The Southwest: Contact Attitudes toward Native American Foods

The reasons for disagreement over Native American meal patterns—whether they reflected tribal differences or the personal tastes of the observer—are not clear. For example, the flavors and textures of certain foods (buried, aged, and “rotted”) were foreign to Europeans, were not equated with comparable European fermentations such as aged wines and cheeses, and would have elicited negative reactions. Seasonality and intermittently available resources were not taken into account consistently, nor was the variability in quality and quantity due to the time of year. Native Americans categorized some foods as “starvation foods,” implying that they were prepared for times of scarcity when more desirable foods were in short supply. Observers might have seen Native Americans eating less appealing foods without understanding that such foods prevented starvation. In addition, the quality of food observed may have depended on the time of day, whether the foods described were snacks or the large meal of the day, whether the meal was a feast or an ordinary meal, whether eating had been scheduled to accommodate special projects, and whether the people were in a permanent encampment with access to stored food or in a temporary encampment with fewer resources. In addition, observers were not always sensitive to underlying standards of manners. For example, what may have seemed like carelessness or dirtiness to Europeans was often a strict native injunction against using food that had dropped to the ground, because such items were considered food for the dead.