"Slow Foods" Keep You Skinny, Clean Out Your Arteries, Level Your Blood Sugar and Leave Your Teeth Alone

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Seneca Nation historian and "bioneer" John Mohawk, Ph.D., associate professor and co-director of the University at Buffalo Center for the Americas, is up to his knees in heirloom corn.

He is a staunch advocate of the slow-food movement, a worldwide effort to safeguard and promote the use of traditional, unprocessed foods that digest very slowly, which means they are a lot better for you than the foods that populate the average American diet.

Among the slow foods is Iroquois White Corn, once a staple of the Native American diet, that -- in a display of slow-food entrepreneurship -- Mohawk and his associates now roast, grind and sell to upscale restaurants throughout the country.

For the past three years, he and Yvonne Dion-Buffalo, staff assistant in the UB Center for the Americas, have partnered with the national Restorative Development Initiative (RDI) to set up the "Iroquois White Corn Project," a corn hulling and milling operation centered around a small log cabin in the Seneca Nation's Cattaraugus territory -- a cabin once home to Mohawk's parents.

The RDI is a national organization that works directly with indigenous, traditional and family farmers to improve the economic viability of smaller-scale organic farming. It aims to produce an agricultural economy outside the commodities market of conventional corporate agribusiness, which the institute says "has systemically destroyed farmers financially and forced them off the land."

The local non-profit project is similar to other traditional farming projects initiated by RDI throughout the country. It currently is funded by the First Nations Development Institute, and headquartered on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation in Western New York where Mohawk lives.

The Mohawk team hulls the corn and stone-grinds it to order every week. The maize is then roasted in heavy, cast iron pans and shaken 60 times over a fire until the meal develops its trademark nutty flavor.

The project has shipped up to 350 pounds of tamal flour (stone milled from hulled corn), roasted white cornmeal (stone milled unhulled roasted corn) and hominy (hulled whole corn) a week.

Among its customers are New York City's Angelica Kitchen and Philadelphia's White Dog Café, well-known East Coast restaurants that support traditional foods and small farmers, and Bobby Flay's internationally-acclaimed Mesa Grill and his Spanish Bolo restaurant, both in Manhattan.

Iroquois White Corn is a nutritional staple that has a respected place in Iroquois history. It anchors the Iroquois "three sisters" agricultural system that features corn, beans and squash, and prior to contact with Europeans was used as a barter currency throughout the Northeast.

Besides its nutritional value, however, the corn is valued for its flavor. Kevin von Klause, executive chef and partner in the White Dog Café, says, "Its sweet earthy aroma and flavor add a new dimension, yet an old-fashioned flavor, to muffins, pancakes, savory herb stuffings and creamy polentas."

When Gourmet Magazine described "the rich, toasty flavor" of roasted Iroquois White Corn flour, more than a hundred readers called to order 10-pound bags to be shipped for the holidays.

Iroquois corn and other ancient crops are absorbed by the body slowly -- hence the name "slow foods" -- and, proponents say, can reduce and even reverse degenerative diseases.

Mohawk, a Turtle Clan Seneca who is internationally recognized as a spokesperson for indigenous values and culture, is director of indigenous studies in UB's Center for the Americas. In his writings he often addresses the relationship between the global culture's treatment of indigenous peoples and its treatment of the earth's environment.

"Slow" foods, which include squash, watermelon, ancient varieties of corn and a dense, tough desert bean called pepary, were commonly grown and eaten by the America's general population before the 19th-century agricultural revolution.

"Because they are slow-release carbohydrates, they do no dramatically raise blood-sugar levels and keep us feeling full, whereas processed foods -- and today they are very highly processed -- disperse sugar rapidly into the bloodstream, raise blood sugar, then insulin levels and promote fat storage," he says.

The shift from "natural" foods, which Mohawk says has become a politicized term, to foods that have not been meddled with by modern science has been marked by a rise in heart and circulatory problems, tooth decay, obesity and diabetes.

"Among those most vulnerable to these degenerative diseases are indigenous peoples," Mohawk says.

"In some regions of this country, for instance, native communities have a diabetes rate of 80 percent. It's been found that when such people go back to eating what we might call their traditional diet, more wild leeks or berries or cactus, they can count on a reduction and even a reversal of these conditions."

Mohawk explains that the slow-food movement, which has thousands of supporters in the United States and Europe, is part of a general movement to address health issues through behaviors like food choice and exercise.

It promotes the reintroduction of many previously unavailable food items that are neither elitist nor expensive. They are grown by native and non-native farmers, then put through minimal processing and sold for general consumption.

Mohawk and his colleagues do not grow the corn themselves, but purchase it from farmers whom they have encouraged to grow it.

"Our flour is of the highest quality and appeals to those looking for unusual, high-quality items to add to their menus," he adds.

The White Corn Project also operates the Pinewoods Café, a slow-food restaurant that serves traditional whole foods sometimes combined with more recent additions to the American diet. Mohawk calls it "a laboratory of sorts" for new slow-food recipes that will appeal to the contemporary palette.

The café's menu includes gourmet corn soup, bean soups, buffalo chile (that's chile made with buffalo meat), corn bread and the occasional special, says Mohawk, like stews, dumplings or a casserole loaf that might feature corn flour, garlic, squash, onions and sausage. This theoretical casserole, he says, might mix traditional and non-traditional ingredients and would have an "interesting" flavor and texture that you can't get with wheat flour or barley.

The Pinewoods Café is open on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. It is located at 13466 Fourth Mile Level Road (Route 438) in Irving, N.Y.