Award-winning chef on staying true to North American ingredients in his cookbook

If we look at the world through an indigenous lens, we can start to see that we have a deeper connection to the earth. We have more understanding of the plants around us, because the indigenous diet includes so many plants, right? And there's so much that we could be doing, and it's just also owning up to this history of things that's happened. This work is really important because it thinks about North America as a whole. We have this massive continent, and the Western diet's completely ignored so much of this beautiful plant diversity and protein diversity that's here. Our. Our philosophy was, in order to showcase North American indigenous foods, we took away European ingredients, right? So there's no dairy, no wheat flour, no cane sugar, no beef, no pork, no chicken. Those things didn't exist here. So we wanted to showcase what was really here. So using heirloom varietals of things like corns and beans and squash, and the agriculture that was here, utilizing all the wild foods and all the wild plants, over half of our menu is completely plant based because there's no cheese and butter and everything, and we can still make food taste good, right?