So if you can't hunt and forage on public property and you don't yet have private property to your name, boom, That is a part of your life that you are not partaking in anymore. And it doesn't take a whole lot of generations passing for that knowledge to just kind of fall away completely.

8:05Huh. And is this true then that like when there was an opportunity to go foraging, it was kind of like, well, I don't have the handed down knowledge in any way. Only poor people would do that. Yeah, then you have this really weird thing happen in the 20th century where everyone is like wanting to show off wealth. So then foraging kind of became taboo, even if you did have the knowledge. And that was regardless of race. Foraging very much got looked down upon because why would you be, you know, heading down to the creek to gather pawpaws when you can go to the grocery store and get a banana? And in the 1950s and 1960s, being a Black person out in nature, out in the woods, out in predominantly white spaces was like a very scary thing to do.

8:55For the sake of your safety, that's not a space that you would want to necessarily be in. And it was kind of like a three-combo punch to us culturally moving away from getting to know our natural spaces. And I am one of a myriad of people who is actively trying to combat that. And do you feel like it's working? Like, what kind of feedback do you get from your followers? Yeah, one of the best days I think I've ever had in my life, I was out foraging and a girl who also happens to be Black, probably a teenager, she runs up to me and she's like, you are that girl from TikTok. talk. And I was like, oh my God, yes.

9:48And she was so excited. And so I got to like take her and show her what I was there harvesting. I got to like give her and her mom like a cut leaf tooth wart leaf so they could taste like the spicy brassica-y-ness from it. And the way that her and like her friends and her mom's like face lit up, I went home and I cried. I cried for like a solid 20 minutes because that's, oh my gosh, it's like almost overwhelming. And the thing that stuck with me was, she was just like, you're doing this for the culture. Man, I'm starting to tear up just thinking about it now.

10:36In some ways, through foraging, you are helping people reconnect with their own history and the ways that people used to eat off the land, like in a seasonal, sustainable way. Yeah. So many of us have such a fraught relationship with food. and a lot of that is due in part to like societal pressures a lot of that is due to how processed food is and I personally I have had a historically very fraught relationship with food I grew up very overweight and so I was always being pressured to to eat less cook less I I, full disclosure, like dealt with an eating disorder in my early and my mid-20s, in which food was like very much the enemy, in which I had to like train myself to stop thinking about this subject that I had loved thinking about and dreaming about my entire childhood.

11:43And in a way, diving back into foraging was the way that I fell back in love with food. It was not on purpose. I was super poor after college, living in a house with five of my friends and wanting to eat things other than ramen and canned vegetables. and so I was like, ah, well, you know, let me turn to some of that, like, weird knowledge that I had just been amassing for no reason as a kid.

12:24And it just brought me this joy and this, like, connection to place that I didn't have at that point in time. so much so that I went out and I sought out more information and I got more bold with my cooking and, you know, started being willing to put like flour and bread into my food again and, you know, was willing to make sweet things again. I just, there's something soul nourishing about caring about what you're nourishing your body with. That's forager Alexis Nicole Nelson You can find her on TikTok at Alexis Nicole and on Instagram and Twitter at Black Forager On the show today The Food Connection I'm Manoush Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR Stay with us

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15:38with more ideas from TED speakers, and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show. And that's because you are directly supporting our work at NPR. So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED, or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, The Food Connection. If you visit Sean Sherman's restaurant Awamni in Minneapolis, you will find a pretty unique menu. So we've got a lot of duck, a lot of geese, pheasant, venison, elk, things like that.

16:26Dishes like preserved rabbit, bison tartare. Lots of wonderful lake fish from across this region and around the Great Lakes. Grilled root Vegetables with dandelion pesto and hand-harvested wild rice. We have many varietals of corn, beans, lots of wild berries, lots of wild foods in general. So there's a lot of cedar, there's a lot of bergamot, things like that. But what you won't find is anything that isn't native to North America. We cut out colonial ingredients of things that didn't exist here before. So we don't use any dairy, any wheat flour, any cane sugar. and we're not using beef, pork, or chicken for protein choices.

17:06So we just try to cook and make food taste like where we are and get people to think about the history of the land that they're standing on. Sean is a restaurant owner, chef, and the founder and CEO of the company, The Sioux Chef. As an S-I-O-U-X, since I'm a part of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe. When I called Sean on a Monday, the restaurant was closed, but he was prepping for the week ahead. Okay, so what are you doing? What are you cooking right now? So we've got a big pot of choke cherries today that my mom brought to the restaurant. She was just in the Black Hills, and I was probably cooking about 20 pounds of choke cherries.

