By Joy Summers | The Minnesota Star Tribune
Chef Sean Sherman’s Indigenous Food Lab offers Native food that’s made to order — and served by Indigenous makers — at the Minnesota State Fair.
The most local food at this year’s State Fair can be found near the back of the International Bazaar of the Great Minnesota Get-Together.
The Indigenous Food Lab at the Taste of the Midtown Global Market booth has a debut menu that earned a coveted spot on the official new fair foods list. A mixture of nixtamal and locally harvested wild rice is topped with a tart wild berry wóžapi sauce and offered with either bison meatballs or sweet potato dumplings (and an optional crunch from a spiced cricket-and-seed topping).
It has many of the hallmarks of a popular fair food — local flavor, curiosity, naturally gluten- and dairy-free, and it can be made vegan. But how a Native American dish got to the State Fair is a journey that starts with one of the most recognizable chefs to come out of our region.
In 2019, Sean Sherman took the stage in Dan Patch Park on what was billed as “The Sioux Chef Presents the Indigenous Food Lab.” Into the microphone, he welcomed the crowd to the fair’s first Indigenous Peoples Day.
“I don’t think it was official,” Sherman recalled. Just before kicking it off, his co-host and Minnesota’s lieutenant governor gave him the go-ahead. “Peggy Flanagan said, ‘Yeah, let’s just call it that.’ So, we did.” Although the fair was canceled the next year due to COVID, when they returned in 2021, it was officially official: Indigenous Peoples Day was part of the Minnesota State Fair’s programming.
“I had tried for years to have any presence at the fair,” said Sherman. “I would go to the fair to document anything that has anything to do with Natives.” He found very little on the fairgrounds that spoke to him about the modern Native American experience. “I found some dreamcatchers being sold at a stand and turned them over. They were made in China,” he said.
