This week we discussed how Indigenous cultures often use all parts of a plant—for food, medicine, ceremony, housing, and more. In the classroom we watched a time-lapse video of the sunflower plant (native to present-day North America!) go from seed to seed in 75 days. We learned that Indigenous peoples make bread and cakes out of sunflower flour, use sunflower oil for sunscreen and to treat snakebites, take pigment from the petals to color hair and textiles, and use the long, fibrous stems for construction.
In the kitchen we made a salad featuring five parts or expressions of the sunflower plant: the sprout, the tuber (which is commonly called sunchoke or Jerusalem artichoke), the petals, the seeds, and the oil (which we made into a dressing). In our closing circle, each chef named the sunflower part they liked the best after tasting the salad.
