The idea of decolonizing your life can be broad: Doing it can mean taking apart how you speak, what you wear — even what you eat.
'Decolonize' Your Diet, Say Berkeley's Cafe Ohlone
Vinvent Medina (left) and Louis Trevino (right) gather herbs for dishes at Berkeley's Cafe Ohlone. (Courtesy of mak-'amham)
Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino from San Lorenzo are tackling the eating part by transforming how people in the Bay Area think about local food. Both Medina and Trevino belong to Ohlone communities native to the Bay: Medina is a member of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and Trevino is part of the Rumsen Ohlone tribe.
Their organization, mak-’amham, which means ‘our food’ in the Chochenyo Ohlone language, operates the pop-up restaurant Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley.
I sat down with Medina and Trevino this week to talk about out how deeply rooted colonialism is in our modern food. Below are some highlights from the interview, which have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
What does decolonizing your diet mean to you?
Vincent: Decolonizing our diet means returning back to the traditional ways that our ancestors ate, before colonization ever came to the Bay Area. We know there are foods that are inherently good for our bodies — that our bodies still recognize even to this day and that are extremely nutritious.
We know certain foods were imposed on our community by colonizing governments, like the Spanish, Mexican and American governments. These foods that were imposed on our people caused a lot of harm. They were foods that our bodies didn’t recognize, like white sugar, refined flours, dairy and alcohol. And we know that certain foods, in our view, were imposed on us to hold us down. When we are able to take away those foods that caused harm and return back to our traditional way of eating, we tap into all of these cultural benefits, as well as an improvement in our collective health and wellness.
Louis: It also means going into archives that were recorded by our people in the 1920s and 1930s and looking at those notes for references to food. It means learning about those foods and finding out where they were gathered and how they were prepared. Then you put that into practice and eat those foods regularly, share them with our families, share them with our elders and introduce them to our young people so that they can be a part of our future.
What are some traditional Ohlone foods being served now?
Vincent: So much of what we eat is seasonal. That’s something we celebrate because we know there are many nutritional benefits that come with eating seasonally. Right now, it’s acorn time. Acorn is a staple for us; no meal is complete without having acorn in some form on the plate. We process it until it’s made into a flour to make a soup and bread, which is just so delicate and rich, nutty and sweet.
Louis: Right now there are lots of stews, venison, and other dishes that are very warming to the body. There are lots of roots, lots of mushrooms — especially chanterelles, lobster mushrooms and yellowfin mushrooms.
How is Cafe Ohlone evolving local indigenous fare?
Louis: At Cafe Ohlone, we develop recipes that utilize our traditional foods in modern ways. Sometimes it’s to please the modern palate and sometimes it’s to have natural expressions of what we enjoy. An example of that is our acorn flour brownies, which we developed in order to introduce acorn, hazelnut and ground chia seeds to our young people. This recipe excludes dairy, gluten and refined sugars. Our original plan was to use this as a gateway food for acorn, to get young people hooked on it. We were going to phase out the brownies, but it turned out that our elders really enjoyed it so we couldn’t get rid of them. Now both of those things coexist.
Has the meaning of Thanksgiving changed for you?
Vincent: For me, it’s about being with family, eating more than we should probably eat and spending time with people we love. I didn’t think about this narrative that’s out there about Thanksgiving growing up because it’s so far removed from California — this narrative of the East Coast first Thanksgiving dinner. It happened at a much different time, before California was even colonized.
Of course, there’s always these feelings of frustration, because of how romanticized the story is. Indigenous people throughout North America have been abused for generations, for doing nothing beyond living in places that other people wanted to live. It’s important to tell the truth of what happened on the East Coast. But the regional stories of indigenous cultures are also important because people can learn how history has shaped where we’re at today and also see that native people of the Bay Area are alive and well.
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