Long before chef Sean Sherman rolled his award-winning food truck onto Minneapolis streets, serving foods indigenous to the Minnesota and Dakota regions, he was interested in writing a cookbook devoted to the food of the Lakota tribe.

“I started trying to research the subject, and I was not able to find anything,” Sherman, also known as The Sioux Chef, told TakePart in 2014. “Most of the cookbooks I found were dealing with fry bread and utilizing commodity foods. They didn’t pertain to anything traditional for me.”

The supplemental food available on reservations through the USDA’s Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations has since expanded beyond commodity foods such as “government cheese” and dehydrated potatoes to include fresh produce, like apples and celery, and “specialty” items, like clementines and cranberries. Last year, two Native American–owned businesses signed contracts to deliver frozen bison meat to the FDPIR and are on schedule to deliver a total of 520,000 pounds of it by the end of June. In December 2015, blue cornmeal began to arrive on reservations as part of the USDA’s measure to support access to traditional foods. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the ingredients Sherman’s Lakota ancestors cooked with are returning to native communities in the upper Midwest.

In April, Pat Roberts, director of FDPIR for Wisconsin’s Menominee Reservation, will introduce the cornmeal to the nutrition program she oversees for the Midwest region. There will be taste tests and cooking classes to showcase dishes such as blue cornbread and blue cornmeal pancakes. But interest so far seems lukewarm.

“We haven’t had that much success with people taking it,” said Roberts, who was born on the reservation. “It’s not part of our region’s culture. Blue cornmeal would be more a tradition for the South.” The heat- and dry weather–loving corn has deep roots in the Southwest, where it was a staple of the Hopi tribe in northeastern Arizona. A Native American ingredient is not, in most instances, an ingredient that is culturally resonant with all Native Americans.

“The one thing we’re waiting for is wild rice. Wild rice is really the Midwest region’s cultural food,” Roberts said. The word Menominee is derived from the Algonquin word for wild rice. The ingredient is a regular guest at weddings, funerals, and potlucks—events Roberts has done much of the cooking for in her lifetime, she added with a laugh. Alongside venison chili, wild rice is cooked into casseroles and a posole-like soup.

Roberts hopes tribes who are harvesting wild rice in Minnesota and Wisconsin, such as the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, can form a consortium and strike a deal with the USDA similar to the blue corn and bison brokers. She explained that the problem is scale: To be included in the federal food distribution program, a food must be available in quantities for all eligible participants in the U.S., and this is what slows the inclusion of regionally relevant foods. Roberts mentioned interest for wild salmon in the West and for whitefish from tribes near the Great Lakes in the Midwest. “There’s still only $5 million put out for cultural foods, and that does not go very far when you know how many people are on the program in the United States,” she said. In 2015, 886,000 people participated.

But, Roberts said, bison and blue corn are a good place to start. “It’s something that’s been requested by the people. It’s not put in there by the USDA. It’s because all the tribes have requested this through the National Association meetings.”

Reintroducing Native food traditions through foods in the FDPIR, heirloom seed saving, and efforts like The Sioux Chef truck could not only have cultural benefits, but may improve public health among native communities. Sixteen percent of American Indians and Alaska natives have type 2 diabetes—the highest of any U.S. racial and ethnic group, according to the American Diabetes Association. Yet a study in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis found that many of the plants in the diet of Sherman’s ancestors in the Northern Plains—cattail broadleaf shoots, chokecherries, beaked hazelnuts, lamb’s-quarters, plains prickly pear, prairie turnips, stinging nettles, wild plums, raspberries, and rose hips—are highly nutritious.

“It’s different with indigenous foods because it’s reacquainting people with foods that have been growing around them all this time—the stuff their grandmothers ate,” Sherman said.

Roberts, who is 79 and a grandmother herself, remembers hunting, foraging, and then eating the very same way her father had when he was young—catching lake fish, picking berries, seed-saving, and sitting down at the table to venison and squirrel.

“I can’t say we ate a lot of hot dogs,” she said.