Do you love fry bread? Sometimes they sell it at fairs and carnivals, not unlike an elephant ear or a funnel cake. It’s a delicious bit of flat dough fried in grease and sprinkled with sugar or jam. It is a Native American delicacy or rather an adaptation, a survival food, the food of forced marches, famines, and lock downs on reservations. Plainly speaking when they were no longer allowed to roam around and hunt and buffalo were growing scarce, the government gave people rations to help keep them from starving, basically just lard and flour. Fry bread is the end result.
In my part of the world fry bread is related to Native Americans but you see a similar thing all across the world in various cultures. India has their own versions, as do the aboriginals in Australia. Once again, fry bread is always the end result.
The end result of what? Human nature, oppression and greed, poverty and control. We’re all eating our fry bread now.
With all dark humor here, but fried bread dough is an opiate of the masses, designed to keep people complacent. It doesn’t just prevent starvation, it is also comfort food and physiologically, it is actually addictive. It spikes your blood sugar, provides almost no nutritional value at all, and makes you even more hungry in the long run. It’s also hard on your brain so you can’t think as well. It’s how you fatten up cattle and likely people, too.
Hey, at least in India, Native Americans, and the Aboriginals of Australia, all got some lard to go with it. Lard helps to mitigate some of the harm and delay the consequences. In modern America we decided lard was bad for you, so we’ve now spent a good half century going “fat free” and becoming twice as unhealthy, even faster.
So what makes fry bread so sad is that people actually were once healthy. This place of good health once existed. Just a few generations back the leading cause of death in many places was accidents, fights, and old age. People were much healthier, their physical quality of life was much better. You actually had to go out, “get yourself killed.” Today we simply suffer from type 2 diabetes, metabolic disorders, obesity, heart disease, cancer, depression, addiction, alzheimers, you name it. The vast majority of these modern diseases that cause so much suffering (even among young people today) are totally man made. Just 30 years ago, type 2 diabetes in children was completely unheard of. It didn’t even exist as a disease at all.
That is why fry bread carries with it so much sadness. It tells a story that many of us still refuse to hear, one we don’t even realize is crying out to us. The story of fry bread is also a tale that makes me rethink things in a philosophical context, re-examine the odd juxtaposition between freewill and fate, and perhaps on some level the to revisit the notion of a collective morality, or a collective immorality, if you prefer.
I really like how CS Lewis said, “The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured.…….Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends.……All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.”
See, there's this thing called biology... 
The saddest part is our fry bread is all processed with artificial flavors and colors and preservatives, etc. No wonder we’re in such bad shape.
And, yeah, that’s a great quote from CS Lewis, it really illustrates why it’s so important to be generous towards people with their shortcomings. Like it says in I Peter 4:8
7 But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.
8 And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.
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Amen! I do love that fancy wording, “fervent charity.” Charity is love but a love heavily infused with mercy and grace. “Fervent” means intense, vehement, and even zealous. So be intense and vehement about giving grace to one another. 🙂
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The “fry bread” of America is the soft drink. Sugar use to be a rarity. Now it is commonplace and companies like Coca Cola use every trick in the book to hook low-income suckers to drink caffeinated sugar water. We even pay for that poison with food stamps.
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Probably true, Tom! I guess one difference is that you’ve got the free market going on, so while soda has been sold to us in all sorts of exploitative ways, it hasn’t actually been forced on us. Unlike our Gov, coke never tried to claim it was vital and necessary for our health to avoid drinking water and just drink soda instead.
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A little-known fact is that soft-drink industry was one of the most massive lobbyists for the National 21 Drinking Age back in the 80s and 90s. Studies have shown that beer and wine are actually healthier; kids grow up drinking them at dinner in Europe and they don’t have near the problems with childhood obesity, diabetes, or infertility that we do. Also despite all the horror-stories about teenage drinking that circulated in America back then; alcoholism and binge-drinking are not nearly as common in Europe as it is here.
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Actually, yes! I’ve never really thought about it that way before, but small amounts of beer and wine are actually pretty good for your digestion and intestinal flora. Also, while your liver is breaking down alcohol it stops producing glucose which can lower your blood sugar. Soda does the precise opposite, raises your blood sugar and starves your intestinal flora.
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Reblogged this on clydeherrin.
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Thank you, Clyde. Much appreciated. 🙂
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I’m pretty sure fry bread is cooked in shortening these days, which is much worse than lard. People used to die of infections and infectious diseases, which really took down life averages in history. Now are lifespans are going down again due to lifestyle.
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Ahh yes, good point about the shortening! Lard was probably better for us back in the day.
