Name: Andrea Condes
Location: Denver
Education/background: Associate and Bachelor degrees from The Culinary Institute of America – Hyde Park, NY
Business name: Four Directions Cuisine
Tribal affiliation: Andean
What led to your passion for Indigenous foods?
My interest in Indigenous foods started out as a personal journey. I am a transracial adoptee who spent 29 years disconnected from my culture. While I was living in Wisconsin, I came into relationship with several relatives from Oneida Nation who graciously shared stories and knowledge from their culture.
It helped spark self-education of Indigenous Native cultures from all over the Americas and globally. Being rooted in in my culture. while also educating myself on other Native Indigenous cultures feels like a dreamy place to exist. When elders and other knowledge keepers share with me, there is an understanding of trust that I will also keep this information safe and pass it along in a responsible way.
My way of storytelling and form of art is through food. When I book a food demonstration at a museum and get to step onto a stage to share where quinoa originated, why it’s important to the Andean people, and how it’s special from a nutritional and agricultural standpoint, I am actively keeping storytelling and knowledge exchange alive. Whoever is at that presentation will likely have a new understanding and respect for quinoa vs. only seeing it through the U.S. American marketing lens of “super food.”
Why do you think it’s important to make traditional foods accessible for Native people?
Our traditional foods are a huge part of our culture. They connect us to our traditional lands, our ancestry. It’s a part of our edible memory. For generations our foods and other aspects of culture were illegal. In South America, chicha was banned by the Spanish. In the U.S., the buffalo was brought to near extinction.
Our ancestors knew how to live self-sufficiently. The colonizers didn’t want that, so they cut us off from our traditional food ways in an effort to starve us out of existence or force us to rely on them for food access. Accessing our traditional foods is a cultural right and act of survival.
What is the importance of an Indigenous diet for a healthy lifestyle?
The Indigenous diet is very healthy and balanced. It’s also a huge part of our culture. Our diets connect to our food systems and that connects us to our communities. The food is one element of a healthy lifestyle. The community connectedness and support is another element.
Prior to colonization, throughout the Americas our people did not battle diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses created and exacerbated by the processed foods and chemicals that we’ve been exposed to. Our traditional foods are nutrient dense and healing medicines. Bison is healthier for our bodies than beef. Quinoa is one of a handful of plants that is a complete protein.
When food systems are community based, as they were for our ancestors, we can zero in on what individual pockets need instead of trying to apply a one-size-fits-all system to the masses. In the Andes, each village grows what it needs and what it can based on the environment. There are no big box stores controlled by corporations that only have their bottom line in mind.
Capitalism has convinced us that we need and deserve convenience, for a fee of course. Now we’re addicted to convenience and it’s a difficult cycle to get out of. It is made easier through the collective strength and resource sharing of community systems. On our street alone, there is a neighbor-friend who also grows crops in his yard. We share crops back and forth throughout the growing season and then when the colder weather sets in, he shares home baked sourdough bread and we share a jar of sauce or preserves that we made from our own harvest. There is another neighbor-friend who has a couple of mature apple trees. We have an open invitation to harvest every Fall, and we share jars of applesauce and apple butter made with those apples.
In what ways are you involved in the education, restoration and accessibility of traditional Native foods?
We work with local museums, non-profits, foundations and private businesses in a multitude of ways to share Indigenous Native knowledge.
We have had the privilege of working with Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, History Colorado, American Indian College Fund, University of Colorado system, Comcast, U.S. Bank, Anythink Libraries and many others.
We offer cooking classes and workshops ranging in subject from learning how to use a molcajeta to prepare salsa macha, to seed saving and food preservation techniques. We also offer collegiate presentations in the area of food sovereignty and building community food systems.
Over the past year, we have also been working hard to photograph plants in our education garden for informational slides, as well as create recipes and other content that we post to our social media platforms (@pachamama_nation and @fourdirectionscuisine on Instagram) for free. We don’t have a Patreon page or anything with a pay wall. We also include a special recipe in each monthly newsletter for our subscribers.
We have dreams of creating a powerful YouTube channel for Indigenous cuisine and plant education, but we haven’t designed the format we like the best yet, so it remains a project in progress.
How can community members be involved and support the cause of restoring and protecting indigenous food systems?
Look for opportunities to learn from Indigenous Native knowledge keepers. They might be in your family. You might not have that generational knowledge in your immediate family, but others do. Chat with folks. Look for safe groups on social media platforms. Find offerings from local Native community centers.
If you have any amount of growing space, from a windowsill to acreage, learn about the original people, plants and animals of that land and consider growing some of those plants. It can be herbs, fruit and vegetable crops, or flowering plants that attract pollinators. If everyone does a little something it culminates into an impactful shift towards restoration.
If available, sign up for a local CSA where the growers are utilizing sustainable cultural growing practices. If they don’t have a CSA or that’s not how you can engage, volunteering your time on the land can be helpful, donations (monetary, tools etc…), and simply sharing the farm’s work with your networks also goes a long way. For example, Ts’uyya Farm in Albuquerque grows in waffle gardens and is currently working on a project that maps waffle gardens in the Southwest and other geographical locations. Minoru Farm (me-no-Rue) is an Asian vegetable farm in Brighton, CO, with both summer and winter CSA shares.