17:42And that smell of wild choke cherries cooking just is something that always just shoots me back to being a young kid in my grandmother's kitchen. Sean, Lamni sounds unlike any restaurant I have ever been to. And that is kind of the point, right? It is. you know, it's kind of unfortunate that we're, you know, one of the only restaurants of this kind out there. It opens up a lot of conversation. You know, it opens up that question, why aren't there more Native restaurants out there? And it does start with history. I mean, it's just the relations of Indigenous peoples and primarily the United States government.

18:16You know, it's going to be important overall to know these pieces in history that have happened to us and have really kept us down for a long time. Here's more from Sean Sherman on the TED stage. I think what's most damaging for us and why we don't have a lot of indigenous restaurants out there was the loss of our education. Because this whole generation, like my great-grandfather's generation and my grandfather's generation, they should have been learning everything their ancestors intended them to learn. You know, how to fish, how to hunt, how to gather, how to identify plants, how to live sustainably utilizing plants and animals around us.

18:50But instead, we went through a really intense assimilation period. The boarding school systems stripped this whole generation of all that knowledge and education. And we're still reeling from that in our communities today because of this direct link to the trauma that happened there. And being Indigenous in the 1900s was much better. My grandparents were born before they were even citizens, which doesn't happen until 1924. We couldn't vote until 1965. We couldn't celebrate religions until 78, you know? So what does it look like for me growing up in this? Like, I was born in the mid-70s and growing up in post-colonial America.

19:25Like, what kind of foods was I eating? People in the media are always like, you're native. Like, what kind of foods did you grow up with? Because they want to hear a cool story. Like, oh, I'd get up in the morning, take down an elk with a slingshot I made, have a big family feast, you know. But that wasn't the reality, you know, because, like, I grew up with a commodity food program because we were poor, like a lot of people on the reservation. And it's just the way it was. And we didn't even have the pretty cans when I was growing up. We just had these, like, black and white cans, just beef and juices.

19:50And that's dinner, you know, and that sucks. We could do better than There's so much more to learn and more to offer with indigenous foods. Sean, I just want to emphasize this point that, as you say, indigenous foods like the ones you are serving today in your restaurant, they weren't really around when you were growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Yep. We did harvest things like this wild prairie turnip that we call timsula and chokecherries. And there were some elders that have held on to some recipes, but a lot of it was colonized. I remember my mom giving me a cookbook. She's like, oh, we already have a cookbook featuring all the Lakota foods.

20:28And it just kind of read like a Lutheran cookbook. So it's just like, no, mom, I'm looking for recipes without cream of mushroom soup, you know. So I wanted to know, like, what kind of wild foods were we utilizing? So it just was a long path of self-study to try and figure it out because there, you know, was no joy of Native American cooking out there for me. No. So where did you turn to your sources for information about this? Was it people? Was it, I don't know, archives? Yeah, a little bit of everything, you know, because I would just talk to people, some of their memories, try to filter what might have been indigenous and what was obviously brought on later.

21:03Spent a lot of time outdoors and really just trying to understand what are the purpose of all these plants that my ancestors would have known. You know, is it food? Is it medicine? Can you craft with it? Or can you do all three? And I think that was the best place to start was just opening up my eyes and starting to see the world around me for what it had to offer. So you run the restaurant, but you also founded something called the Indigenous Food Lab, where your goal is to teach people the fundamentals of Indigenous food education. What are those fundamentals? So I think the first thing that you do is just identify what does the term Indigenous education mean.

21:39So to break down that, first off, Indigenous education was thousands of generations of knowledge being handed down, family member after family member, community after community, giving people basically the blueprint to live sustainably, utilizing plants and animals of your region and all the tradition that goes along with it. And understanding the immense amount of diversity out there, because indigenous peoples obviously isn't one group. You know, there's still 576 tribes federally recognized in the U.S., 622 in Canada, 20 % of Mexico identifying as indigenous. So when we're breaking down indigenous knowledge, we're looking at the wild foods, permaculture, agriculture, seed saving, regional histories, medicines, food preservation, fermentation, nutrition, health, spirituality, sustainability, cooking techniques.

22:23It just goes on and on. It's a whole education because that's what all of our educations were. We have a community garden that we do ourselves and we're growing a lot of heirloom seed varietals, whether they're corns, beans, squash, amaranth, tobacco, chilies. And our goal is really utilizing our food lab as a place where tribal communities, especially around us, can work with us so we can help them develop healthy indigenous culinary projects for their community and share a lot of this knowledge base and education with their own community too and just help grow it. And that's why we should have Native American food restaurants all over the nation run by indigenous peoples, right?

