First Foods

We’re easing into fall with one more round of late-summer favorites and the first foods of the autumn harvest. 🍂

Join Grinding Stone Collective at the American Indian Community House for our next Inter-Tribal Pantry, where we’ll be sharing fresh seasonal foods and making the shift to evening hours so more folks can stop by after work or school.

As always, food is free and available while supplies last. Please bring a tote bag and register ahead of time.

📍 American Indian Community House
234 West 39th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10018

📅 Friday, September 25th
⏰ 4pm–8pm

RSVP: bit.ly/septemberpantry

Driving down Highway 101 and turning inland through Southern California, the landscape shifts through so many worlds: coast, chaparral, mountains, valleys, and eventually desert. What can look dry from a distance becomes its own beautiful oasis of cactus, Joshua trees, succulents, palms, and flowering desert plants, each holding food, medicine, shelter, and story. 🌵

For this Southern California Native Summer Foods spotlight, we’re focusing on desert foods connected to abundance and survival in a hot, arid biome: honey mesquite pods, jackrabbit, yucca blossoms, California fan palm fruit, desert chia seeds, and prickly pear cactus fruit.

These foods remind us that desert foodways are not empty or scarce when they are systems shaped by timing, water, patience, observation, and respect. Southern California’s desert homelands are connected to many Indigenous peoples, including Cahuilla, Serrano, Chemehuevi, Kumeyaay, Quechan, and many more whose relationships with these lands continue today.

⚠️ Foraging safety: only harvest foods you can identify with complete confidence, and avoid areas that may be contaminated by roadsides, pesticides, polluted soils, or unsafe waters. Learn whose homelands you are on, follow local Tribal guidance when available, harvest only where it is safe and permitted, take only what you need, and leave enough for regeneration, wildlife, and future harvests.

Which Southern California desert foods would you add to this list?

📣 Grinding Stone Collective Hours Extended Today!
We’re staying open later today — hours have been extended until 7 PM!
Come by and visit us before we close. We’ll be here until 7 PM today. 🌿

Grinding Stone Collective is back at the American Indian Community House for our next Inter-Tribal Pantry, featuring select summer fruits and vegetables to celebrate the season and share in the abundance this time of year has to offer.

Join us as we gather in community and continue building access to fresh, nourishing foods through the First Foods Program.

Food will be available first come, first served, while supplies last. Please bring tote bags.

📍 American Indian Community House
234 West 39th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10018

📅 Friday, August 21st
⏰ 11am–3pm

RSVP required: https://bit.ly/summerfoodsataich
Link in bio

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For this Native Summer Foods spotlight, we’re driving down the 101 Highway towards Northern California, where forests, rivers, coastal waters, and mountain landscapes hold breathtaking views and the echoes of Indigenous foodways. 🌿🐟

Here we highlight summer foods connected to summer abundance across the region: Chinook salmon, surf smelt/candlefish, California blackberries, which I encountered again and again along coastal beaches growing in abundance, manzanita berries, delicious smelling yerba buena, and tasty pepperwood leaves. Some come from rivers and beaches, while others grow along forest edges, hillsides, and gathering places shaped by generations of care and a continued commitment to keeping our natural resources safe.

Northern California is home to many distinct Indigenous Nations, including Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Wiyot, Tolowa Dee-ni’, Pomo, Wintu, Maidu, Miwok, and many others. These foods are part of living relationships with land, water, season, ceremony, stewardship, and community responsibility, so we ask that all foraging be done with care and respect.

⚠️ Foraging safety: only harvest foods you can identify with complete confidence, and avoid areas that may be contaminated by roadsides, pesticides, polluted soils, or unsafe waters. Learn whose homelands you are on, follow local Tribal guidance when available, harvest only where it is safe and permitted, take only what you need, and leave enough for regeneration, wildlife, and future harvests.

Which Northern California foods would you add to this list? 🌊🌲