Human history certainly has had periods of infection and disease, but if you go back far enough when people were still somewhat isolated and eating native foods, you often find long lifespans, strong immune systems, and good health. We’ve created these false narratives where everyone in history was just dying of dysentery and TB at age 40 before modern medicine came along and saved us all. We kind of leave off the parts where globalization, industrialization, the march of civilization, was also what was making us sick.
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People were not dying at age 40. There was a high infant death rate that would give you an average lifespan of 40, averaging 0 to 80. But it’s not even that simple. Life has long been like a race with spurts. Make it past infancy, and you have a big chance of surviving to adulthood. And then women had to survive childbearing and men had to survive warfare. I don’t think there’s anyway people can avoid infections, even if they avoid infectious diseases, even today. A local woman just died of an infection she’d waited too long to trear. She’d fallen and cut herself, not even very old. These are just part of life. In modern times, some of the longest lived generations was born into the mid to late 19th C before any modern medicine was widespread, and it was owing simply to more ready access to food due to fancier farm equipment and trains. As an amateur lover of history, I’d noticed long before it was published in a paper. I’m not big on modern medicine, though modern hygiene and not drinking water we’ve thrown our shit buckets in are good modern advancements. Too bad San Fran and other blue areas have forgotten about them.
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Today with type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders, and our over reliance on antibiotics, we are incredibly vulnerable to infection. I’d take a guess and say it’s probably even worse then it was in the past and we have in fact weakened ourselves.
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One of the things that really is laughable are some of the products in ‘upscale’ supermarkets which back in the past were things that poor people ate and are now marketed as ‘exotic.’ Like kale: farmers used to grow it in Europe to feed their goats because it increased milk production. Nobody ever ate it unless they were starving. Goat & Sheep Milk too: that was for farmers too poor to own a cow—both don’t have enough fats to make butter and mostly water.
Buckwheat is another one: it’s sold under various names as a ‘traditional food.’ In Eastern Europe, the barons used to grow it for livestock food and gave a ration to the serfs to make bread with. Another are the mushrooms called ‘truffles.’ Literally: hogs wouldn’t eat them and rooted them up while foraging. The story is that an exporter in France got the idea to sell them in America as a ‘delicacy.’ Most people in France won’t touch them.
One more I’ve seen lately are vinegar-based hydration drinks. They’re actually not to unhealthy, but it used to be known on Midwestern farms as ‘switchel.’ It was sort of the precursor to lemonade and iced tea; and it had to be ice cold, heavily flavored and/or sweetened to get it down. When I was a kid some of the old farmers still liked it, but I always imagined it would taste about like gasoline would taste.
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Yes! I believe lobster was another poor man’s food that went on to become an exotic delicacy.
Kudos to those midwestern farmers with their switchel, because that is a marvelous thing for your health.
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Decades ago, I taught at a high school on the Navajo Reservation in northeast Arizona. The Navajo were proud of their flat bread. It was ethnic Navajo, apparently. As a resident white man, living veteran of Hindu vegan ashram life, my instinctual response to Navajo flat bread was, “Ick! How unfortunate.” Really old Navajo women would go around the area peddling Navajo flat bread for what coin they could muster.
IB, if the history of flat bread that you recount in your post is true, the Navajo People have forgotten their history. And that is a crying shame.
During my time on the Reservation, I picked up 5 hitch hikers. The place was so wild and isolated that picking up hitch hikers was the Christian thing to do. Well out of the 5 hitch hikers, 4 were drunks. The fifth sober guy was Hopi, not Navajo.
We must always remember clearly our history. Otherwise we lose ourselves to despair.
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You’ve had some good adventures, Silence! I’m not sure if the Navajo have forgotten their history or if fry bread simply became an integral part of Native American identity everywhere? Regardless, there are some pretty neat strides being made today to try to help people return to a more traditional diet for their own health and well being. That wisdom has very nearly been lost and forgotten.
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It’s quite interesting that the first large scale social welfare programs in America were devoted to keeping Indians on the reservation while the buffalo population was being systematically wiped out so that there would be no food source for them to go back to if they tried leaving. I feel like there may be a lesson in there somewhere.
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Right? Exactly.
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Even sadder is the mental equivalent of fry bread that has mesmerized the masses. The “news,” entertainment, literature, and the “arts” are all mental junk food, lulling us into complacency with meaningless mantras, shallow storylines, two-dimensional characters, and strictly materialistic, in-the-moment concerns with no regard to long-term consequences. Don’t think, just consume the intellectual mush, fried in a good helping of self-indulgence. Yumm…
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Hmm, mental fry bread? Well there you go, you have coined a new idea and it works quite well! Indeed, there is entirely too much mental fry bread going on in the world and we desperately need some proper nutrition. 🙂
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Thanks, IB. That’s probably going to be in an upcoming post. 😉
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