Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino at their Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley, California, are now among the many Native chefs who are now feeding their com- munities with take-out cuisine rather than sit-down dinners because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
COURTESY OF CAFE OHLONE
Nation of Oklahoma), former owner of the Corn Dance Cafe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Access to healthy food is on a day-to-day basis, and there have been terrible problems among the Navajo and in Montana and the Dakotas.”
SERVED WITH SPIRIT
Yet the pandemic has also revealed deep lay- ers of resilience. As the virus spread, many chefs continued to care for their customers and others in their communities. For chefs, preparing food is more than a job, says Oden,
who now works as a consultant to other chefs. “What goes into the food is not just the ingredients,” she says. “It’s your love and your spirit and your heart that goes into the food that makes it taste good.” While waiting to bring Cafe Ohlone fully
back to life, for instance, Trevino and Medina are filling wood boxes with ingredients that once comprised their special Saturday night dinners. These include acorn soup; locally gathered herbs and teas; watercress, blackber- ries and gooseberries for salad topped with
a blackberry, bay laurel and smoked-walnut dressing; chia-seed porridge and acorn-flour brownies with sea salt. The boxes are complet- ed with a beeswax candle and a way to access a Vimeo recording about the Ohlone peoples. Across the country in Holyoke, Massachu-
setts, Chef Neftali Duran (Ñuu Savi, Mixtec) has been spearheading the Holyoke Food and Equity Collective, a new organization built on an old principle. “A lot of chefs are doing mutual aid work now,” says Duran, who until 2015 owned El Jardin, a wood-fired bakery
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 31
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