Healthy Hopi Recipes

Hopi cookbook focuses on traditions of food"Healthy Hopi Recipes" helps the larger community understand more about Hopi traditional foods, appreciating spirituality and special techniques, best practices in both growing, gathering crops as well as enhancing and sustaining transfer of traditional customs in Hopi food exchange during ceremonies.

"Noosiwqa" (food) preparation, origins, nourishment, medicinal uses, cultural exchange, gathering traditions, and how food is valued in Hopi culture is the focus of this new cookbook.

The first cycle of project funding (about $30,000) paid for interviews combined with census data of 100 Hopis from the reservation area to gather information on why and how often traditional Hopi dishes were prepared in an average Hopi household.

Additional information that proved extremely valuable in assessing how and when traditional foods were utilized is that of the 1,515 families living on the reservation who were surveyed, 574 were headed by single women.And:For Hopis, food represents a wide variety of traditional custom observation as well as basic life sustenance, such as transfer of culture.

Special ceremonial foods at births, initiations and weddings along with the knowledge of how they are prepared are still seen as extremely important and highly valued.

Food gathering and preparation also identifies various rites of passage for Hopi womanhood.

Traditional value was also placed on the acknowledgment that the Creator provides such nourishment and that respect must be given for that food. Food is also seen as a medicine and should be shared.Comment:  Note the differences between the traditional Native values and the mainstream American values given to food.

For more on the subject, see Cookbook Counters Tragedy, Cookbook Is Fond du Lac Fundraiser, and Hualapai Cookbook and Cards.

Below:  "A hot, delicious bowl of blue corn dumplings; just one of many traditional Hopi recipes found in Healthy Hopi Recipes." (Photo by Rosanda Suetopka Thayer)