Melvin Martin: The big question -- To fry or not to fry?

Opinion

Monday, January 25, 2010

Every Saturday evening I like to prepare a special meal for my relatives and a friend or two. At the conclusion of last Saturday's Southern-style pork chop supper, when I made the wholly innocent suggestion that I make venison stew, I was absolutely horrified to say the least when one of my guests requested fry bread to accompany the stew.

FRY BREAD KILLS! This is the sole dietary mantra that I base my entire culinary existence on (and I might add, upon very sound medical advice). Probably not all that much has changed in Indian Country since the extremely vociferous, national debate over fry bread that took place in 2005 shortly after an opinion-editorial on this subject appeared in Indian Country Today. Suzan Shown Harjo boldly described fry bread for what it actually is for Indian people everywhere: big, brown sponges packed to the bursting point with impending death.

Per the following recipe, these servings of fry bread are nowhere near as large as what is usually made (dare I say "traditionally made?"); so, try doubling the recipe.

Nutritional Information: Navajo Fry Bread I (from allrecipies.com)
Servings Per Recipe: 8
Amount Per Serving
(Note: The percentages indicated are based on a 2000 calorie daily diet)
Calories per serving: 543
Total Fat: 34.2g (53%)
Cholesterol: 35mg (67%)
Sodium: 1274mg (51%)
Total Carbs: 47g
Dietary Fiber: 1.4g
Protein: 10.7g

Not to personally defame the Navajo Nation with this recipe, but to transform a single serving of already quite dangerous fry bread into the standard-sized Indian Taco, generally made with the low-cost hamburger that´s usually not drained of its lethal fat content; plus several ounces of high-fat and high-sodium U.S.D.A. commodity cheese that the purists always demand; plus nearly half a small container of regular sour cream; plus refried beans that are most often made with lard as is the fry bread itself; and perhaps three to four ounces of high sodium salsa - and the aforementioned "impending death" quickly becomes, with the addition of these several hundred more calories (conservatively estimated and with unknown amounts of sodium): "Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn..."

I know all-too-well that fry bread is the number one, all-time favorite Indian comfort food. I know that the majority of Indian people throughout Turtle Island regard fry bread as "traditional" and even somehow "culturally sacred." I know that giving up fry bread for a lot of people in our communities would be a far more difficult challenge than for a long-time smoker, drinker or heroin addict going cold turkey with their respective drug of choice.

But since we, as Indians, seem to be getting fatter and fatter and fatter (and most tragically, this includes our youth who are now the most obese of the young of the principally categorized U.S. ethnic groups) - to hold regularly scheduled, high-dollar contests to see who can build the "better Indian Taco" is simply way beyond my ability to comprehend such events (that are taking place more frequently now as an increasing number of our people embrace a wide variety of comfort foods to ward off, among other things of course, the demonic presence of a lingering national/global economic recession that affects even the reservation system).

Focusing on Indian youth, in the early ´90s in Tucson, Arizona, I attended school for licensed vocational nursing with a woman from one of the local reservations whose eleven-year old son (affectionately known to her as "Knick Knack") stood at about four and a half feet tall - and weighed close to 200 pounds! I recall asking this woman how Knick Knack had gotten to be such a big boy and she told me that she made fry bread for him at least four days of each week, and that she had done so since he was old enough to eat solid food. She also said that Knick Knack needed help putting his lace-less shoes on as he could not bend over far enough to accomplish this task.

Before that, in 1983 in New Mexico at another trade school, I had befriended an Indian person who also ate a lot of fry bread (every day of the week in this case) and he was perhaps one of the most tragic figures I´ve known in my life thus far. "Ned," at the age of 28 weighed in at 400 pounds and was 5´-5" in height. About halfway through the academic year, Ned disappeared for two weeks and I thought he´d dropped out of school. Upon his return to campus, Ned informed me that he had been hospitalized for a crippling lower back pain. He volunteered to me that it was his weight or more specifically his "gut," as he referred to it that was the primary villain. Ned explained that his abdominal fat (he had at least an 80-inch waist) was so heavy that the weight was generating extremely serious pain to his lower back; so much so that he had collapsed at home and had to be airlifted to the nearest big-city medical facility. And then he told me that he knew that his set-in-stone daily diet of fry bread (and canned beef stew) was to blame - more so the fry bread than the stew since he ate four servings of this oily treat per meal.

I personally set him up with the trade school´s nurse for nutritional counseling after he had tried and failed to lose weight for one month on what he called the "potato chip diet," where he ate just one small bag of potato chips a day and nothing else. 27 years later, I almost cry thinking about this unfortunate fellow.

These are, of course, extreme instances of fry bread "overload," but as far as the impact of fry bread upon the American Indian population goes, (and no pun intended) their stories are definitely "food for thought." And, knowing all that we know these days about the assorted health hazards of fried bread, do we really need annual contests offering prize money to further glorify just one more component of a blend of lifestyle choices that are so viciously killing us?

I leave you now with the following to ask of yourself:

To fry, or not to fry, that is the question...

Melvin Martin is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota. He can be contacted at pbr_74@live.com.