page_title: Lois Ellen Frank
section_title: Philosophy
hierarchical_section_title: Lois Ellen Frank / Philosophy
caption_attribution_description: Español: Chef Lois Ellen Frank
context_page_description: Lois Ellen Frank is an American food historian, cookbook author, culinary anthropologist, and educator. She won a 2003 James Beard Foundation Award for her cookbook Foods of the Southwest Indian Nations, the first cookbook of Native American cuisine so honored.
context_section_description: Frank delineates four major periods in Native American cuisine. The first is prior to 1492, which she calls "Pre-Contact", when Native Americans were of necessity relying on ingredients they grew, gathered, or hunted in their local areas. The second is "First Contact," when European ingredients like Eurasian domesticated animals were added to Native American diets. The third was the "Government Issue" period, during which many Native Americans were removed from areas where they could produce their own food and provided government commodity ingredients such as flour, sugar and lard in order to provide a subsistence diet resulting in foods of necessity like frybread, which she calls "a very complicated food for me. It represents survival. If the ancestors had not created this bread, they might have starved ... For some it is a comfort food, for others including some chefs and some Native community members, it represents colonization and a period of time in history that is traumatic." The current period she calls "New Native American," characterized by Native American chefs returning to the pre-contact ingredients and recipes.
  Frank calls potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili, cacao, and vanilla the "magic eight" ingredients that were found and used only in the Americas before 1492 and were taken by explorers and colonialists to the Old World, changing cuisine there. According to Frank,
  If we deconstruct that these foods were inherently native, then that means that the Italians didn't have the tomato, the Irish didn't have the potato, half the British National Dish—Fish and Chips—didn't exist. The Russians didn't have the potato, nor did they have vodka from the potato. There were no chiles in any Asian cuisine anywhere in the world, nor were there any chiles in any East Indian cuisine dishes, including curries. And the French had no confection using either vanilla or chocolate. So the Old World was a completely different place.
  Unlike some Native American chefs and cookbook authors, she believes that others developing recipes for and cooking Native American cuisine is not a problem if Native American producers, such as wild rice harvesters, are benefitting.
  Her recipes have a vegetable-forward approach, and she has said she prefers to develop menus focussed primarily on foods from the Pre-Contact period and some from the First Contact period. She believes foods from the Government Issue period created health issues such as  high rates of diabetes and prefers not to use them often.
caption: Frank in her Santa Fe, New Mexico, garden
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