Next month Craig will have his biggest showcase yet: he’s one of several Native American chefs (including Frank) who have been invited by the Chef’s Garden—a Huron, Ohio, farming company that grows produce used by many of the country’s top restaurants—to cook for more than 100 visiting chefs at a conference. “I’m hoping not just to present my version of Native American cuisine but to demonstrate to all these other chefs, who specialize in many different traditions, the indigenous roots of all types of cooking in the Americas, no matter what the cuisine,” he says.
To be sure, Craig’s high-end cooking isn’t going to address the health crisis among average Native Americans. According to the 2010 census, more than half of the 13,409 people on the Fort Apache reservation live below the poverty line. And the impoverishment extends to the land, once rich with fields of alfalfa and other crops but now largely fallow. In Cibecue, there’s a lone convenience store whose mostly barren shelves stock Pringles and a few other packaged snacks but no fresh fruit or vegetables.
“This area, which used to be rich with food, is now a food desert,” Craig says. He is trying to tackle this problem, too. Earlier this year, he co-founded a nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing agriculture and water use among Western Apaches. The organization has since built a garden in McNary, a small community on the reservation. It has also hosted cooking workshops at the Sunrise Park Resort and begun a program to deliver Native American packaged meals to the Apache elderly.
Craig says he thinks these initiatives are compatible with his high-cuisine aspirations. The ideas are linked by a common goal: to reintroduce indigenous cuisine to both Native Americans and the outside world. In culinary school almost 15 years ago, Craig says he was “force-fed the notion that there were only three mother cuisines: French, Italian, and Asian.” There are, of course, no shortage of groups—Middle Easterners, Africans, others—who might take issue with such reductionism. But Craig points out that each of the so-called mother cuisines was revitalized by contact with the foods of indigenous Americans. He points to the role of the tomato in modern Italian cooking. “And chilies changed all of the cooking of Asia forever,” he adds. Despite this, modern Native American cuisine has yet to attain the three-star Michelin renown or even general awareness that’s associated with ravioli or coq au vin. Craig hopes that will change. “My stance today,” he says, “is that Native American cuisine is the fourth mother cuisine and needs to be included in that list.”
Article Appeared @http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/08/23/nephi-craig-farm-to-table-food-and-the-movement-to-rediscover-native-american-cooking.html