Gavelwrench Fishfire | A Blog

American fitness goddess and gym bully Jillian Michaels wrapped up her summer-long reality series this week called Losing It with Jillian Michaels. Being a disciple of Ms. Michaels, I was a fan of the show, even with it’s predictable story arcs, family meltdowns, close-up doughnut eating, medium-shot doughnut renouncing, in-your-face product placement, and feel good weight loss endings.

While it’s true her empire is at times contradictory (having a line of weight loss pills while seeming to discourage them in her books), I believe she has a genuine interest in helping the morbidly obese and those who are exercise challenged (the category in which I used to fall). Of course, her idea of helping is often scaring these families into submission. But facing one’s mortality has never been a popular prerogative in our culture. At least once per episode she yells “THE FOOD YOU’RE EATING IS POISON!” Some may find this shrill, but I think it’s refreshingly effective hyperbole. I guess you can tell what kind of parent I’ll be.

Anyway, one episode in particular I wanted to mention was with a Yavapai-Apache family in Arizona. The episode highlights the rampant problem of diabetes and obesity among Native Americans. More interestingly, it also addresses the checkered and controversial heritage of fry bread, which I knew little about.

Now if you’ve ever been to the flavorful cafeteria in the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C., fry bread will not be unfamiliar to you. It’s exactly as it sounds. Fried, puffy golden dough. Preferably served savory with some buffalo chili on top. It’s delicious. It’s also 700 calories. I had always associated this with being a “traditional” Native American food. But over the course of the episode, the idea of this being a remnant of tradition is challenged by Michaels. In one pivotal scene, she throws an entire box of fry bread away at a community picnic to the dismay of many onlookers.

This leads to some fry bread throwing at Michaels and confrontation with a tribal elder who tells her it is NOT cool to waste food in their culture. She later apologizes for any disrespect, but argues that what she threw away would not be classified as food. In fact, she thinks it is–as you might have already guessed–POISON! But the incident sparks debate in the community about the bread’s significance.

Earlier, she asks the woman featured on the show, Cora-lei, if her ancestors had things like enriched bleach flour. Cora-lei admits that fry bread really wasn’t introduced into their culture until the 19th century when the U.S. government began rounding up Indians, confiscating their land and relocating them out west to terrain that couldn’t easily be farmed. To keep them from starving, the government began giving them rations of things like blocks of cheese and blocks of lard, further alienating them from their more healthful hunting and gathering traditions.

Jillian says,  ”Not only is this 100 percent not of your tradition, it is seemingly a representation of everything horrible that’s happened to your people.” Cora-lei responds, “That’s true.”

There are many good articles on the decades-old fry bread fracas. One quote I found especially telling was by two Indian scholars noting the irony of selling fry bread mix in the Native American museum in D.C.:

[A] fitting conclusion: excess commodity flour, lard, sugar, [once] offered to starving reservation people as partial payment for the millions of acres of treaty-stolen land, [and] transformed by Native ingenuity to disguise mold and rancidity, here becomes a portable artifact of Indian authenticity for tourist consumption.

This is not to say that everyone, American Indians in particular, should feel bad for enjoying it and eating it. I don’t. Nor should it be banned from the museum’s cafeteria. It just provides a good example of how unhealthy foods can be rationalized and perpetuated through tradition and almost folkloric devotion. Comfort foods. We eat them because they evoke strong memories of family, home, and our past.

But Micheals is right to discourage the worship and romanticizing of family favorites, regardless of your cultures and traditions. When faced with diabetes, high cholesterol, sleep apnea and a whole host of other diet-related issues, you can hardly afford to be picky.

Back to basics. Maybe not hunting and gathering per se, but counting at least. Calories in, calories out.

Pictures courtesy Flawedartist and Navin75 under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 2.0 License.