Icon or hazard? The great debate over fry bread

By Angie Wagner

updated 9:33 a.m. ET Aug. 21, 2005

SELLS, Ariz. - When you first see it, plopped down on a paper plate in all its caloric bliss, the round, doughy treat is so appealing, so alluring it’s hard to believe this wondrous sight can cause anything but delight.

But fry bread, that fluffy concoction American Indian women lovingly make in their kitchens and people line up for at powwows and western fairs, has come under attack as a hazard to health.

Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee Indian, wasn’t trying to cause a debate. She just was exhausted with yet another one of her relatives dying of diabetes. She zoned in on fry bread as a culprit and whipped out a January column for Indian Country Today declaring it junk food that leads to fat Indians.

She made a New Year’s resolution to abstain from fry bread. Then she did something some Indians consider insane: She asked them to give it up, too.

Word spread through Indian Country. Outrage! The nerve of Harjo! What started as a woman’s disdain for the yummy delicacy suddenly became the great fry bread debate. Ask any Indian about it and you’ll either be greeted with rolled eyes — or sparkling, hungry eyes.

After all, fry bread is synonymous with Indian culture. South Dakota has just made it the official state bread. And many Indians don’t want anyone coming between them and their hot, greasy skillets.

“It’s like giving up turkey at Thanksgiving,” said Gayle Weigle, an Anishinabe Indian who runs a Web site celebrating fry bread stories and recipes. “It is a tradition.”

Delicious and loaded with calories
Indian women like Margarita Gonzalez on the Tohono O’odham reservation here rise before dawn to start making fry bread. Gonzalez makes four dozen each morning and makes her living selling them in an empty lot in Sells.

“It’s like a craving you get for it, the aroma of it. You have to try to keep yourself from it,” she said, taking a break from serving the lunch crowd.

To say fry bread is tasty isn’t doing it justice. It’s scrumptious, sweet, and puts a crazy spell on anyone who craves it.

But it’s loaded with pesky calories — at least 700 for one paper-plate size piece — plus a whopping 27 grams of fat, according to a nutritional analysis by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Those things are awesome,” tribal police officer Mario Saraficio said, getting excited at the thought. “It’s bad, but it’s good. If the doctor told me I had to give it up, I’d say probably not.”

Fry bread came to be by necessity. When the government moved Indians off their land and onto reservations in the 1800s, they were kept from their traditional foods such as elk, corn, deer and rabbit. In their place were rations of flour, salt and lard, and Indian women did what they could with it, creating the wonderful fry bread that would become part of their culture.

Ingredients vary today, but the main ones are still white flour, salt, sugar and lard. Some call it a popover, and options are endless for how to eat it. There’s the Indian taco, fry bread with red chili and beans, or the extra sweet version with powdered sugar or honey on top.

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