North American Food
Early on, until about 2000 BC, people in North America ate only wild foods that they could hunt or gather.
These foods varied according to the environment where each group of people lived. Inuit people, who lived in the far north along the coasts of the Arctic Ocean and in Alaska, ate a lot of fish and seal meat, and gathered seaweed. Chinook people, who lived a little further south in the Pacific Northwest (modern Oregon and Washington) ate a lot of salmon, and wapato, which was a lot like potatoes. Further south, Californian people ate a lot of bread made from acorns.
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In the south-west (modern Arizona and New Mexico), Pueblo people ate cactus fruit and pine nuts, and hunted rabbits and birds for meat. The people who lived in the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, like the Blackfoot, the Sioux, the Ute, and the Navajo, ate a lot of mammoth, at first, and then when the mammoth all died out, they began to eat a lot of buffalo meat. They dried and smoked the buffalo meat so they could eat it for a long time after a hunt, making beef jerky. Ute people also ate a lot of pine nuts, which they gathered from the trees, and sunflower seeds.
Further east, along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers,
people also ate a lot of fish and gathered nuts and berries. Along the Great
Lakes, Cree people ate fish with wild
rice that they gathered in the wetlands around the lakes.
And on the East Coast, the Iroquois
and the Algonquin ate venison (deer meat) and fish, and also pigeon and
turkey and rabbit. Sometimes they ate bear, which was important even though
it was hard to get, because it had a lot of fat,
and the deer and fish didn't. Like the Californians, they gathered acorns
to make bread, and they also made bread out of sunflower
seeds. To sweeten their food, they used maple sugar and maple syrup,
and also honey. Cooks put maple sugar in bread, stew, tea, and vegetables,
and people sprinkled it on top of their berries. In the south-east, Cherokee
people ate a lot of turtle, fish, and venison, sweet
potatoes and also acorn bread.
An important food for people who were travelling or hunting was pemmican, a sort of energy bar made of berries and chopped meat, that people could eat without having to stop and cook anything.
But around 1000 BC, people began to eat very differently in North America. The Pueblo people began to farm about this time. They got corn and beans and squash from the pre-Olmec people of Mexico, and they began to eat a lot of these three crops (the "Three Sisters") instead of the wild foods. People made corn into a flat bread, like modern tacos and tortillas, and rolled up mashed beans inside these wrappers (The beans were the same beans we eat in enchiladas today, but they also had kidney beans and lima beans), with other vegetables like green peppers.
Farming soon spread to other parts of North America, and by 1000 AD most people in the Mississippi Valley and along the East Coast were eating a lot of corn, beans and squash (the Three Sisters) along with their wild food. Along the East Coast, people also ate a lot of sunflower seeds that they grew, and used sunflower oil.
One important food that these farming people ate was succotash, which was a kind of stew made of lima beans, corn, meat, and bear fat.
People also ate roasted or boiled corn on the cob, popcorn, bean soup and pumpkin soup.
Whether they were farming or not, everybody's main drink
was water. When they could, though, many people liked to drink herbal tea better
than just plain water. People made tea with sassafras, or added pumpkin
blossoms or corn silk to thicken their water.
People in California added lemonade berries to their water to make a sour
drink like modern lemonade.
To find out more about North American food before 1500 AD, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
Native North American Foods And Recipes, by Kathryn Smithyman (2005). Written for middle schoolers.
Turkeys, Pilgrims, and Indian Corn: The Story of the Thanksgiving Symbols, by Edna Barth (2000). For middle schoolers.
North American
food after 1500 AD
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