Indigenous Food-Science-Ways: Integrating Indigenous knowledge with food science research and education to support value-added Native foods

Objectives 1-4 are the research objectives of this project. For each objective, the purposes and procedures are briefly described, followed by detailed methodology.

Objective 1. Assess Native food status on the Flathead Reservation:

The recently formed CSKT Food Sovereignty Team has conducted a quick survey on COVID-related food insecurity. Building on previous dietary studies on the Reservation^6,20, we propose to work with the CSKT Food Sovereignty Team to assess the annual Native food status on the Flathead Reservation. Surveys and focus groups will be used to gather Tribal members’ perceptions, knowledge, practice, interest, and challenges in accessing, preparing, and consuming Native foods. The assessment will also explore opinions on creating value-added opportunities for Native foods with ecological and food sovereignty purposes. This business component of Native foods has not been studied in previous CSKT research. The assessment result will guide the product and business development of this project to meet the Tribes’ needs.

Assessment planning:

We have recently received funding from the Center for American Indian Rural Health Equity to form a CSKT Community Advisory Board on healthy value-added Native foods. We will work with the Board on designing and conducting the assessment. Besides, we will follow the First Nations Development Institute’s “Food Sovereignty Assessment Tools²¹” to conduct the assessment. The survey will be administered in December each year and focus groups in June to allow analyzing the survey data for forming appropriate focus group questions. We will pilot a survey and focus group interviews in spring 2021 to prepare for the project assessment (supporting documents).

Annual Native food survey:

The survey will be semi-structured with multiple choices and open-ended questions, administered online using Qualtrics (Provo, UT). As this Reservation has around 60% non-Native residents²² who can influence the local food system, the survey will recruit 60 adult Tribal members and 60 non-tribal adults from the Reservation. The survey will assess the participants' Native food experiences and opinions, including the frequency of consuming selected Native foods, the perceptions on Native food and dietary health, the interests and barriers to acquiring more Native foods. The survey will also inquire participants' thoughts on value-added Native foods, including the potential cultural conflict to commercialize ancestral foods, recommendations on the choice of Native foods and value-added directions, and implications of value-added Native foods to food sovereignty and ecological conservations. 

Annual Native food focus groups:

The focus group will recruit 24 adult Tribal members split into three groups with comparable demographics for result validations across groups. The actual method employed will more closely resemble the action of storytelling or ‘Talking Circles’ which are more commonly employed for Indigenous peoples to communicate and gain greater understandings through a Native perspective. Indigenous peoples have long used storytelling as an oral tradition to pass on knowledge from generation to generation to teach about cultural beliefs, values, customs, rituals, history, practices, relationships, and ways of life.  Storytelling serves to connect Indigenous people to their environment and guide their interactions with it.  In this way, storytelling can preserve culture, help to better realize relationships to the environment, and serve as a means of appreciating and supporting collective decisions.  The term ‘Talking Circles’ will be used as our means of assessment and will encourage storytelling by elders and others who wish to participate. The Talking Circles will be based on a focus group approach that is widely used in consumer research²³. The focus group guide will be developed based on the survey result and framed on the opportunities of value-added Native foods. Nvivo 12 Software (QSR International, Doncaster, Australia) will be used to analyze and create themes from the focus group data. 

Objective 2. Develop healthy value-added bison meat products

Bison dried meat is a traditional food of many First Nations Tribes. The CSKT stakeholders consider dried meat as a desirable product to be developed due to its connection with Indigenous foodways, its high nutritional quality²⁴, yet high demand in time and resources to prepare. Bison dried meat can be made into various dishes²⁵ and thus has a wide market potential beyond Native consumers. Bison dried meat traditionally is made by sun drying. However, literature is scarce regarding bison meat drying to meet current food safety standards.

Thus, this project aims to integrate traditional Indigenous knowledge and food safety requirements to develop commercializable bison dried meat. While we intend to honor the animal by providing the original flavor of bison, some consumers including Natives may prefer less gamey and bloody flavors. Hence, bison jerky with smoke flavors will also be developed. The developed bison products will be presented to the Flathead Tribal schools and MSU to engage the students in learning Native foods. The products will also be used to build the bison ranch-to-campus models (objective 3).

Bison dried meat preparation:

The bison dry meat will be developed based on traditional meat cutting and handling recommended by Tribal stakeholders, combining the following oven heating and solar drying steps to meet USDA safety regulations for jerky^26,27. Longissimus dorsi will be sliced  into approximately 1 cm thick slices and slices either placed in brine for salt equilibration or dry rubbed with salt and held at ≤ 40°F with selected periods and levels of salt. Lethality will be achieved using a commercial smokehouse (Alkar, Lodi, WI).  Meat strips will be processed for lethality in two different ways.  One would be a process similar to how many processors produce jerky, house temperature at 160°F with dampers closed for 1 hour²⁶.  The second process would be steam cooked to an internal temperature of 145°F for 5 minutes. Afterward, using a solar-assisted forced-air dryer, the meat water activity will be reduced to ≤ 0.85 monitored by a water activity meter (Aqualab 4TE, Meter Food, Pullman, WA).

