Where Is All the Native Food?

Of course, local food is also represented well: New York–style pizza shops dot every other block; bagels and babkas abound; and farm-to-table establishments serve regionally-harvested ingredients to diners in every borough. 

But there is a different kind of local food that is harder to find. If you’re seeking a meal that is prepared using ingredients native to the land, prepared according to methods honed by people living here since time immemorial—in the case of New York City, that’s the Lenni Lenape—then the choices are few and far between. 

So where is all the Native food? 

It turns out that question has a better answer in Minneapolis, Minnesota—where renowned chef Sean Sherman and the organization he leads, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), are working to change the continent’s relationship to ingredients that are traditional to Indigenous cultures and histories. 

Created in 2017, NATIFS has become an ambitious culinary organization whose wide-ranging programs and initiatives can make it hard to define. One way to understand the organization’s mission is to visit its award-winning Owamni restaurant, which sits on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis’s Mill Ruins Park. 

Famously, Owamni refrains from using ingredients introduced by European colonizers. That excludes wheat flour, cane sugar, dairy, beef, pork, and chicken from the menu.  

What’s left to compose Owamni dishes? It’s a lot more than one might think.  

“In America, Indigenous foods haven’t really been a part of the conversation until recently,” Sherman says, which means that many eaters have little idea of, for example, the “immense plant diversity out there that Western diets completely ignore.” In contrast, Owamni’s 2025 winter menu features lesser-known plant additions like tepary beans, juniper maple, and sweetgrass.  

Not only do Indigenous ingredients such as these tend to be healthier and more sustainable, but they also hold real educational potential. Sherman asks, “What were our food sources? How did we gather salts, fats, and sugars?” Answering questions like these informs menu development and also uncovers historical insights about Indigenous communities that have been forgotten or ignored. They are also prompts to be shared with the visitors who eat at Owamni, as care is taken by servers to educate about the ingredients on the plates. In Sherman’s view, “the more we normalize seeing Indigenous foods out there, the more people understand that it’s not just lost or decimated cultures, but thriving cultures that are creating solutions for our food system.”  

In other words, by reintroducing Native food, Owamni is creating an occasion for a new conversation—about ingredients that are rooted in the past and offer a way forward for the future. 

When Owamni opened in 2021, it was one of just a small handful of restaurants that, as Sherman has put it, “represent the food and people that were there before.” A lot has changed in four years. Today, Sherman regularly fields requests for advice and support from up-and-coming Indigenous chefs and food groups. And while Indigenous restaurants in the US are far from fully representative of the vast range of Native North American food traditions, the volume has increased exponentially (even if not in New York) to the point that one can now find listicles on the best places to try Native American food in the US. The movement is just getting started. 

There’s no doubt the success of restaurants like Owamni should be celebrated. But Sherman and NATIFS also recognize that going to a restaurant is a financial privilege—and that people should be able to eat the food and benefit from Native knowledge regardless of their economic circumstances. 

It’s precisely this ethic of access that motivates an expansive array of public-facing programming offered by NATIFS in Minneapolis and (increasingly) beyond.  

In addition to owning Owamni, NATIFS runs an Indigenous Food Lab that offers classes on everything from Native American cooking and farming techniques to Indigenous medicines and languages. It also operates a market within Minneapolis’s Midtown Global Market that serves affordable grab-and-go Indigenous meals, while carrying the products of over 50 Indigenous vendors and authors. It even maintains a YouTube page with over 100 videos that bring bite-sized bits of the organization (think recipe walk-throughs and explainer videos) to almost 20,000 subscribers. 

As these activities work together to disrupt fundamentally structural problems—centuries of land dispossession, forced relocation of Native people, and the ongoing imposition of non-Native foods—it’s fair to ask how the organization is able to advance change at any kind of scale. 

NATIFS’s answer: Become (at least part of) the food system. Indeed, because it has honed its food procurement and production know-how through its restaurant and market, NATIFS has a distinct opportunity to partner not only with local Indigenous reservations to meet food needs, but also with large food-serving institutions like schools and hospitals.  

That’s part of why the organization has focused its recent strategic growth on capital expansion—including the purchase of a three-story, 21,000-square-foot facility in South Minneapolis that will beef up the capacity of its Indigenous Food Lab to be a culturally specific food producer for the region. The effect can be a sort of virtuous circle: “You’re moving money to Indigenous producers, for food that gets created by an Indigenous workforce, which then goes to the Indigenous [and other] communities that need it the most,” Sherman describes. 

A grant from the Mellon Foundation is helping NATIFS take this holistic approach—that includes food education, production, and distribution—to sites outside of Minneapolis, including Bozeman, Montana, where the organization is partnering with organizations like the local food pantry. Expanding operations to additional locations is important not just because it could reach more people, but also because there is such diversity (of ingredients and preparation methods) across North American regions. If successful, Sherman sees a future in which an expanding set of regional food systems allows communities to decolonize their diets in ways that follow local traditions and respond to local needs—an option that hasn’t existed in North America for centuries.  

It’s a bold agenda for NATIFS to be balancing, and a lot of work is still on the table, but when asked about the possible stress of the restaurant operations, building acquisition, and organizational expansion swirling together, Sherman emphasizes the urgency of the opportunity at hand. He says, “If we start to learn from diverse Indigenous communities … that have deep connections to our land, there is a future for our humanity.”