@RusA #9857481 continued BTW.. How about the Indian native American foods, are they the same as Mexican foods?
The answer to this one is going to be long, so I put it in a separate post.
Mexican food is mostly a blend of Spanish and native Mexican cuisines, relying heavily on maize corn, beans, and local produce. What they call a "taco" is meat and condiments put onto a piece of flatbread (which may or may not be a tortilla made from maize) and then eaten by hand after folding it over. The "hardshell tacos" you get here in the States, as well as the burrito and other Taco Bell specialties, are as unfamiliar in Mexico as fortune cookies are in China. They also have a number of stews and sauces that go by the general name mole, pronounced "MOH-lay", which very often includes unsweetened cocoa as a bitter flavoring. Mexico is a large country, and as you would expect, has many regional cuisines, none of which are much like our "Mexican" food, which these days often goes by the more accurate name of "Tex-Mex".
Native American food is as varied as the tribes themselves: In the Eastern part of the country, where tribes were settled agricultural societies, the food is based on corn, beans, and squash (often planted together as "the Three Sisters"), as well as wild plants, and venison and small game like rabbits.
Around the Great Lakes, the tribes cultivate wild rice, as well as hunting and gathering. In the Great Plains, where the tribes were nomadic, they mostly lived off the enormous herds of bison, as well as what wild plants were in the area, especially seasonal berries. (Pemmican - meat pounded with berries and dried into a kind of jerky - was and is very popular.)
In the Pacific Northwest and other coastal regions, fish is very popular, especially salmon. Today there is a great deal of conflict in the Northwest between Indians and Anglos over fishing rights. By treaty with the Federal government, the tribal Indians can fish out-of-season, which Anglo fisherman consider an unfair advantage.
Native American food today is also influenced by the fact that many of the tribes have lived for decades on reservations that were usually established on poor land that nobody else wanted. Without the ability to hunt and gather in the traditional ways, the reservations were often without sufficient food supplies. So the people ate whatever was available, often relying on government commodities like flour, sugar, lard, and coffee. As a result, the contemporary cuisine is starchy and fatty, with obesity and diabetes being serious problems among reservation Indians. A typical everyday food for them is the "Indian taco", which is a piece of frybread (thick flatbread fried in meat grease) topped with whatever is available - often meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. Real Indian frybread is a treat, but it's not exactly health food. There is a considerable movement now to change all this, and to produce an authentic "Native" cuisine that combines contemporary techniques with traditional foodstuffs.
From the movie Thunderheart (1992): a half-Indian FBI agent amuses the teacher at the reservation school when he tells her that his father used to call him "Wasi", which he thought meant "good boy". She informs him that in the Lakota language, "Wasi is what we call the lard we put in stew. I think he meant that you were a chubby boy!"
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@RusA #9857481 continued
BTW.. How about the Indian native American foods, are they the same as Mexican foods?
The answer to this one is going to be long, so I put it in a separate post.
Mexican food is mostly a blend of Spanish and native Mexican cuisines, relying heavily on maize corn, beans, and local produce. What they call a "taco" is meat and condiments put onto a piece of flatbread (which may or may not be a tortilla made from maize) and then eaten by hand after folding it over. The "hardshell tacos" you get here in the States, as well as the burrito and other Taco Bell specialties, are as unfamiliar in Mexico as fortune cookies are in China.
Native American food is as varied as the tribes themselves: In the Eastern part of the country, where tribes were settled agricultural societies, the food is based on corn, beans, and squash (often planted together as "the Three Sisters"), as well as wild plants, and venison and small game like rabbits.
Around the Great Lakes, the tribes cultivate wild rice, as well as hunting and gathering. In the Great Plains, where the tribes were nomadic, they mostly lived off the enormous herds of bison, as well as what wild plants were in the area, especially seasonal berries. (Pemmican - meat pounded with berries and dried into a kind of jerky - was and is very popular.)
In the Pacific Northwest and other coastal regions, fish is very popular, especially salmon. Today there is a great deal of conflict in the Northwest between Indians and Anglos over fishing rights. By treaty with the Federal government, the tribal Indians can fish out-of-season, which Anglo fisherman consider an unfair advantage.
Native American food today is also influenced by the fact that many of the tribes have lived for decades on reservations that were usually established on poor land that nobody else wanted. Without the ability to hunt and gather in the traditional ways, the reservations were often without sufficient food supplies. So the people ate whatever was available, often relying on government commodities like flour, sugar, lard, and coffee. As a result, the contemporary cuisine is starchy and fatty, with obesity and diabetes being serious problems among reservation Indians. A typical everyday food for them is the "Indian taco", which is a piece of frybread (thick flatbread fried in meat grease) topped with whatever is available - often meat, cheese, lettuce, and tomato. Real Indian frybread is a treat, but it's not exactly health food.
From the movie Thunderheart (1992): a half-Indian FBI agent amuses the teacher at the reservation school when he tells her that his father used to call him "Wasi", which he thought meant "good boy". She informs him that in the Lakota language, "Wasi is what we call the lard we put in stew. I think he meant that you were a chubby boy!"