Microbial and quality tests:

The products prepared with varying salt levels, brine periods, heating and drying time will be tested for Enterobacteriaceae, Generic E. coli, and total aerobic plate count using 3M Petrifilm Plates (St. Paul, MN). The products that pass the above indicator tests will be subjected to a challenge study utilizing inoculated pathogens, E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella spp. and Listeria monocytogenes to confirm the process lethality. The products that pass the challenge test will be screened for sensory qualities using an in-house sensory panel. Using the process yielding a safe and desirable product, a jerky version of the bison product will be created by including spices and powdered smoke flavor during the dry brining step.

Pilot scaled-up and consumer tests:

The processes yielding safe and preferable sensory qualities will be pilot scaled-up from 140 grams to 14 kg of starting bison meat. Scaled-up products passing the meat temperature, water activity, indicator and the challenge tests will be evaluated for batch consistency by an in-house sensory panel and a texture analyzer (TA.XTii, Texture technologies, Hamilton, MA) with Warner-Bratzler knife with guillotine block. Two bison dried meat and two bison jerky products with tested safety, optimized sensory quality, and batch consistency will be presented to the three Flathead Tribal schools and MSU for consumer acceptance tests. 120 students at each location will rate their liking of the four products on a nine-point hedonic scale.

Nutritional analysis:

For the top-rated bison dried meat and jerky, total protein, fat, fatty acid profile, and mineral will be analyzed by NP Analytical Laboratories (St. Louis, MO). Moisture will be analyzed using a Mettler Toledo HE53 Moisture Balance (Columbus, OH). The nutrition labels will be created using the ESHA software (Salem, OR) and provided to the Tribal schools and MSU for presenting the product quality compared to foods currently offered on the campus.

Objective 3. Build economic and ecological models for bison ranch-to-campus

Both the CSKT Food Sovereignty Team and our Producers are interested in business models to bring healthy Native foods to the local market. Flathead Reservation 4H Extension and MSU Culinary Services are looking to use Native foods to enrich the students’ learning of Indigenous heritage. Yet, CSKT members repeatedly face the conflict of profiting from ancestral foods, which should have been integral to the land that the Tribal members commit to safeguarding⁷.

Henceforth, we propose to build both economic and ecological models of taking Native food to the market, to demonstrate that commercializing Native foods has the purpose of benefiting not only the local economy but most importantly, food sovereignty and environmental sustainability. The models will be built to bring the bison products developed in Objective 2 from ranches to the three Flathead Tribal schools and MSU.

The economic model for the bison ranch-to-Tribal schools:

Based on the 2017 Census of Agriculture, Montana has an estimated bison inventory of 19,157.  That inventory is mostly distributed across three locations and includes 4,045 bison in Glacier County (in Blackfeet Nation), 1,379 bison in Big Horn county (in the Crow Agency), and 2,800 in Madison county (home to Ted Turner’s famous Flying D Ranch)²⁸. The three Producers on this project have a total of around 550 bison located on the Flathead, Blackfeet, and Crow Reservations.

In developing a model that delivers bison from ranches on the Flathead Reservation into schools, the existing supply chain can be utilized. While there are only three scalable bison slaughter and processing facilities in Montana, White’s Wholesale Meats on the Reservation has expressed a willingness to slaughter bison from the CSKT. Once slaughtered, the bison meat can be made into a bison dried meat or jerky with Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center, also on the Reservation. The utilization of this existing slaughter and processing capacity provides a clear remedy for the largest hurdle impacting the completion of a ranch-to-school supply chain²⁹. This supply chain also satisfies CSKT’s interest in using slaughter and processing that is in the local economy and has an existing relationship with the Tribes.

The economic model for the bison ranch-to-MSU:

In addition to delivering healthy food to Tribal schools, the development of expanding this supply chain to include the MSU dining hall will also provide positive benefits to all involved.  This project will collaborate with Chef KayAnn Miller, Director of MSU Indigenous Food Initiative. The MSU Dining Hall has a long-running interest in purchasing Montana raised foods with an ongoing example including the purchase of beef from animals raised by Montana State University³⁰. The established Farm-to-Campus program is commissioned to make 25% of the foods served on campus sourced from Montana suppliers³¹. Similarly, this new collaboration will provide an important outlet for Tribal food to make its way to feed the student body at Montana State University and augment existing supply chains through the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center and the CSKT.

The ecological model:

The supply chain economic model for the bison products will be used as the framework to build the ecological model. The ecological model will be constructed using contemporary, holistic, and food product-specific life cycle assessment (LCA)^32,33. The LCA model will focus on the basic cumulative use of energy, water, land, and associated greenhouse gas emissions³⁴. This will offer opportunities for identifying improvements in bison product chain efficiency, manufacturing safety, and environmental performance.

Economic and social-cultural factors such as employee benefits, working conditions, and animal welfare will also be incorporated into the model^35,36 as cultural considerations are critical for food production and consumption patterns as well as how environmental, social, and economic impacts associated with food systems are valued. The bison products LCA will be constructed by selecting/defining a functional unit of consumer benefit, articulating the LCA goals and scope, inventorying mass and energy inputs and environmental releases throughout each relevant stage of production, and evaluating the potential economic, social, cultural, and economic impacts of cumulative mass and energy inputs and releases.

The LCA model will become the foundation for future development into a more-comprehensive life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) which will include life cycle costing (LCC), social life cycle assessment (SLCA), and cultural aspects within the bison product LCA. Transparency in LCA documentation including databases and assumptions utilized coupled with diligence in group-informed interpretations of LCA results will help provide meaningful information for project stakeholders and the public.