23:00And for us, we just want to get this food back into tribal communities especially and make people healthy and happy and break a lot of the cycle of, you know, government reliance on food and huge rates of type 2 diabetes and obesity and heart disease because of this low nutritional food base that the government's been feeding us for too long. Indigenous diet is really kind of the most ideal diet. It's healthy fats, it's diverse proteins, it's low carbs, it's low salts, it's a ton of plant diversity, and it's seasonal, you know? It's just really good. It's like what the paleo diet wishes it was, really, when it comes down to it.

23:33Like, because it just makes sense, you know? If we can control our food, we can control our future. And for us, it's an exciting time to be Indigenous because we are taking all of these lessons from our ancestors that should have been passed down to us, relearning them and utilizing the world today with everything it has to offer and becoming something different. You know, this is an indigenous evolution and revolution at the same time. You have said, Sean, in the past that sharing culture through food is healing. What do you mean by that? I think that, you know, again, like it just opens up people.

24:11So if you think of the first time you maybe have experienced sushi or Ethiopian food or something like that, and how that affected you, the flavors and the thoughts and how it changed your perception of that country or that culture of whatever it might be. And it creates curiosity and you want to know more and you want to learn more. And I think that for indigenous peoples who have had such a rough time, especially with the US government, and we've had so much stripped away from us that it's really important to experience some of these flavors that are true representation of where we are. If you can taste these foods and have places to taste them and understand, it's going to open up a lot more people for compassion and understanding.

24:50And, you know, we can live in a better world. That's Sean Sherman, co-owner of Awamni in Minneapolis and founder of The Sous Chef. You can see his full talk at TED.com. On the show today, ideas on reconnecting to what we eat. and solutions for some of our biggest food problems, which includes hunger. There's a lot that has to do with just access, which is why I have always said that hunger is not an issue of scarcity. There's more than enough food. This is social entrepreneur Jasmine Crow. For the last four years, she's been trying to figure out how to redirect healthy food that might be wasted to the people who need it.

25:37ever since she visited a food bank in 2017 and saw what was on offer. I always remember the biggest thing is they were giving away a gallon of barbecue sauce. So just think like a whole gallon of milk, but it's filled with barbecue sauce and then no meat. They had Weight Watchers, Ding Dongs, some Belveeta breakfast biscuits. There were these superhero shaped macaroni noodles, a couple of canned goods, Like a very small can of corn, a can of peas, a can of refried beans, some kettle potato chips, French fried green onions. And that's what they were giving people. That was it. Nothing was fresh.

26:16Nothing made sense. I couldn't think that someone would be able to take those items home and actually make a meal of them. I learned that it was ultimately the case for a lot of food banks and a lot of food pantries. They would receive donations of whatever it was going to be that week, and that's what it was. And what I saw that that was doing is it made people have to go to a lot of different food banks because they never knew what they were going to get. It, to me, was a real eye-opening experience of there being a huge difference in this country between access to food and access to meals. So Jasmine started to investigate why food banks weren't solving the U.S.'s hunger problem.

27:01She continues from the TED stage. In almost every major U.S. city, the food bank is viewed as a beloved community institution. Corporations send volunteers down on a weekly basis to sort through food items and make boxes of food for the needy. and canned drives. They warm the hearts of schools and office buildings that participate and fill the shelves of food banks and food pantries across the nation. This is how we work to end hunger. And what I've come to realize is that we are doing hunger wrong. We've created a cycle that keeps people dependent on food banks and pantries on a monthly basis for food that is often not well-balanced and certainly doesn't provide them with a healthy meal.

27:42Yet we're wasting more food than ever before, More than 80 billion pounds a year to be exact. And as this food sits, it gradually rots and produces harmful methane gas, a leading contributor to global climate change. You have the waste of the food itself, the waste of all the money associated with producing this now wasted food, and the waste of labor with all of the above. All of this made me realize that hunger was not an issue of scarcity, but rather a matter of logistics. I mean, Jasmine, that is staggering. I cannot even picture how much 80 billion pounds of food. Like, what does that even look like?

28:21We are wasting so much every year. And I want to stress that this is not food that's also coming from our households, because if you factor that number in, it's even greater. But from consumer-facing businesses, every year, 80 billion pounds of perfectly good food goes to waste. So these are the restaurants, These are the grocery stores you go to, the hotels. All that food gets thrown away. While at the same time, we have nearly 50 million people that are living food insecure, which means they never know when or where their next meal is coming from. I just couldn't believe that we were living in a society that was allowing that to happen.