On a day of -38 temperatures and frigid winds gusting across the Northern Great Plains, Mariah Gladstone fed the wood stove at her home in Montana as she shared details about her recent professional passion project. The founder of online Indigenous cooking show Indigikitchen has recently released a toolkit that, with funding from nonprofit Montana No Kid Hungry, is designed to help school food service directors figure out how to incorporate more Indigenous foods into their menus. Gladstone believes it's an important step in getting more culturally appropriate ingredients into meals at Native schools throughout the U.S.
"I really want to look at how can we reincorporate local ancestral foods in ways that makes sense in our daily lives, and obviously school meal programs are a huge place for that conversation to occur," she said. Although her toolkit is state-specific, as is a similar one put out by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, "What I would really love to do is create a living resource so food service directors across the country who have incorporated Native foods [into recipes] can contribute those to a library of recipes that other food service directors are able to use."
