From KCRW, I'm Evan Kliman and you're listening to good food.

If you've been listening to this show for years, you probably know the name Sean Sherman.

I've had the pleasure of speaking with the award-winning chef, activist, author, and educator on a few occasions, but not since his restaurant Awamni garnered a James Spirit Award, or since he was named the 2023 recipient of the Julia Child Award,

or since he made the list of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people.

His latest endeavor is the newly launched indigenous food lab in Minneapolis.

There's a lot to discuss and I'm so glad to welcome Sean back to good food.

Well, you've been a very busy guy.

It's true. It's true. Lots of travel, lots of projects, lots of things manifesting.

So let's talk about this mission of yours

with founding the North American traditional

indigenous food systems, natives, and opening the indigenous food lab.

Tell us about it.

Absolutely.

So the nonprofit world was always something I realized early on was going to be really necessary to be able to do this work

because trying to do for-profit businesses it's such a hustle you know you're just

constantly working so hard for so little money and I just really wanted to get this out there larger because the need was so big like just from what I grew up with on Pine Ridge having very little access to much nutrition or food in general and just seeing

that still being so commonplace in so many tribal communities that we wanted to see we saw an opportunity to try to make a difference.

So the non-profit natives or North American traditional indigenous food systems

was designed to try to be a support center to help develop more food operations and to really help see more

restaurant tours, more food truck operators, caters, food producers, whatever it

may be. Because the two goals is creating access to indigenous

foods and creating access to indigenous education. So we just opened up

...