Article by: Dale Carson / Indian Country Today 

The more connected you are to your roots, the better your diet probably is. The foods of your youth, or your parents' and grandparents' childhoods, are likely to be healthier than what you eat today unless you are vigilant about your eating habits. If you go home to visit and eat kneel-down bread or bannock or whatever is, and has been, a tribal staple, but stop at a fast food place on the way back, that doesn't cut it.

It is very hard to watch everything you eat; in fact, it is nearly impossible. There is, however, one food that we as Native people can always rely on for health, and that is corn. It is the one staple grain indigenous to both North and South America.

Although corn pollen discovered below Mexico City in the 1950s was carbon-dated as 80,000 years old, it took centuries for the cultivation of the golden grain to cover all of Indian country from the bottom of South America to Canada. There is corn oil, corn syrup and corn starch; and between them, food manufacturers provide a touch of corn in some way to everything in the supermarket. The lone exception may be fresh fish. Even frozen fish and meats have a light corn starch coating on them to keep them from drying out.

Photo courtesy usda/Alice Welch

Dent corn, sweet corn, flint and popcorn are the four major types of commercial corn grown in this country today. We grew our own flint corn and dried some, ground some and ate some. It was a good, secure feeling to know we could survive anything with the stores we had. That must have been comforting to our ancestors as well.